ABSTRACT
The medieval era in China (approximately from the third to the sixth centuries) witnessed the rise and maturity of landscape poetry. This essay offers a few samples to demonstrate the change in Chinese attitudes toward nature as seen in the poetry of the period. Briefly stated, this change involves a process whereby wilderness is philosophically, religiously, and socially idealized. An inquiry into this process will not only deepen our understanding of the traditional Chinese conception of nature but also provide a culturally illuminating perspective from which to explore remedies for some of the serious abuses of the environment resulting from China’s economic development in the recent past. I will focus on three distinctly different, though closely related, genres of poetry in which descriptions of nature occupy a prominent position. The Chinese have traditionally termed these genres respectively as the poetry of seclusion (yinyi shi), the poetry of mountains and waters (shanshui shi), and the poetry of fields and gardens (tianyuan shi).
