Nature Poetry (China)

Chinese nature poetry relates to two themes, first to Tianyuan (field garden), the peasant's habitat or the domestic garden sphere, and then to Shanshui (mountain water), the natural landscape. The natural poetry in China was a counterpoint to the political and courtly sphere. The Shi Jing already offers a wealth of natural images, but a real nature poetry, which also addressed the nature, originated only from the third century.

Important influences of this nature poetry are the following:

1. The topos of the hermit who flees from evil times with a noble disposition. This hermit is a Confucian topos in which wild nature is an ideal and idealized place of refuge.
2. The Taoist mysticism that nature as an expression of Dao understands. In literary terms, the journey to the Daoist immortals who live in paradises , to the real nature of the mountains and caves, changed in nature poetry .
3. The Fu of the Han period shaped later natural poetry with their long catalogs of flora and fauna and geographical descriptions. Nature appeared here as supra-personal and as a refuge for the individual.

Due to these influences, Chinese natural poetry appears both as a negation of culture, but at the same time as part of culture. For poets at court or in office, it also served as a means of stylization that is autobiographical.

The first natural poets were Xi Kang , Zuo Si , Yu Chan and Sun Chuo .

Tao Yuanming then represented the culmination of this poetry as the poet of Tian Yuan poetry.

Other poets reacted to nature as the 'spirit of the universe', who reflexively perceives it ( Liu Xie , Wenxin diaolong), as a poet of natural spontaneity ( Lu Ji , Wen Fu ), or with vinous, natural poetry. The hermit often appears as the expression of a poet who describes authentic, natural life.

The Shan Shui poetry then appears first from Xie Lingyun . Xie Lingyun's poetry appears as a philosophical concept of nature that has strong Buddhist , Daoist and Confucian influences, so that his descriptions of nature do not show any naive feeling. As a result, natural poetry appeared as the poetic standard, but poets who also wrote natural poetry were often not understood as such, for example Shen Yue , Liu Zongyuan and Lu You , because their poetry also contained different elements.

In the Tang period, the lyric was strongly influenced by the amalgamation of impression and scenery, and later famous natural poets of the Tang period are z. B. Meng Haoran , Wei Yingwu and Wang Wei , where Wang Wei is considered to be outstanding.

The Chinese natural poetry is viewed as internally contradicting, since the turning away from the world has been stylized literarily, but strictly speaking it is only apparent, as one can see in many poems that the orderly Confucian state is also an image of the natural and natural cosmic order applies.

See also

• Chinese literature
• Chinese novel
• Chinese drama
• Chinese essay
• Chinese reportage literature
• Chinese women's literature

literature

• Volker Klöpsch, Eva Müller (Ed.): Lexicon of Chinese Literature. CH Beck, Munich 2004