“
In this jumbled world of ten thousand things, there are things that are beautiful, things that are ugly, and things that combine beauty and ugliness. However, if we attend to beauty, we can find almost nothing that completely lacks it. The ugly face of the puffer fish bears a slight trace of beauty within its ugliness. Sea cucumbers possess an unintelligible form, but even in this unintelligible form, we catch a glimpse of beauty. People despise the creepy appearance of hairy caterpillars and snakes, yet an honest look may reveal something appealing about them. But of all these subjects, the most extreme example must be shit. Among countless books on aesthetics, probably not a single one expounds on its beauty. There are voluminous Western and Chinese poems, but in our experience, we have never run into a poem about shit. Probably such a poem does not exist even in books of which we are not aware. If this is the case, then we might regard shit as entirely unsuitable for poetry; but, curiously, there are many poems about shit in haiku.
— MASAOKA SHIKI