His poetry, Bashō once told a student, was like a fan in winter, a stove in summer. As with so many of his images, the statement can be taken in more than one way. It can be read as a praise of uselessness, saying that poetry, like the bashō tree, is a thing to be loved precisely because it has no utilitarian purpose—by Bashō’s own account, that is what he meant. But the description can also be read as an advocacy of intensification: whatever a person’s experience, bringing it into a poem will strengthen it more. In some subtle way, these two ideas are not so disconnected as they at first may
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