4—
Aesthetic Consciousness of Landscape in Chinese and Anglo-American Poetry

Romantic nature poetry . . . was an anti-nature poetry, even in Wordsworth who sought a reciprocity or even a dialogue with nature, but found it only in flashes.^[1]

This statement made by Harold Bloom in 1970 has probably vexed many readers who consider Wordsworth the high priest of nature. Indeed, for decades, when referring to nature poetry or landscape poetry, many critics like to look at Wordsworth as the counterpart of either T'ao Ch'ien (365–427) or Hsieh Ling-yün (385–433). That they have been so compared is, no doubt, due to the facts that, first, they employ landscape as their primary material for poetry; second, they focus what we may call aesthetic attention upon natural objects — mountains, rivers, trees, birds, and so on; third, they are supposed to seek a return to nature and harmony with it; and, last, their poetries bear certain structural resemblances, such as the use of excursion (in Wordsworth and in Hsieh) as a means to disclose objects in nature. (Hsieh's poems were first given a generic classification as "Excursion Poems" before he was acclaimed as the initiator of Chinese landscape poetry.) Indeed, we may even find part of M. H. Abrams's description of the "Greater Romantic Lyric"^[2] applicable to Hsieh in the sense that his poetry begins with landscape and ends with awakening or recognition.

And yet, in spite of these resemblances, many of the comparative studies of this poetry remain illusive and superficial. Upon closer examination of the two models on the basis of their indigenous sources, including comparison and contrast of their historical morphology and their aesthetic structuring activities, we will encounter

significant root differences, both in terms of the conception of genre and in terms of perceptual-expressive procedures. The Chinese poets' consciousness of landscape as an aesthetic object in and of itself is a perceptual-expressive as well as genre possibility hardly circumscribed by that of the English nature poets. To understand the exact projection and curve of this poetry, we must look into the historical formation of this aesthetic consciousness in both traditions.

Let it be understood first that not all poems containing landscape are necessarily landscape poems. For example, the large paragraphs of landscape description in Homer, those in the fu (rhymeprose) of the Han Dynasty, or the landscape passages in the long narratives of the classical Latin period only serve as a background against which human events take place. Landscape plays only a secondary or subordinate position; it has not become the main object for aesthetic contemplation.^[3] We call a poem a landscape poem not only because landscape has become the primary aesthetic object but also because landscape can be seen as an aesthetic object in and of itself. For landscape to become so involves, therefore, our acceptance of it as it is, self-so-complete. In what sense and in what way is such an acceptance made possible in China? To what degree can we say English and American poets have or have not cultivated such an acceptance? How does this acceptance or incomplete acceptance affect the contour of the different poets' approaches (perception and expression) to nature and, more specifically, to landscape?

There is a famous kung-an (koan^[*] ) in the Ch'an (Zen) Buddhist Transmission of the Lamp :

Thirty years ago before I was initiated into Ch'an, I saw mountains as mountains, rivers rivers. Later when I got an entrance into knowledge, I saw mountains not as mountains, rivers not as rivers. Now that I have achieved understanding of the substance, mountains are still mountains, rivers still rivers.^[4]

This can be taken as representing three stages of our perception of reality. The first stage, "seeing mountains as mountains, rivers rivers," is comparable to the innocent or naive mode of apprehending reality. This mode is naive in the sense that it is not cluttered by intellectuality; it is perception like that either of a child or of people in primitive societies before any epistemological activity enters into their consciousness. This kind of consciousness responds directly to the concrete data of nature. A child's consciousness is often without

language or at least without conscious intellectual language. A child lives in a sort of coexistence with the thousand things in nature but does not seek consciously to disclose them in poetry. When the child does, the poem often focuses on the most salient features of the concrete presences of things. Like the poems by primitive peoples, a child's poetic utterances often seek to identify objects in their full, original, indigenous status. However, when a conscious attempt to express this response in language is made, we find ourselves moving into the second stage of perception, "seeing mountains not as mountains, rivers not as rivers," in which epistemological activity is at work. This activity leads us away from the fresh, direct appeal of landscape to seek in the world of ideas for relationships and meanings. The third stage, "seeing mountains still as mountains, rivers still rivers," must then be considered an achieved perception in which we affirm landscape in its original existence as independent and self-sufficient. This article of faith necessarily demands that we abandon language and intellectualization to return to objects as they are. In a practical sense, both the first stage, from which we might be irrecoverably exiled, and the third stage, which remains open to us as a possible choice, offer no possibility for poetic expression, since poetry is invariably bound up with language. In both these stages, experience, not expression, is called for. Still, the perceptual differences involved here, which we can, for the moment, term noetic and noematic , would give rise to different expressive procedures, in spite of the intrusion of language. Noesis, in Husserl's sense, is the way or ways to look at an object, noema. We can see, imagine, and dream about a tree, but the tree remains what it is. Noetic formulations are products of the mind, not those of nature. To put it more simply, if the poet should start with the second stage of investigation, the process of disclosing landscape will be conditioned by the poet's constant attempt to articulate and clarify relationships between himself or herself and the objects in nature. If, on the other hand, the poet should start with the third stage, in which such relationships are transparent and need no further explanation, this disclosing mode will admit little or no intellectualization.

Let us, for the sake of illustration, compare a poem by Wang Wei, an eighth-century landscape poet in China, and Wordsworth's "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey." Wang Wei's poem, "Bird-Singing Stream," is very brief.

Man at leisure. Cassia flowers fall.
Quiet night. Spring mountain is empty.

Moon rises. Startles — a mountain bird.
It sings at times in the spring stream.^[5]

Wordsworth's poem is relatively long, 162 lines. We will quote here the first twenty-two lines:

Five years have past; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur.—Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard tuffs,
Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves
'Mid groves and copses. Once again I see
These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!
With some uncertain notice, as might seem
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire
The Hermit sits alone.
                                                                        PW , 2:259

The 140 lines that follow recount how "these beauteous forms" had given him "sweet sensations" and quietude, how he felt the presence of elevated thoughts interfused with a sense sublime, how between mind and objects there had been lively traffic, how nature becomes "the anchor of [his] purest thoughts," "the guide, the guardian," and "soul of all [his] moral being." Wordsworth once said,

                                        the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind
With all its solemn imagery.
                                         The Prelude , 191

Presumably, Wordsworth's ideal poem should also be one that allows the visible scene to enter "unawares" into his mind, but the poet who has fulfilled this ideal is Wang Wei and not Wordsworth. The

discursiveness of the latter belies the perceiving process he seems to be arguing for. Three-fourths of the poem is spent in relating how external nature affects his mind and how his mind consorts with and complements nature. If, however, we should take the first twenty-two lines as a separate entity, we would have a landscape more or less free from explanation. In it he can even claim to have disclosed, so to speak, unconditional faith in the landscape as it is, a landscape that comes to us in a sort of spontaneity and immediacy: these waters, these cliffs, this sycamore, these orchard-tufts.^[6] There is even a certain degree of trance-like consciousness with which the poet, like Wang Wei, receives the appeal of things in a kind of "wise passiveness" ("Expostulation and Reply," PW , 6:57). The implications of this famous motto by Wordsworth (coupled with "We murder to dissect" — "The Tables Turned," PW , 6:57) were never realized in his poetry, nor did he literally achieve the ideal state in which, as Geoffrey Hartman puts it, "cognition and perception is one."^[7] The fact is, of course, that for Wordsworth landscape alone is not adequate to constitute the aesthetic object of his poetry. This is clearly expressed in his poetry, especially in his preface to The Excursion and throughout The Prelude , in which he repeatedly emphasizes the mind as the mediator and maker of meaning. "Minds that have nothing to confer/Find little to perceive" (PW , 2:35).^[8] The complexity of this perceptual procedure, involving syllogistic progression and exploratory thinking, must be dealt with later in this essay. Suffice it to say here that his perceptual-expressive procedures differ greatly from those of Wang Wei. Briefly, in Wang Wei, the scenery speaks and acts . There is little or no subjective emotion or intellectuality to disturb the inner growth and change of the objects in front of him. The objects spontaneously emerge before the reader-viewer's eyes, whereas, in Wordsworth, the concreteness of the objects gives way to abstraction through the poet's analytical intervention. In large measure, Wordsworth begins with the second stage of investigation, a noetic approach to the phenomenal world, and Wang Wei's can be considered a noematic disclosure.

To fully understand the parameters of these two modes of perception and presentation, we must trace the morphology of these attitudes from their respective indigenous traditions. Here, the question of the adequacy of landscape must be rephrased as follows: Can natural objects in their mere physical existence express themselves without the poet's injecting into them ideas or emotions? Can landscape in its naive, innocent, original form, without involving the

world of concepts, occupy us directly? This question is not only central to the discussion of landscape poetry but is also central to the phenomenological discussion of Being by such philosophers as Heidegger and others. The latter aspect has been treated in chapter 3. Let us now take up the former aspect. If the poet's answer to the above question is positive, he will attempt to release the objects in Phenomenon from their seeming irrelevance and bring forth their original freshness and thingness — return them to their first innocence, so to speak — thus making them relevant as "self-so-complete" objects in their coextensive existence. The poet merges with and, in some sense, becomes the objects before the act of composition and focuses attention upon them in such a way as to allow them to leap out directly and spontaneously to us, unhindered. Clearly, such a perceptual horizon is dominant in much of Chinese landscape poetry, particularly in poets like Wang Wei, Meng Hao-jan, Wei Ying-wu, and Liu Tsung-yüan (all T'ang poets). The centrality of this attitude is also reflected in a number of proverbial philosophical and critical phrases: Chuang-tzu: "Tao (Nature's Way) is everywhere"; Sun Cho (320?–380?): "The mountains and rivers are the Tao"; post-Sung critics: "What we see is where the Tao resides"; and Shao Yung (1011–1077): "View things as things view themselves."^[9]

Most Chinese critics would claim that the ancient Chinese were always delighted by the natural sublimity of mountains and rivers; they were referred to as "beautifully alive" or "divinely beautiful," harboring sacredness and demanding reverence; they were compared to kind and wise men.^[10] Indeed, such a view finds many echoes in later poems, such as this by Tu Fu (712–770):

How about the Mount of Mounts?
From Ch'i to Lu, never-ending green.
Great Transformation centers here divine beauty.
Shade and light divides here dusk and dawn.
Rolling chest: in it are born layers of clouds.
Eyelids strained to open by incoming birds from afar.
Ah! to stand atop the highest peak
To see: how tiny the rest of the hills!
                                         "Looking at Mount T'ai-shan"

But, in spite of this view, in most ancient Chinese poems, such as those in the Shih Ching and the Ch'u Tz'u , mountains and rivers were still used decoratively and illustratively as a background. Its emergence from this subordinate position to a prominent and independent

object for aesthetic consideration had to wait until the radical cultural change of the third and fourth centuries. This is no place to recount and detail all the social forces that stimulated this change. Briefly, this period witnessed a reaction against the dead rigidity and superficiality of the Han codification of the Confucian system, the revival of Taoism, the popularization of Buddhism by way of Taoist interpretations, large groups of intellectuals seeking affinity with nature by residing in mountains where they could enjoy them in their untrammeled fullness, and, perhaps most important of all, their engagement in ch'ing-t'an (pure talk or philosophical bull-sessions) on Tao (Way or Nature's Way). Many scholars have written on some of these historical factors,^[11] but little has been done in the way of understanding the aesthetic implications of this change in literature.

As we can see, the central force in shaping the consciousness of landscape in medieval China is the Taoist aesthetic horizon, in particular, Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu as promoted and explicated by Wang Pi (226–249) and Kuo Hsiang (died ca. 312). Kuo Hsiang's explication was especially influential on the Orchid Pavilion poets (the first landscapists), on Hsieh Ling-yün, and even on the Buddhist monk Chih Tun, whose participation in ch'ing-t'an sessions had turned him almost completely Taoist in his outlook. Kuo Hsiang's annotations of Chuang-tzu's view of Phenomenon had indeed become the woof and warp of medieval Chinese thinking, providing new departure for creativity.

Here, a highlighting of some of the related points from my discussion on Taoism in chapter 3 is in order. The Taoist philosophy begins by rejecting the premise that the structure of Phenomenon is the same as we conceive it. All conscious efforts in ordering it will result in superficial structures imposed upon undifferentiated existence and hence distorting it. Human classifications and conceptions cannot represent the cosmic scheme, the total Composition of Nature; the concrete, undivided existence must be retained and must not be dissected into separate entities. Since all imposed orders are forms of distortions of Phenomenon, we must give it back its original forms, understanding that "Ducks' legs are short; lengthening them means pain. Cranes' legs are long; shortening them means suffering" (Chuang, 317). We must leave them as they are by nature. Each form of being has its own nature, its own place; how can we take this as subject (principal) and that as object (subordinate)? We as human beings are but one form of being among a million others. What right do we have to classify other forms of beings? How can we impose

"our" viewpoint upon others as the right viewpoint, the only right viewpoint? White clouds are white; green mountains are green. White clouds cannot blame green mountains for being green. Green mountains cannot blame white clouds for being white. In Kuo Hsiang's annotations, "All things are what they are without knowing why and how they are. . . . Although things are different yet they are the same in that they exist spontaneously as they are" (Chuang, 55). "Since nonbeing is nonbeing, it cannot produce being. When being is not yet produced, it cannot produce other things. Who then produces things? They spontaneously produce themselves. By this is not meant that there is an 'I' to produce. The 'I' cannot produce things and things cannot produce the 'I'. The 'I' is self-existent. Because it is so by itself, we call it natural. Everything is as it is by nature, not made to be so. . . . Who can be the Lord that commands things? Everything produces itself and is not created by others. This is the Way of Nature" (Chuang, 10). When Chuang-tzu talks about the "Piping of Nature," it is not something mysterious and transcending Phenomenon but the very Free Flow of Composition of a million things, each functioning, generating, conditioning according to its own nature. Here, Kuo Hsiang's commentary to this concept was most representative of the view of the times and was most cherished by the poets:

Pipes and flutes come in different lengths and notes in different pitches. Hence, a million differences and variations of long and short, high and low, tones. Although tones vary in a million ways the principle of their natural endowment is the same. Thus, among them, no distinction of good and bad things. . . . Notes change in a thousand, a million fashions, harmonizing their differences, each always assuming its natural role, each performing its natural part.
Chuang, 45

To put all things on an equal footing and to allow their various natures to take their course is the path to preserve the completeness of the cosmic scheme. Hence, one of the initiators of Chinese landscape poetry, Wang Hsi-chih (321–379), and other Orchid Pavilion poets can say:

Looking up: blue sky's end.
Looking down: green water's brim.
Deep solitude: rimless view.
Before the eyes, Pattern displays itself.
Immense, Transformation!

A million differences, none out of tune.
Pipings all variegated:
What fits me, none strange.
          Wang Hsi-chih, "Orchid Pavilion"

This poem can be considered the poetic restatement of Kuo Hsiang's interpretation of Chuang-tzu. Landscape is worthy of our wandering in it and viewing it because "what we see is where the Tao resides" ("Before the eyes, Pattern displays itself"), because "a million differences, none out of tune." Mountains and rivers are the very pattern of nature (in China, landscape poetry is called the "poetry of mountains and rivers"); they are by themselves complete.

The singular contribution of Kuo Hsiang in the revival of Taoism was his reaffirmation of Chuang-tzu's "Tao is everywhere" and that it is "self-rooted." He redefined many key Taoist terms and helped to clear away the possible mystical as well as metaphysical meanings surrounding the words Tao, T'ien , "Divine Mortals," and "Holy Men."^[12] He unequivocally said in his preface: "Above, there is no Creator; below, things create themselves." This clarification prepared the way for pronouncements like "seeing mountains as mountains" by Ch'an Buddhists (who are Taoist-oriented) and for most of their paradoxical form of communication via anti-communication, as in this round of priest–disciple exchange:

Q: What is the general idea of Buddha's law?

A: Spring comes, grass green by itself.

I. A. Richards once explained the structure of metaphor in terms of vehicle and tenor. The view that landscape qua landscape is Nature's Way points to the merging of vehicle and tenor: The tenor is contained in the vehicle, or the vehicle is the tenor, the container is the contained, the thing named is the thing meant. This explains why a large portion of Chinese poetry is nonmetaphorical and nonsymbolic.^[13] Because of this merging, it does not require human intellect to interfere or mediate. It is no accident that a Taoist should stress the Fast of the Mind (Chuang, 14) or Sitting-in-Forgetfulness (Chuang, 384), for it is by emptying out all traces of intellectual interference that one can fully respond, as does a mirror or still water, to things in their concreteness, to their spontaneous, simultaneous, and harmonious presences. It is a bosom empty but open, into which a million things can return. In order to achieve cosmic measure or the natural measure of things, we have to give back to natural objects

their own freedom of activity, their own indigenous expressive emergence, we have to merge into, move with, and tune in with the million things constantly changing before us.

The Sage roams in the path of a million changes — a million things a million changes in accordance with the laws of a million changes. Changes are infinite, and so would be the Sage.
Kuo Hsiang's commentary on Chuang-tzu's
concept of change (Chuang, 246)

Abiding by concrete things in their constant growth and change, we arrive at a sense of infinity without the burden of having to constantly struggle to match a set of assumed permanent forms.

But this view, to allow the uninterfered emergence of things, could, from another perspective, be labeled as antispeech and antiart. A poet must mediate between Phenomenon, which has its self-so-complete existence, and language, which is a human-conceived entity, in order to produce a poem. Therefore, it is not surprising to find that, among the early landscapists, as in Wang Hsi-chih's poem quoted earlier, vehicle and tenor are still separate, in spite of the fact that the tenor points back to the vehicle for identification.

The truth of the matter is that in many of the landscape poems of this period, the consideration of how landscape by itself is Nature's Way is latent in the poets' aesthetic consciousness, as for example in Hsieh Ling-yün's "Scene from South Hill to North Hill Passing the Lake . . . ":

Dawn: off from the south cliff.
Sundown: rest on the north peak.
Boat left ashore, to pore into distant islands.
Staff laid aside, to lean on a thick pine.
Sidepaths lean and long.
Round islets bright and clear.
Looking down: tips of tall trees.
Harkening above: water rushes from large valleys.
A criss-cross rock splits the stream.
A dense forest blocks all paths.
Sky thaws: thundering rains^[14] : how about them?
Vegetation rises up in profusion.
First bamboo-shoots wrapped in green sheaths.
New reeds hold purple fluffs.
Seagulls sport on spring shores.
Pheasants play in mild winds.
Cherish Transformation: mind will be unbounded.^[15]

Embrace things: love will deepen.
One need not regret that men of the past are distant.
Sad it is to find no one of like mind.
To roam alone is not emotional relief:
Appreciation now abandoned — cosmic scheme: who knows?

The poet's sight and hearing are filled with the epiphanies and activities of mountains, rivers, and other natural objects. In the words of Wang Hsi-chih, "We look up: immense, the universe! We look down: so full, things and things!" A million things, a million fashions of delight. "But what do these activities mean" is still a question for Hsieh. His question: "Sky thaws: thundering rains: how about them?" His answer: these activities in their natural measure give rise to profuse vegetation. Each natural being, bamboo shoot, reed, seagull, and pheasant, following its own natural endowment and role, emits its energy of growth. By perceiving these beings as endowed with natural energy, our minds will be boundless with change and transformation. It is clear that this poem is still not free from traces of explanation, but the form this explanation takes is unique; it resembles the kung-an (koan^[*] ) verbal exchange in Ch'an Buddhism of a later time. Compare the priest–disciple exchange, quoted above, to Hsieh:

Sky thaws: thundering rains: how about them?
Vegetation rises up in profusion.
First bamboo-shoots wrapped in green sheaths.
New reeds hold purple fluffs.
Seagulls sport on spring shores.
Pheasants play in mild winds.

and further to Wang Wei (701–761):

You ask me the way to the Pattern.
Fisherman's song deep into the cove.
        "Answer to Vice-Prefect Chang"

The employment of a concrete scene in place of explanatory elaborations is a mode of expression continuously practiced by Chinese poets. With the identification of vehicle and tenor, the last few lines of commentary in Hsieh's poem, by its implication, must become, then, a sort of appendage. The core consciousness of the poem is the disclosure of landscape as it is. The Taoist emphasis on the priority of things necessarily deemphasizes the role of commentary in poetry. Thus, as we move from the third and fourth centuries to the T'ang Dynasty, we witness a continuous decrease in the use of statements.

The acceptance of landscape as self-so-complete logically excludes the necessity of discursiveness, as can be observed in an interesting computation done by Ami Yuji in his Chugoku^[*] chuseki^[*] bungaku kenkyu^[*] (A Study of Medieval Chinese Literature , 1960), in which he lays out the ratio between lines of scenery and those of statement in pre-T'ang poetry. A quick review of some of these will help to affirm this aesthetic consequence:

With this affirmation of the priority of things in their natural measure arose a whole art of focused attention upon landscape's live emergence from Phenomenon. For these Chinese poets, the function of language is solely to punctuate the very vital rhythm of the emergence of things, to approximate their cuts and turns, their patterning and the way they leap out fresh and alive from their seeming irrelevance. Thus, we find that Pao Chao discloses "earth's veins" from deep torrents, "sky's network" from spearing trees.^[16] Some of the most famous of Chinese landscape poems by Hsieh Ling-yün are characterized by his ability to unfold for us, like landscape painters, the different phases and gradations of limpidity or transparency ("White clouds embrace dark rocks / Green bamboos charm clear ripples"), seclusion ("Linked cliffs: roads seem blocked / Thick bamboo-groves: paths are lost"), brightness ("Dense groves hold lingering gleam / Distant peaks hide an arc of light"), and light in the sense of lightness and in the sense of brightness ("Cloud and sun brighten each other / Sky and water both freshened and clear"). Or witness the play of distance in Hsieh T'iao ("Sky's end: mark a homing boat / Among clouds, indistinct, smoke or trees") and movement in stillness ("Fish

sport: new lotus flutters / Birds scatter: last flowers fall"), or listen to the silence in sound, as in Wang Chi ("A bird sings: the mountain becomes quieter"). All these reflect what the Chinese critics would call "spiritual interest," or interest evoked by the vital rhythm of the natural measure of things, a fundamental expressive emphasis in poets like Wang Wei, Meng Hao-jan, Wei Ying-wu, and Liu Tsung-yüan and in Southern Sung landscape painters. Indeed, this expressive interest is dominant even in descriptive poets like Wang Yung (468–485), whose interest in landscape remains somewhat on the surface:

Forests break off. Mountains stretch on still.
Islands end. The river opens wide again.
From clouded peaks, celestial village emerges.
Source of the stream: sycamores and cedars.

The visual order of the natural objects as they come to us (or as we come to them) is closely reproduced, transparent, quickened, and direct, allowing the reader-viewer to move into the scene, unblocked.

Wang Wei's poetry is noted for its different gradations of visual distinctiveness:

The river flows beyond the sky and earth.
The mountain's color, between seen and unseen.
                                    "Floating on the River Han"

White clouds — looking back — close up.
Green mists — entering — become nothing.
                                        "Mount Chungnan"

Vast desert: a lone smoke, straight.
Long river: the setting sun, round.
 "An Envoy to the Barbarian Pass"

These Chinese poets want to structure nature in accordance with nature's way of structuring itself or to disclose nature in accordance with nature's way of disclosing itself. To do so requires the poet's removal of the conscious self — that is, the Taoist conceptions of the "Fast of the Mind" and "Sitting-in-Forgetfulness" — to focus attention upon objects not from the poet's point of view but from that of the objects, a noematic awareness in which little conscious and intellectual activity is allowed to expand. This state of mind, of no conscious mind, no doubt resembles a trance-like consciousness:

Empty mountain: No man.
But voices of men are heard.
                                Wang Wei,
                       "Deer Enclosure"

Man at leisure. Cassia flowers fall.
Quiet night. Spring mountain is empty.
Moon rises. Startles — a mountain bird.
It sings at times in the spring stream.
        Wang Wei, "Bird-Singing Stream"

High on the tree tips, the hibiscus
Sets forth red calyces in the mountain.
A stream hut, quiet. No one around.
It blooms and falls, blooms and falls.
                   Wang Wei, "Hsin-i Village"

In this consciousness, Kuo Hsiang says, "a million things return to one's bosom"; this is so because, free from the burden of thought, from the unrest of metaphysics, the poet has another hearing, another vision, so to speak (which the poet, in turn, gives us). The poet hears voices that conscious thinking selves normally do not hear and sees activities we are normally not aware of. This is precisely what Lu Chi (261–303) meant when he said, "In the zero of silence, to search for sound." It is also what Ssu-k'ung T'u (837–908) meant when he said, "Wait in silence — It is here the Scheme is seen."

The state of stillness, emptiness, silence, or quiescence is ubiquitous in the landscape poems of Wang Wei and his contemporaries. The "voices" one hears are those one hears in absolute silence — voices from unspeaking, self-generating, self-conditioning (wu-yen tu-hua ) nature outside the world of language. In this poetry, discursiveness is out of place; in this poetry, each object discloses its original spatiotemporal extensions and relationships in a manner that is luminous, fresh, and pictorial, as in Liu Tsung-yüan's "River-Snow":

A thousand mountains — no bird's flight.
A million paths — no man's trace.
Single boat. Bamboo-leaved cape. An old man
Fishing by himself: ice-river. Snow.

Likewise, the famous Japanese haiku poet Basho^[*] (1644–1694) approximates movement in stillness and sound in silence in his famous poem:

Ancient pond —
A frog jumps in:
Sound of water.

Or he allows the silent world to emerge monochromatically:

Spring:
Unnamed mountain's
Morning mist.

Thus, the Taoist noematic emphasis on nature's measure and scheme, as well as its denunciation of the egoist enterprise (i.e., that of the ego ordering the nonego), helps to bring forth a special type of non-mediating mediation by decreasing discursive, analytical, and explanatory procedures. This poetic strategy leads toward an art of pure landscape poetry of noninterference, tzu-jan and self-so-complete.

What kind of answer do we find in Western poets to our initial questions: Can natural objects, in their mere physical existence, express themselves without the poet's injecting into them emotions or ideas? Can landscape in its naive, innocent, original form, without involving the world of concepts, occupy us directly? We remember that Wordsworth once said: "Minds that have nothing to confer/Find little to perceive." He was even more specific.

Objects . . . derive their influence not from properties inherent in themselves, but from such as are bestowed upon them by the minds of those who are conversant with or affected by those objects. Thus, the Poetry, if there be any in the work, proceeds whence it ought to do, from the soul of Man, communicating its creative energies to the images of the eternal world.
Letters, 705^[17]

The two themes (or the two variations of one theme) from his preface to The Excursion (or "The Prospectus to The Recluse ") and the conclusion of The Prelude are almost proverbial; I quote them here only as a reminder:

How exquisitely the individual Mind
 . . . to the external World
Is fitted: — and how exquisitely, too —
Theme this but little heard of among men —
The external World is fitted to the Mind.
                                                                  PW , 5:5

                      . . . and we may teach them how;
Instruct them how the mind of man becomes
A thousand times more beautiful than the earth
On which he dwells, above this frame of things.
                                                         The Prelude , 537

Despite Wordsworth's emphasis, at one point, on looking steadily at his object the way an artist looks at a model or an actual landscape, he definitely posits the aesthetic object of his poem within the poet's mind rather than within the landscape itself — in other words, in the mode of noesis rather than that of noema . Nature or innocence cannot be attained without traversing through thought. In the words of Geoffrey Hartman, "There is some confrontation of person with shadow or self with self. . . . Wordsworth cannot find his theme because he already has it: himself. Yet he knows self-consciousness to be at once necessary and opposed to poetry."^[18] Nature or landscape is a subject for his mind to explore, a field in which he can identify the growth of his mind; at the most, landscape, serving as an object for aesthetic contemplation, is significant to him only to the extent that it helps to reveal the powers of his imagination in his epistemological search for transcendence. It is natural that such a search should be reflected in his exploratory rhetorical structure. Donald Wesling describes his style most cogently: "The tentative exploratory thinking in the body of 'Tintern Abbey' moves through a process of intellection which deepens the reference of the opening description — the distinction of Wordsworth is that at best landscape is inseparable from such sequences of generalization."^[19] At this point, one may want to ask: In what sense can we talk about Wordsworth's landscape and Chinese landscape poems in the same breath? Indeed, it is apparent that Wordsworth's poems reveal a mode of approaching landscape very different from that of the Chinese poets. And yet, to say that Wordsworth had no genuine aesthetic interest in landscape would probably be wrong. There are many moments in which we find him totally absorbed in landscape, allowing us to be "usurped" by it, as, for example, this fragment:

                                       Many a time
At evening, when the earliest stars began
To move along the edges of the hills,
Rising or setting, would he stand alone
Beneath the trees or by the glimmering lake,
And there, with fingers interwoven, both hands

Pressed closely palm to palm, and to his mouth
Uplifted, he, as though an instrument,
Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls,
That they might answer him; and they would shout
Across the watery vale, and shout again,
Responsive to his call, with quivering peals,
And long halloos and screams, and echoes loud,
Redoubled and redoubled, concourse wild
Of jocund din; and, when a lengthened pause
Of silence came and baffled his best skill,
Then sometimes, in that silence while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind,
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received
Into the bosom of the steady lake.
                                                          The Prelude , 189, 191

In spite of certain analytical traces, we feel the activities of nature — solemn and beautiful — which emerge limpidly before our eyes in a moment of the obliteration of sense^[20] , a moment in which the question of vehicle and tenor has no precedence but, instead, a strong communion between the perceiver and the perceived is at work. But, like the marvelous Snowden mountaintop passage in Book 14, where the poet presents, for a moment, a pure landscape where there is not a trace of "encroachment," nature cannot be left alone in its original, self-sufficient form; it is seen as "the emblem of a mind / That feeds upon infinity" (The Prelude , 515). The earlier version is even more assertive: "The perfect image of a mighty mind, / Of one that feeds upon infinity, / That is exalted by an underpresence" (514). He continues later: "This spiritual Love acts not nor can exist / Without Imagination, which, in truth, / Is but another name for absolute power / And clearest insight, amplitude of mind, / And Reason in her most exalted mood" (521). As pointed out by Fred Randel in his "The Mountaintops of English Romanticism,"^[21] passivity in the reception of scenery is continually questioned by the Romantic poets. This norm of unrest reaches back to Petrarch's having to apologize for his indulgence in pure landscape on top of Mount Verntoux near Avignon in 1335 instead of remembering that the human soul is beyond comparison the subject of admiration.^[22] Among the Romantics, according to Randel, Coleridge furthered this theme and prepared the way for

subsequent poets, including Wordsworth, to agonize over "whether man's whole soul is most fully engaged in a solitary sublime experience or in a social and ethical interaction."^[23]

It is clear that while Wordsworth had a strong feeling for sensible objects as they really existed, he could not come to an unconditional acceptance of them as such. Hence, even within the more landscape-oriented passages, the disclosure of natural objects is carefully guided by his active perception of them. Wordsworth gives them to us in terms of how he comes upon them, in a sort of linear progression, rather than letting the objects come forth both diachronically and synchronically. Let us dwell upon the Snowden scene for a second. After the introduction of time and weather, the poet "began to climb"

                    with forehead bent
Earthward, as if in opposition set
Against an enemy, I panted up
With eager pace.

When he arrived at the top:

            and lo! as I looked up
The moon hung naked in a firmament
Of azure without cloud, and at my feet
Rested a silent sea of hoary mist.
A hundred hills their dusky backs upheaved
All over this still ocean; and beyond,
Far, far beyond, the solid vapours stretched.
                                             The Prelude , 511, 513

The series of goal-directed pointers like "began to climb," "panted up," "looked up," "beyond," and so on resemble the traditional one-dimensional perspective in painting: chosen time, chosen point-of-view. The phrase "as if in opposition set / Against an enemy" further polarizes his relation with nature and cancels the possibility of merging into it or "to view things as things view themselves." Here, it is instructive to reintroduce Hsieh Ling-yün's poem "Scene from South Hill to North Hill Passing the Lake . . . " for comparison. The title seems to promise a procedure exactly like that of Wordsworth — the use of "excursion" to disclose objects in nature, but closer examination reveals a clear difference. The contemporary critic Lin Wen-yueh lays out a common structural pattern found in the landscape poems by Hsieh and his contemporaries. Her chart for the first ten lines can serve as a point of departure for our discussion^[24] (I have added the notes on yin and yang):

One explanation of this structural pattern is, no doubt, the use of parallelism, as duly observed by Lin. But the rise of parallelism, which later became a common rhetorical device, was based upon nature itself. The primordial pair of Yang and Yin, Ch'ien (Sky) and K'un (Earth), sunshine and darkness, and so forth was derived from the ancient Chinese people's observation of cosmic forces at work in nature; it is through their cooperation — one complementing the other the way one parent complements the other — that produces the things in the world. Having one oppose the other would lead to the breakup of the original union and the destruction of totality. More important, objects disclose themselves to us diachronically (as we approach or emulate them) and synchronically (as they approach or emulate us). This explains the fact that the poet looks both at and from objects in nature, hence the changing perspectives and nontemporal sequence in Chinese landscape poetry. Like the Chinese landscape painter who uses multiple or revolving perspectives to represent his or her total experience of the mountains (as they are viewed from different vantage points and in their various appearances and moods), the Chinese landscape poet attempts to lay out all moments of experiencing a mountain reality spatially, as in this example from Wang Wei:

In Wordsworth, however, we find the dominance of linear and syllogistic progression, like the use of a single perspective in traditional Western painting, both of which are examples of the process of the ego in search of the nonego.

When Plato denounced concrete appearances for his abstract Ideal Forms, he had already rejected the pre-Socratic faith that people, plants, and animals shared one undifferentiated world and language. This was the first polarization between self and nature. When Aristotle tried to save the poet from being excommunicated from Plato's Republic and introduced "logical structures" or "universal structures" as achievable forms of permanence, humans had separated themselves from the rest and acclaimed themselves to be the active generators of order, turning the infinite into finitely manageable units (such as Aristotle's model of the universe), reducing the untrammeled natural vastness into rationalized, explainable enclosures. The Greek emphasis on balance, symmetry, and restraint deterred Roman and later poets from accepting nature in its original, wild condition. With the rise of Christianity, any conception of infinity had to be anchored in God; delight in pure landscape was almost considered sinful because, like other sensuous pleasures, it would lead human beings away from their efforts to achieve communion with God. As a result, there was an unprecedented triumph of symbols over sensations in the hermeneutical framework in which objects in nature were implicated. Indeed, natural objects were employed almost exclusively for allegory, as signs for abstract ideas, as objects of personification, and as means for didacticism.^[25] Here, we must reconsider the basic metaphorical structure — vehicle and tenor, signifier and signified, the literal and the symbolic — underlying metaphor, symbol, allegory, myth, and emblem in the context of Western writing, particularly in pre-Romantic periods.

Metaphor or metaphoric thinking has been seriously questioned by contemporary writers and philosophers. Beda Allemann in his "Metaphor and Antimetaphor" enumerated a series of attacks on metaphor, undertaken by as diversified a host of writers as expressionists like Carl Sternheim, Theodor Tagger, and Gottfried Benn, the futurist Marinetti, Paul Celan, Robbe-Grillet, and the Russian Formalists.^[26] We can add Pound of the imagist period, Williams, and many postmodern poets. What were some of the things that bothered these writers? What kind of epistemological or hermeneutical crisis were they responding to? I will not be able to examine all the above cases. For our purpose, three examples will suffice. In Allemann's essay, the following piece of prose by Kafka is quoted:

The poplar in the fields swaying in the wind, which you have called the Tower of Babel — for you refused to believe that it is a poplar. . . . Look what you are doing! Out of sheer rashness you are not satisfied with the true names of things, they are not enough for you, and now, in a great hurry, you pour arbitrary names out over them.^[27]

As if to answer Kafka, Pound has this to say:

I believe that the proper and perfect symbol is the natural object, that if a man use "symbols", he must so use them that their symbolic function does not obtrude; so that a sense, and the poetic quality of the passage, is not lost to those who do not understand the symbol as such, to whom, for instance, a hawk is a hawk.^[28]

But this plain truth — to give back objects their immanence, to call a poplar a poplar, a hawk a hawk — is not so easy to assert. Witness Alain Robbe-Grillet's defense:

If I say, "The world is man," I shall always gain absolution; while if I say, "Things are things, and man is only man," I am immediately charged with a crime against humanity.

The crime, Robbe-Grillet explains, is that he has broken a solidarity implicated in a system of anthropomorphic analogies, that he has ignored metaphoric thinking, which is supposed to lead him back to "a notion of hidden unity," and that he has allowed the world of objects to remain "entirely external." But analogical or metaphoric thinking is always affective, hence

the world of the things has been so thoroughly contaminated by my mind that it is henceforth susceptible of any emotion, of

any character trait. I will forget that it is I, I alone, who feels melancholy [when I speak of the melancholy of a landscape], or suffers solitude; these affective elements will soon be considered as the profound reality of the material universe, the sole reality . . . worthy of engaging my interest in it.

And this reality, the universe of significations, "leads infallibly to the [idea] of a nature common to all things . . . a superior or higher nature. The idea of an interiority always leads to the idea of a transcendence."^[29]

Here, we are not talking about metaphor as a mere literary device, as a figure of speech commonly used in both Western and Chinese poetry, but as a problem of epistemology and hermeneutics. An apple to the Chinese, to the pre-Socratics (Homer, for example), and to people of many other cultures is a fruit, sweet, crisp, and shiny, but to the pre-Romantics it has the entire burden of original sin — metaphor, myth, allegory, and emblem all rolled into one. Similarly, the garden — Andrew Marvell's "The Garden," for example — is invested with layers and layers of symbolic significances, the Virgilian locus amoenus , the biblical hortus conclusus , the lost Eden (again, the burden of Adam's Fall), the achieved Christian paradise, and so forth. Like man, "a little world made cunningly of elements," the garden, too, can be a perfect world reflecting the macrocosm. Ben Jonson's garden estate poem "To Penshurst" begins with God and the four elements, followed by various hierarchies, in order of importance, of angels, (God-ordained) princes, men and women (the former in command of the latter), animals, plants, and so on, with this interesting detail: The fish happily jumps to the hook, for within the predestined network of things, the fish is allotted to be eaten by men. In Pope's "Windsor Forest," the grand cosmic pattern of harmonious confusion and agreement through differences governs "nature," the physical universe, human society, humankind, and the arts. This pattern is fundamental even to the political state:

. . . Draw to one point, and to one centre bring
Beast, Man, or Angel, Servant, Lord, or King.
                                  "Essay on Man," iii, 301–2

In the pre-Romantic periods, almost none of the objects in nature was seen as it is. As Owen Barnfield puts it, the literal was always implicated in the symbolic.^[30] Through a series of analogies, the four elements — fire, air, water, earth — were seen to have made up man's body, including the making of the four humors, constituted the plant

and animal as well as the mineral worlds, and thus to have linked everything in a network of symbolic markers within a cartography referred to as macrocosm-geocosm-microcosm. All creatures were God's imprints and signatures.^[31]

In this connection, one most unimaginable aspect for the Oriental mind is that mountains should have been considered in seventeenth-century English literature as "shames," "ills," "warts," "wens," or "blisters" (a subject thoroughly studied by Marjorie Nicolson in her book Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory ). They were seen as such because the appearance of mountains after the Deluge destroyed the balance, symmetry, and order of God's work. In a curious way, Adam's Fall (microcosm's blemish) was linked to the Deluge (the disfiguring of Earth's perfect globe, giving rise to "ugly" mountains) and later to the breaking of the circle (the geocentric macrocosm blasted by Copernicus and Galileo). Both Nicolson and Basil Willey are of the opinion that the eighteenth century was plunged into a huge crisis of consciousness because of this curious blend of pessimism. In the words of Nicolson:

Each of these "decays" aroused opposition. Against the orthodox conception of the decay of Nature in man was the humanistic defense of the essential goodness of man. In opposition to the decay of Nature in the earth, we find one group of theologians staunchly insisting that the earth was not cursed , that this still is the world that the Lord has made, and other men, like Hakewill, declaring that, even though God may or will destroy it, Nature in itself has no seeds of decay, but operates upon orderly laws. If momentarily the "new philosophy," which seemed to prophesy the decay of the cosmos, called all in doubt, the implications of the Galilean discoveries were to lead . . . to exultation rather than despair.^[32]

"Opposition" is perhaps not the best word to describe the situation. The eighteenth century literally had to "justify" humankind, nature, and the infinite interstellar world in order to overcome the pessimism and sense of "displacement" brought about by the earlier period. In this connection, Shaftesbury played a pivotal role. Aside from his very important argument for the innate goodness of man, an argument that helped precipitate the reception of Confucianism in this period, he, through an imaginary dialogue between Theocles and Philocles conducted while going through an interstellar and terrestrial excursion, resurrected in hyperbolic terms a nature in its super-

abundant variety and irregularity hitherto disallowed or dampened in literature and art.^[33] While this "liberation," aided by the new sense of sublime occasioned by the translation of Longinus and the elated descriptions of the Alps by travelers, made it possible for a poet like James Thomson to write, with Miltonic drive, extended descriptions of nature in which the poet surrenders to a scene and accepts its mysterious power as such, this nature was still permeated with all the attributes of God — with or without naming him. Thus, when Romantic poets like Wordsworth began to appropriate landscape as their primary aesthetic material, consciously or unconsciously, they too had to justify its role in the order of things, for, as Kant (following Plato) would say, pure perception of phenomena is not sufficient; real knowledge consists of the poet's faculty of imagination to see into the essence of the ontological world, to move beyond the phenomenal to the noumenal. This epistemological search, often weighted with agony and unrest for meaning beyond the phenomenal (in this case, landscape) is ubiquitous among the Romantic poets. Hegel sees this most clearly:

The hour that man leaves the path of mere natural being marks the difference between him, a self-conscious agent, and the natural world. The spiritual is distinguished from the natural . . . in that it does not continue a mere stream of tendency, but sunders itself to self-realization. But this position of severed life has in its turn to be overcome and the spirit must, by its own act, achieve accord once more. . . . The principle of restoration is found in thought, and in thought only: The hand that inflicts the wound is also the hand that heals it.^[34]

The craving for radical innocence together with all its unresolved conflicts and contradictions continued to obsess modern philosophers and poets. Kierkegaard's rejection of abstract system (the world of ideas) for concrete existence, Heidegger's demand to return to pre-Socratic conceptions of physis (emergence of things) instead of meta-physis , and, in between, the imagists' not yet articulated emphasis on the natural symbol as adequate symbol (Pound: "A hawk is a hawk"; Williams: "No ideas but in things," "a world that is always real")^[35] — these positions arose from a central concern of how , in Kenneth Rexroth's words, the Western poet can bypass epistemological procedures.^[36] The how has become part of the rhetorical justification of the poet's object-oriented poem. Take, for instance, these lines by Rexroth (italics mine):

The holiness of the real
Is always there, accessible
In total immanence.
     "Time Is the Mercy
                of Eternity"

The seasons revolve and the years change
With no assistance or supervision ,
The moon, without taking thought ,
Moves in its cycle, full, crescent, and full.^[37]
                                          "Another Spring"

We recall here Wallace Stevens, whose entire poetic effort can be characterized as attempting to see the original "mere being" with "an ignorant eye." But his affirmation of the self-sufficient presences of terrestrial objects as they are also has to take the form of rhetorical justification (italics mine):

The palm  at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought , rises
In the bronze decor.

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm,  without human meaning,
Without human feeling , a foreign  song.

You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy .
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.
                                                  "Of Mere Being"

Instead of conceiving reality as having an ontological status, Stevens perceives or tries to perceive it in its prethinking or preontological context of synchronous presences of beings. He finds it difficult to present this world because, unlike the real world, he has to make a choice in the ordering:

           it was not a choice
Between excluding things. It was not a choice

Between, but of. He chose to include the things

That in each other are included, the whole,
The complicate, the amassing harmony.^[38]

The paradox here is as Hegel had stated it: "The principle of restoration is found in thought, and thought only: the hand that inflicts the wound is also the hand that heals it." It is in this sense that Stevens, like the Romantics, is still troubled by the question of epistemology. In "The Poems of Our Climate," after having presented concretely and transparently a world consisting of clear water, a brilliant bowl, and pink and white carnations, Stevens continues, "one desires / So much more than that. . . . Still one would want more, one would need more, / More than a world of white and snowy scents. / There would still remain the never-resting mind."^[39]

The persistence of this desire for epistemology and the priority given to humankind as the sole order-generating agent deter many poets from accepting the concrete world as such. John Crowe Ransom is of particular interest here. In attacking imagism, he understands beautifully how marvelous and remarkable objects by themselves can be:

[Idealists] object that an image in an original state of innocence is a delusion and cannot exist, that no image ever comes to us which does not imply the world of ideas, that there is "no precept without a concept." . . . But there is this to be understood too: the image which is not remarkable in any particular property is marvellous in its assemblage of many properties, a manifold of properties like a mine or a field, something to be explored for the properties; yet science can manage the image, which is infinite in properties, only by equating it to the one property with which the science is concerned; for science at work is always a science , and committed to a special interest. It is not by refutation but by abstraction that science destroys the image. It means to get its "value" out of the image and we may be sure that it has no use for the image in its original state of freedom. People who are engrossed with their pet "values" become habitual killers. Their game is the images, or the things, and they aquire the ability to shoot them as far off as they can be seen, and do. It is thus we lose the power of imagination, or whatever faculty it is by which we are able to contemplate things as they are in their rich and contingent materiality.^[40]

In spite of this richness, we are later told, the best kind of poetry, or the "right" kind of poetry, is what he calls "metaphysical poetry" in which the poet's mind is assigned a miraculous role.

Our whole study would have reached an impasse if, after all this intense awareness of objects as they are by various poets and philosophers, no further steps had been taken. The view that objects are immanent by themselves and need no human supervision to be what they are anticipated the possibility of bypassing epistemological procedures all together. This positive step was first taken by Williams in such poems as "Nantucket," Sycamore," and "The Red Wheelbarrow," in which, to use Hillis Miller's words, there is no symbolism, no reference to a world beyond the world, no interaction of subject and object.^[41] As I have argued in chapter 3, this final break from the dominance of a Platonic world of ideas and concepts, a break that involves the questioning of the artificially "constituted" transcendence and affirmation of the immanence of things, prepared the way for poets like Gary Snyder, Charles Tomlinson, the later Rexroth, the later Robert Creeley, Robert Bly, Cid Corman, Lew Welch, James Wright, and many postmodern poets to meet, receive, and present landscape in its own terms with a humility and freedom from egoistic intrusion quite unmatched by previous landscapists.^[42]

Here, I would like to consider briefly the works of Rexroth, Tomlinson, and Snyder, through which I hope to reveal the trajectory of this change. All three poets, each in his own way, have produced pure landscape poems of noematic emphasis. Part of their change to this aesthetic consciousness is, no doubt, due to their exposure to Chinese poetry and art, but, more relevantly, they were more disposed to pure landscape than poets of earlier generations because of the slow change of perceptual orientation outlined above and in chapter 3. They had been relatively freed, so to speak, from Platonic-Aristotelian perceptual constructs as well as from the "burdens" of Christianity so that they could see more clearly the implications of the Chinese model.

Kenneth Rexroth

Rexroth was probably the first American poet after Pound who embraced Chinese culture with almost complete passion and seriousness. He tried to read almost anything about Chinese culture and literature. In his An Autobiographical Novel, Assays, Classics Revisited , and many reviews on things Chinese, he generously acknowledged his debt to Chinese culture and art, to Chinese poetry in particular. He related how Pound's Cathay led him into Chinese literature, how as a young boy he read with elation Waley's Chinese translations, which had incalculable influence on him, and how an hour of talk

with Witter Bynner, translator of T'ang poetry, changed his interest and led him to read and fervently translate Tu Fu, whose works have become an important marker of his art.^[43] As he puts it:

I have saturated myself with his poetry for thirty years. I am sure he has made me a better man, as a moral agent and as a perceiving organism.^[44]

I have had the work of Tu Fu by me since adolescence and over the years have come to know these poems better than most of my own.^[45]

In fact, Tu Fu, according to Rexroth, is in some ways "a better poet than either Shakespeare or Homer,"^[46] and his poetry comes from "a saner, older, more secular culture," as it "embodies more fully the Chinese sense of the unbreakable wholeness of reality. . . . It can be understood and appreciated only by the application of what Albert Schweitzer called 'reverence for life'. What is, is what is holy."^[47] Rexroth was greatly excited to find a sounder universe from Joseph Needham's book on Chinese science:

The dominant influence in this volume seems to be the organic philosophy of Whitehead, shorn of its Platonic excrescences. It serves as an available bridge to the comprehension of a world in which Nature works by "doing nothing" instead of passing laws, in which the universe moves as a great web of inter-relatedness of which man and his imperatives are only part. This is basically a true picture of the Chinese universe. It is a universe full of strange and wonderful things. It is a universe Western man is going to have to understand if we are going to survive happily together.^[48]

We recall that in his poem, "Another Spring" (quoted earlier), which was constructed with images and lines from various poems from the T'ang Dynasty,^[49] he affirms the self-generating, self-immanent other world outside ourselves that needs no thought nor supervision. It is clear that his stance is Taoist-oriented. Thus, in an interview conducted by Cyrena N. Pondrom in March 1968, he repeatedly emphasizes that "poetry deals with much more concrete things. It possesses an intense specificity — the intense specificity of direct contact and direct communication; rather than dealing intellectually and discursively with permanent archetypes it does so directly via Whitehead's 'presentational immediacy.'"^[50] To resort to argument as a form of mastering life and experience is to doom oneself. "Man kills

himself by defining the indefinable, grasping the inapprehensible. We do not apprehend reality, since this implies an outstretching effort; rather it apprehends us. We are simply in real ity. We are in being like fish in water, who do not know water exists."^[51] The last statement is a free translation of Chuang-tzu's "Fish forget themselves in water; men forget themselves in Tao [Nature's Way]" (Chuang, 272).

By returning to their natural function, human beings can enter into direct mutual emulation with objects. All evidence shows that Rexroth accepted the Chinese aesthetic horizon, but the early Rexroth accepted it with a certain trepidation. In spite of large paragraphs of landscape in his early poems, there still remain presentational difficulties. First, as we have observed above, he has to introduce into his poems rhetorical justification. Second, he still clings to the method of equivalence (a subtle form of metaphoric structure) by merging landscape somewhat mysteriously into eroticism, which, according to Rexroth, is another form of direct experience.^[52]

           Beyond the hills
The moon is up, and the sky
Turns to crystal before it.
The canyon blurs in half light.
An invisible palace
Of glass, full of transparent
People, settles around me.
Over the dim waterfall
The intense promise of light
Grows above the canyon's cleft.
A nude girl enters my hut,
With white feet, and swaying hips,
And fragrant sex.
                                        "Mirror"^[53]

I must say, however, that Rexroth was very sincere in his attempt to emulate Chinese poetry. He once said that he wrote poetry according to a kind of Chinese rule:

that is, it is a certain place, at a certain time. . . . "A gong sounds far off among the pines" — it is a monastery in the mountains. What this does is to put the reader in a poetic situation. It puts him in a place, just like it puts him on the stage, makes him one of the actors. He is in the poetic situation. . . . This is the fundamental technique of Chinese poetry.^[54]

Indeed, we find many of his poems trying to emulate this "rule." His

"Yin and Yang," inspired by Tu Fu, is such a poem disclosing different activities in spring within the movement of the natural cycle. This desire to become "Chinese" was finally more fully realized in his New Poems (1974):

The air has the late summer
Evening smell of ripe foliage
And dew cooled dust. The last long
Rays of sunset have gone from
The sky. In the greying light
The last birds twitter in the leaves.
Far away through the trees, someone
Is pounding something. The new
Moon is pale and thin as a
Flake of ice. Venus glows warm
Beside it. In the abode
Of peace, a bell calls for
Evening meditation.
As the twilight deepens
A voice speaks in the silence.
                                  "Star and Crescent"

The objects and events in nature (echoing Chinese motifs) have a fairly spontaneous emergence without the poet's disruptive commentary. Here is another example, from the same book, of self-sufficient landscape poetry, in which objects exist in a kind of "presentational immediacy" without going through, in Rexroth's words, "permanent archetypes intellectually and discursively":

A cottage in the midst
Of a miniature forest.
The only events are the distant
Cries of peacocks, the barking
Of more distant dogs
And high over head
The flight of cawing crows.
          "A Cottage in the Midst"^[55]

Charles Tomlinson

When Charles Tomlinson published his "Nine Variations in a Chinese Winter Setting" in The Necklace in 1955, an elated Donald Davie had this to say about the poem:

[The poem] is no piece of fashionable chinoiserie. Nor has it anything to do with translations from the Chinese by Arthur

Waley or Ezra Pound. It is an exercise in rendering the perceptions of one sense by vocabulary drawn from the other:

Pine-scent
In snow-clearness
Is not more exactly counterpointed
Than the creak of trodden snow
Against a flute.

Scent and sight and sound flow together. . . . What emerges from the stanza is not scent or sound or sight but a quality that is all of and none of them, that comes to life only when all of them, each in its own rich identity, comes into perception together.^[56]

Davie concludes by saying this is the elaboration of the symbolist "paysage interieur" and the suggestion by Stevens's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." Tomlinson's own confession gives us a different impression. I offer it here not to refute Davie's most searching analysis but to complement and deepen it. In a letter to me, dated January 1, 1975, Charles Tomlinson says:

You asked about my poetic attitude. I think primarily it was getting the human being into a right relation with nature, where the individual ego was not a predator and where nature could speak for itself inside a relationship — not simply as background or symbolism. When I was a boy I saw a Chinese painting (in a book an aunt brought from Shanghai) entitled "Pine Scent in Snow-Clearness," it hit me at the time that the line was going to be "my attitude." I was fascinated by a title that said so much and yet was so free of the mere subjective. I couldn't have explained it that way then. But I clung to that line for years, feeling it as a kind of pure talisman, something proof against all sentimentality — all the slush the radio poured out in those days. Finally, I used it in The Necklace . I think now my "attitude," granting to nature its own being, had political extensions — basically, it was anti-fanatic (hence, my "Assassin" and "Prometheus" poems), anti-Promethean, suspicious of the merely excited, and yet sensuously aware, deep in colour, form, texture. And yet how much of it I owe to that single phrase, and how right it should have begun with a Chinese painting now that I find myself writing to you. I always thought that phrase "Pine scent, etc." a wonderful instance of sensibility responding to nature, without mere self-involvement, responsive and responsible.

It is fair to say that behind this "attitude" is a comment on the whole system of analogies that Robbe-Grillet criticizes, on the whole Platonic-Aristotelian as well as medieval burden discussed earlier, and on the egoistical sublime of Wordsworth and other Romantics. It is also clear that this "attitude" is not a surface echo of the Chinese title but one of deep resonance with the Chinese landscapists. Here are two of his landscape poems:

Look down. There is snow.
Where the snow ends
Sea and where the sea enters
Gray among capes
Like an unvaried sky, lapping
From finger to finger
Of a raised hand, travellers
Skirt between snow and sea.
Minute, furtive and exposed,
Their solitude is unchosen and will end
In comity, in talk
So seasoned by these extremes
It will recall stored fruits
Bitten by a winter fire.
The title, without disapprobation,
Says "Merchants."
             "On a Landscape by Li Ch'eng"

White, a shingled path
Climbs among dusted olives
To where at the hill-crest
Stare houses, whiter
Than either dust or shingle.
The view held from this vantage
Unsoftened by distance, because
Scoured by a full light,
Draws lucid across its depth
The willing eye: a beach,
A surf-line, broken
Where reefs meet it, into the heaving
Blanched rim of bay-arcs;
Above, piercing the empty blue,
A gull would convey whiteness
Through the sole space which lacks it
But, there, scanning the shore,

Hangs only the eagle, depth
Measured within its level gaze.
                                       "Icos"^[57]

In these poems, Tomlinson has achieved a good degree of freedom from the "mere subjective" and from "mere self-involvement" and brought back to the natural objects color, form, and texture with cinematic visuality. "Icos," in particular, is reminiscent of Wang Wei's "Crossing the River to Ch'ing-ho" in its cinematic handling of various images. Here is Wang Wei's poem:

Boating on wide river:
Confluent water reaches sky's end.
Sky-waves suddenly open up:
Towns: millions of houses.
Farther on: cities are visible.
Instantly, mulberries and hemp.
Backview of native country:
Teeming water merges with cloud-mist.

Both poems achieve unblurred visual immediacy while clear and unblocked images, like different phases of perception capturing changing gradations of color and light, unfold before the viewer. However, when put among Wang Wei's other poems, "Icos" will appear more consciously controlled in the way the camera is guided. Perception is consciously organized into shots. In this sense, Tomlinson, like Williams, from whom he learned this organization, maintains a certain degree of continuity with the tradition of linear movement in Western poetry, although there is this important difference: Both Williams and Tomlinson are careful in varying this movement with striking changes of perspective at key points as well as with sharp twists and turns to reflect the various shifts in perceptual activity. Tomlinson's discussion of Williams's rhythmical line structure is equally applicable to his own poetry. Following Pound's characterization of Williams's lines as full of "jerks, sulks, balks, outbursts and jump-overs," he describes Williams's art as one "where the attention is frequently turned upon outward things, the sound structure of the poems which embody that attention is an expression of strains, breath pauses, bodily constrictions and releases." He compares this to the act of walking: "The good walker should be able to change pace, stop, start, turn, step up and down, twist or stoop, easily and quickly, without losing balance or rhythm. . . . The Williams poem finds analogies for most of these movements."^[58] With this art of attention to

the changing speeds and tensions in the act of perceiving outward things as they disclose themselves, the garrulous ego and "the never-resting mind" are very much effaced. In this sense, Tomlinson's poems come close to the Chinese sense of allowing nature to "speak for itself."

Gary Snyder

Snyder's long and deep identification with Chinese culture and poetry is too well known to need recounting here. His translation of Han Shan ("Cold Mountain Poems") turned Han Shan and himself and their lifestyles into a modern legend; and the two together became a sort of popular cultural hero to college youths of the 1960s and 1970s through his fictionalization in Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums (1959).

When I met him in 1972, I asked him why he was so interested in Chinese landscape poetry. He said, "I grew up in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. When I was about 10, my parents took me to Seattle to see an exhibition of Chinese landscape paintings. I loved them instantly because these were mountains and rivers I recognized; they were as real as those I saw." The mountains he saw every day were real and alive rather than allegorical, symbolic, or artificial. This virgin contact with nature and the confirmation of this nature by Chinese landscape paintings prepared him to become one of its staunchest apologists.

Among the most ruthlessly exploited classes: Animals, trees, water, air, grasses.^[59]

So many mountains, on so clear a day, the mind is staggered. . . . From Canada to Oregon, and ranges both east and west — the blue mass of the Olympics far over hazy Puget Sound — [My companion, who is a poet, said:] "You mean there's a Senator for all this?"^[60]

Unfortunately, there isn't a senator for all that. And I would like to think of a new definition of humanism and a new definition of democracy that would include the non-human, that would have representation from those spheres. This is what I think we mean by an ecological conscience.^[61]

Gary Snyder's position is clear. If poetry speaks at all, it should speak for and from the silent but lively world outside humankind. It should be at once the voice of humanity and the voice of nature. "We must find a way . . . to incorporate the other people . . . — the

creeping people and the standing people, and the flying people and the swimming people — into the councils of government" (TI , 108). Poetry must be at once mysterious (as voices from an awe-inspiring sacramental world long lost to modern humans), aesthetic (as "a pure perception of beauty"), and moral-political (as an assertion of the rights of the nonhuman).^[62] Thus, one of Snyder's essay titles reads "The Politics of Ethnopoetics" (OW , 15).

His commitment, too, is clear: It is not the "return to nature" of armchair philosophers, nor the sublimation and glorification of self through the use of nature. It is certainly not the view of the U.S. Forest Service — "treat it right and it will make a billion board feet a year" — which sees forests as crops and scenery as recreation (EHH , 12). Snyder means a literal return to nature (or re-habitation [OW , 57]), to relearn and reexperience humankind's original relationship with the cooperative, interdependent, interdefining, interrelated, total composition of things. He means humanity's ceremonial participation in holistic communionism (RW , 39) to recover its original "natural being" (EHH , 155), so that "men, women, and children . . . follow the timeless path of love and wisdom, in affectionate company with the sky, winds, clouds, trees, waters, animals and grasses" (EHH , 116). "Gratitude to Wild Beings, our brothers, teaching secrets, / freedoms, and ways; who share with us their milk; / self-complete, brave and aware / in our minds so be it " (TI , 24).

It is no accident that his early Amerindian studies, his love for Taoism and Chinese landscape poetry, and his Ch'an Buddhist training all converge into one center of awareness where humankind becomes truly "moral" by trusting its natural being and by "following the grain" (EHH , 115). There are clear similarities among his three areas of deep interest. The primitive mode of perceiving nature is concrete, viewing things (w)holistically as self-complete (TI , 24); it was a state of total harmony between human beings and nature before polarization. On this level, it resonates with the Taoist aesthetic discussed earlier and in chapter 3. Ch'an Buddhism, Taoist-oriented, attempts to teach us, through intuition and poetry, to live and function within Nature's way. All these contributed to Snyder's complete identification with nature and made him cherish "an attitude of openness, inwardness, gratitude; plus meditation, fasting, a little suffering and some rupturing of day-to-day ties with the social fabric" (OW , 37).

Snyder's call for the retreat of the dominating ego and readjustment of humankind's relation with the "living, exciting, mysterious" phenomenal world, which continuously fills "one with a trembling

awe leaving one grateful and humble" (EHH , 123) easily led him to a kind of nonindividualistic poetry:

Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.

I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
                        "Mid-August at Sourdough
                                  Mountain Lookout"^[63]

A set of simple and unassuming images from nature, relatively free from rhetorical embellishments, open up an ambience into which the reader is invited to move about, to stop for a moment, during which the reader may expand the horizon by reflecting upon it. This is followed by a brief comment like a personal aside, but it is not a comment that would disturb the objects around him. The reader's attention is almost immediately reverted back to the original scene, which now stretches into the distance as nature acts itself out. The operative dynamics in this poem work very much like the Chinese poems both in the first part of this chapter and in chapter 2. Snyder once said: "A poet sort of faces two directions: one is to the world of people and language and society, and the tools by which he communicates his language; and the other is the non-human, non-verbal world, which is the world of nature as nature is itself, before language, before custom, before culture. There are no words in that realm."^[64] This paraphrase of the Taoist-Ch'an Buddhist idea of unspeaking, self-generating, self-conditioning nature is the best commentary on the poem just quoted. Commentary like this sometimes slips into his landscape poems, such as this passage from his "Piute Creek." Somewhere in the midst of the gorgeous landscape, the poet says:

All the junk that goes with being human
Drops away, hard rock wavers
Even the heavy present seems to fail
This bubble of a heart.
Words and books

Like a small creek off a high ledge
Gone in the dry air.

A clear, attentive mind
has no meaning but that
Which sees is truly seen.^[65]

Like Tomlinsons's title for his book of poems, Seeing Is Believing , "that which sees is truly seen" is very much like the Taoist "what we see is where the Tao resides." In many of his landscape poems, Snyder effortlessly dropped the commentary as, for example, in these two poems:

in the blue night
frost haze, the sky glows
with the moon
pine tree tops
bend snow-blue, fade
into sky, frost, starlight.
the creak of boots.
rabbit tracks deer tracks
what do we know.
             "Pine Tree Tops"

Earth a flower
a phlox on the steep
slopes of light
hanging over the vast
solid spaces
small rotten crystals;
salts.
Earth a flower
by a gulf where a raven
flaps by once
a glimmer, a color
forgotten as all
falls away.
a flower
for nothing;
an offer;
no taker;
snow-trickle, feldspar, dirt.
                       "For Nothing"^[66]

Overwhelmed by the richness of the presences of objects in nature, the poet finds himself wavering at the edge of speech. Should he

break the spell of this expressive silence and elaborate on this richness for the reader-viewer? Should he let the objects express their presences and speak for themselves? Thus, he stops short at an indecisive phrase: "what do we know." Should we read it as a question or as a statement? Nature has continually offered itself: "an offer; / no taker." Forget your mind, forget your words, there —

snow-trickle, feldspar, dirt.

there —

Fisherman's song deep into the cove.