Haiku

Haiku / Hokku

Haiku or hokku is a Japanese poetic form that represents in seventeen syllables that are ordered into three lines of five, seven and five syllables, the poet's emotional or spiritual response to a natural object, scene, or season of the year. the strict form, which relies on the short, uniform and unstressed syllabic structure of the Japanese language, is extremely difficult in English; most poets who attempt the haiku greatly influenced Ezra Pound and other Imagists, who set out to reproduce both the brevity and the precision of the image in the Japanese original. 

Adopted from A Glossary of Literary Terms