Taoist & Landscape Poetry

The material covered here runs from the fourth century, when landscape first became a subject in its own right, through the Tang poets whose names are attached to it, and includes the specific poetic genres that grew up around Taoist places and practitioners.

Three different things called Taoist poetry

The phrase covers at least three distinct categories and confusing them causes most of the trouble. There is verse written by ordained Taoists, often liturgical or instructional, much of it preserved in the Taoist canon and rarely read as literature. There is secular poetry that uses Taoist imagery — immortals, elixirs, cranes, grotto-heavens — as available material. And there is poetry with no Taoist vocabulary at all whose way of looking at things is close to what the Taoist texts describe.

The third category is the interesting one and the hardest to argue about, because the evidence is a quality of attention rather than a set of words. A poem that never mentions the Tao can be closer to the Zhuangzi than one that mentions it in every couplet.

Where the vocabulary came from

Two earlier bodies of writing supplied the raw material. The Zhuangzi is not verse, but it is written with a freedom of image that later poets drew on constantly: the butterfly, the useless tree that survives because it is useless, the cook whose blade finds the spaces, the great bird whose flight the small birds cannot conceive. These became fixed references that a poet could invoke in two or three characters.

The Songs of the South supplied the journey: the ascent through the heavens, the chariot of clouds, the search among divinities. When Tang poets write about immortals they are working with an idiom already a thousand years old.

The experiment that failed

In the fourth century, under the Eastern Jin, there was a vogue for what is called poetry of arcane discourse. Writers put the abstract vocabulary of the Laozi and Zhuangzi directly into verse, discussing being and non-being, the nameless, and the equality of things.

The result is generally agreed to have been dull, and later critics said so bluntly. The philosophical terms did not carry poetic weight, and the poems argued rather than showed. This failure matters because of what came out of it: poets began putting the landscape in front of the philosophy instead of stating the philosophy directly, and landscape poetry as a distinct mode emerged from the wreckage of the abstract kind.

Xie Lingyun and the arrival of landscape

Xie Lingyun, in the early fifth century, is conventionally credited with making mountains and rivers a subject rather than a setting. He was an aristocrat with large estates, he travelled into difficult terrain deliberately, and he described it with unusual specificity: particular slopes, particular water, the effort of the climb.

His poems have a recognisable structure. There is an outward journey, a passage of close description, and then a closing turn into philosophical reflection, often in the arcane vocabulary he had inherited. Later readers frequently find the descriptive middle much better than the reflective ending, and the imbalance is itself informative: the philosophy was still being appended rather than embodied.

Tao Yuanming and the other tradition

It is worth separating two modes that English discussion often merges. Landscape poetry deals with mountains and rivers, usually visited, often remote and sometimes arduous. Field-and-garden poetry deals with a farm, a village, neighbours, crops and domestic routine. Tao Yuanming founded the second.

The difference matters because the values are different. Landscape poetry tends toward the sublime and the solitary. Field-and-garden poetry is about ordinary sufficiency, and its Taoist quality, if it has one, lies in scale: enough is enough, the small is adequate, ambition is the disease. Tao's most quoted lines describe picking chrysanthemums by the eastern fence and catching sight of the southern mountain, and the whole point is that the mountain was not sought.

The recluse and the ambiguity of withdrawal

Reclusion is a convention with a complicated honesty problem. Withdrawal was admired, so it conferred reputation, and reputation could lead back to office. There was a recognised phenomenon of retiring to a famous mountain conveniently near the capital in order to be noticed, and contemporaries mocked it.

The tradition developed a distinction in response: the lesser recluse hides in the hills, the greater recluse hides in the city or at court, meaning that inward detachment matters more than physical location. This is a genuine idea and also a convenient one, since it allows a serving official to claim the prestige of withdrawal without withdrawing. Both readings are usually available and the poems rarely settle the question.

Wang Wei and the poetry of absence

Wang Wei's landscape work is the high point of the mode and it works by subtraction. The observer is present only as the thing that registers; there is often no explicit statement of feeling; the human presence is frequently marked by its trace rather than itself, a voice without a speaker, a path without a walker.

His formal affiliation was Buddhist, and his best-known series was written at an estate he owned, in exchange with a friend. The reason his work is nonetheless discussed under Taoism is that the effect it produces — the dropping away of the separating self, the world going on without needing to be interpreted — is what the Taoist texts describe, whatever route he took to it.

The visit that finds no one home

One small genre deserves attention because it recurs so often. The poet climbs to a Taoist abbey or a hermit's hut, and the master is not there. He has gone to gather herbs, he is somewhere in the clouds, the boy attendant does not know where. The poet notes the empty room, the pines, the stream, and goes back down.

Read once it is a pleasant anecdote. Read as a genre it is doing something else: the absence is the point. The sought person functions as the sought thing, and not finding him is presented not as failure but as the appropriate outcome. This is one of the places where a poetic convention and a doctrinal position line up closely.

Hanshan and the rough register

The poems attributed to Hanshan, or Cold Mountain, are a body of several hundred pieces of uncertain date and authorship, probably accumulated over a long period. They are plain to the point of roughness, mix Buddhist and Taoist reference freely, mock the ambitious and the greedy, and describe a life on a cold mountain that may be literal, allegorical or both.

Orthodox Chinese anthologies largely ignored them. They were valued in Japan, and in the twentieth century they became, through translation, among the best-known Chinese poems in English. That reversal is a useful reminder that canons are made by readers and can be remade.

Alchemy, cranes and how literally to take them

Elixirs, cinnabar, the crane that carries the immortal, the grotto-heaven, the herb-gathering that is really something else: this vocabulary is everywhere in Tang and Song verse, and it operates at several levels at once. Some poets were practising something. Some were using inherited ornament. Internal alchemy deliberately used the language of the external kind as metaphor, which means that even a technically informed reader cannot always tell which is meant.

The honest position is that individual poems usually cannot be decided, and that trying to sort them into sincere and conventional imposes a distinction the writers did not necessarily hold. A shared idiom does not require belief from everyone who uses it, and does not exclude belief either.

What to read and how

Wang Wei and Tao Yuanming survive translation well and are the natural starting points. Hanshan exists in several English versions with markedly different characters, which makes the comparison instructive. Xie Lingyun is harder and repays reading with notes.

One practical suggestion: read these poems slowly and resist the urge to extract a message. The mode depends on description that is allowed to stand without being cashed out, and summarising a Wang Wei poem is close to destroying it. If a landscape poem seems to say very little, that impression is often correct and is not a failure of the poem.

Key points

• Taoist poetry covers liturgical verse by ordained Taoists, secular poetry using Taoist imagery, and poetry whose attention resembles the Taoist texts without their vocabulary.
• Landscape poetry emerged in the fifth century out of the acknowledged failure of poems that stated Laozi and Zhuangzi philosophy directly.
• Field-and-garden poetry founded by Tao Yuanming is a separate mode from mountain-and-river poetry, and its values are sufficiency rather than the sublime.
• Reclusion carried prestige that could lead back to office, so poems of withdrawal are rarely free of ambiguity about motive.
• The genre of visiting a master and not finding him treats absence as the appropriate outcome rather than as failure.
• Alchemical vocabulary operates literally and figuratively at once, and individual poems usually cannot be sorted into sincere and conventional uses.