Haiku to what is now called "haiku". Bashō also used his "hokku" as torque points within his short prose sketches and longer travel diaries. This subgenre of "haikai" is known as "haibun". His best-known work, "Oku no Hosomichi", or "Narrow Roads to the Interior", is counted as one of the classics of Japanese literature and has been translated into English extensively. Bashō was deified by both the imperial government and Shinto religious headquarters one hundred years after his death because he raised the haikai genre from a playful game of wit to sublime poetry. He continues to be revered as a
Haiku theoretician F. S. Flint, who passed on Couchoud's ideas to other members of the proto-Imagist Poets' Club such as Ezra Pound. Amy Lowell made a trip to London to meet Pound and find out about haiku. She returned to the United States where she worked to interest others in this "new" form. Haiku subsequently had a considerable influence on Imagists in the 1910s, notably Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" of 1913, but, notwithstanding several efforts by Yone Noguchi to explain "the hokku spirit", there was as yet little understanding of the form and its history. R. H. Blyth