Senryū is a three-line, unrhymed Japanese poetic form structurally close to haiku but aimed at human nature rather than the natural world, typically in a satiric or ironic register.
Discover more poetic terms.
History of the Senryū Form
Senryū emerged in the 1750s in Edo (present-day Tokyo) as a popular form among the era’s rising merchant class, and most early examples circulated anonymously rather than under a poet’s name.
The form takes its name from Karai Hachiemon, a government official in Edo’s Asakusa district who judged maekuzuke, contests in which participants submitted comic verses. Writing under the pen name Karai Senryū, or “river willow,” Hachiemon and his collaborator Goryoken Kayu selected 756 of the prizewinning poems for the first volume of Haifu yanagidaru [Humorous Poems of the Willow Barrel] in 1765. The series eventually grew to 167 volumes, and readers began calling its poems, and the genre itself, by the compiler’s pen name.
Structurally, senryū follows the same 5/7/5 pattern of syllables that traditional haiku uses, and English-language versions of both forms are now often written in free style with up to seventeen syllables rather than a fixed count. Where haiku is generally anchored to a season and a moment of natural observation, senryū examines human behavior instead: domestic life, work, courtship, and ordinary folly. A senryū typically turns on a victim, someone whose foolishness or bad luck the poem exposes; and that victim is often the poet, since a great deal of senryū is self-effacing.