The most minimalist of all translators is the American poet Lucien Stryk. Rhythm American speakers of English give fuller value to each syllable than British speakers do. Their tone is more even. British speakers emphasise some syllables, swallow others to nothing, and their sentences come out with lifts and dips like the flight of a sparrow. In consequence, American poets can make successful use of syllabics as the basis of a rhythm, and many have done so, but British poets have not.
British speakers use a stress-patterned prosody.
The commentator who has been most influential in setting the form of the haiku in English has been William J. Higginson, an American and author of The Haiku Handbook. A study by David Cobb of the poems published in contemporary American haiku magazines shows that they do indeed average eleven syllables, following Higginson's recommendation. He translates haiku with six stresses. He, like Higginson, justifies his policy because it most closely duplicates the form of the Japanese haiku. The task now is to develop an appropriate form in our language for the shortest poem, in the spirit of haiku.