In 1952, R. H. Blyth wrote,
"It is not merely the brevity by which the
haiku isolates a particular group of
phenomena from all the rest; nor its suggestiveness, through which it reveals a whole world of experience. It is not only in its remarkable use of the
season word, by which it gives us a feeling of a quarter of the year; nor its faint all-pervading humour. Its peculiar quality is its
self-effacing, self-annihilative nature, by which it enables us, more than any other form of
literature, to grasp the thing-in-itself (vol. 4, p. 980)."