Poet. He was a lover of nature and a brilliant inventor and practitioner of the present form of traditional Japanese haiku. Each poem consists of seventeen syllables divided into three lines of five, seven, and five syllables, and must appeal to two of our five senses or to one of our senses and our feeling of movement. In his famous walk around Japan, he approached his experiences from a Zen Buddhist perspective, and described them in exquisite prose and verse.