Haiku stimulated the writing of haiku in English. The Japanese-American scholar and translator Kenneth Yasuda published "The Japanese Haiku: Its Essential Nature, History, and Possibilities in English, with Selected Examples" in 1957. The book includes both translations from Japanese and original poems of his own in English, which had previously appeared in his book titled "A Pepper-Pod: Classic Japanese Poems together with Original Haiku". In these books Yasuda presented a critical theory about haiku, to which he added comments on haiku poetry by early 20th-century poets and critics. His translations apply a 5–7–5 syllable count in English, with the first and
Haiku in English the one-line form can create a variety of ambiguities involving the perceived placement of cuts and the grammatical status of individual words, thereby allowing for multiple readings of the same haiku. A variation of the format breaks the line at the "caesura" or pause. At its most minimal, a single word may occasionally be claimed to be a haiku: The first was printed alone on an otherwise blank page and arguably only "works" in that context. The second example is an allusion to the first and also depends on its placement at the center of a haiku collection. Haiku of