Which Japanese poet perfected the haiku form?

Bashō, in the seventeenth century, and he did not write haiku - the word was coined two centuries later. He wrote hokku, the opening verse of a collaborative linked-verse sequence, and the practice of treating that opening as a standalone poem came afterwards.

The five-seven-five rule taught in English classrooms also does not transfer. Japanese counts on, sound units that are shorter than English syllables - so a seventeen-on Japanese poem carries roughly the information of twelve English syllables, and a strict English seventeen is noticeably baggier than the original. Translators mostly abandon the count.

His most famous poem is three lines about an old pond, a frog jumping, and the sound of water, and it has been translated into English well over a hundred times. He also wrote travel journals - The Narrow Road to the Deep North records a walking journey of some 2,400 kilometres through northern Japan - mixing prose and verse, and he undertook it in his forties in poor health, expecting to die on the road, which he eventually did on a later journey.