NEW YORK -- Princeton professor Earl Miner, who died in April at age 77, was the one gentleman-scholar I had the honor of knowing.

In 1979, the year I became president of the Haiku Society of America, I invited Earl to speak to the group's annual meeting. The act required some daring. Whereas Princeton is an august institution of higher learning, the HSA (as the society is affectionately known by its members) at the time was a puny body, its membership fluctuating below 150. I even doubt that we were able to scrounge up enough money for his travel expense from Princeton to New York. But he graciously accepted the invitation. One happy thing was that the Japan Society, New York, in those days allowed us to use their facilities. Earl spoke in the auditorium.

I had not expected to head the HSA. A few years earlier, when asked to discuss haiku as a translator of modern, non-haiku poetry at one of its meetings, I had given a somewhat unflattering assessment of the genre: The form is too short to make it as a poem on its own; its origins suggest it requires a larger context, and so forth. An English major a dozen years earlier, I did not have a high regard for the ephemeral thing.