The second definition applies to English-language haiku: "A foreign adaptation of [the Japanese form], usually written in three lines totaling fewer than 17 syllables.
Poets with this looser definition sometimes use more than three lines in their poems[16] According to Charles Trumbull, the first haiku printed in English were three translations included in the second edition of William George Aston's A Grammar of the Japanese Written Language (1877).
Aston's A History of Japanese Literature, first published in 1899 and a major reference source for early 20th-century poets, also described the "haikai" poetic form.
In Britain, the editors of The Academy announced the first known English-language haikai contest on April 8, 1899, shortly after the publication of William George Aston's History of Japanese Literature.
"[22] The Academy's influence was felt as far away as Australia, where editor Alfred Stephens was inspired to conduct a similar contest in the pages of The Bulletin.
[25] In the essay, Pound described how he wrote a 30-line poem about the experience of exiting a metro train and seeing many beautiful faces.
Two years later, he had reduced it to a single sentence in the poem In a Station of the Metro: The apparition of these faces in a crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.
[30] During the Imagist period, a number of mainstream poets, including Richard Aldington, and F. S. Flint published what were generally called hokku, although critic Yoshinobu Hakutani wrote that compared to Pound and Noguchi, these were "labored, superficial imitators.
"[31] In the Beat period, original haiku were composed by Diane di Prima, Gary Snyder, and Jack Kerouac.
As part of these studies, Kerouac referenced R. H. Blyth's four-volume Haiku series, which included a volume on Eastern culture.
[33] Richard Wright's interest in haiku began in 1959 when he learned about the form from beat poet Sinclair Beiles in South Africa.
[35] The first English-language haiku group in America, founded in 1956, was the Writers' Roundtable of Los Altos, California, under the direction of Helen Stiles Chenoweth.
They also studied the Blyth collection, as well as an anthology translated by Asatarou Miyamori, The Hollow Reed (1935) by Mary J.J. Wrinn, and Haikai and Haiku (1958) among others.
[36][37] In 1963 the magazine American Haiku was founded in Platteville, Wisconsin, edited by the European-Americans James Bull and Donald Eulert.
Among contributors to the magazine were poets James W. Hackett, O Mabson Southard, Nick Virgilio, Helen Chenoweth, and Gustave Keyser.
[51] Two other online English-language haiku journals founded outside North America, A Hundred Gourds and Notes from the Gean, are now defunct.