抄録
Both Basho (1644-94) and Wordsworth (1770-1850) were remarkable lovers of Nature and wrote superb poems about her. But there is a great difference between the forms of their writing: Basho always wrote haiku, three-line poems of seventeen sylables, probably the shortest form as a poem. Wordsworth wrote not only sonnets and short lyrics, but also such long masterpieces as The Prelude and The Excursion, both of nearly 9, 000 lines of blank verse.
Though Basho was probably neither blind nor deaf to what his contemporary samurai and peasants were doing or murmuring, he wrote nothing about them. He was a hermit and had no special interest in politics or social problems. He was a great walker. He came from Kyoto to Edo (Tokyo) and from Edo to the northern part of the Main Land and saw both the eastern and western coasts. Wordsworth visited France in the second year of the French Revolution and was delighted to see the satisfaction of the people.
(The famous paragraph of Basho's Records of a Travel-worn Satchel, viz. Oi no Kobumi, quoted in the earlier part of this study, is translated into English and printed on p. 71 of Basho: The Narrow Road of the Deep North and other Travel Sketches translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa, Penguin Books, 1966).
