Biography
Sam King is a second-year M.A. student in Religion and Ecology at Yale Divinity School. He formerly taught Philosophy and Religion at The Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, CT and served as a Fulbright scholar in Sri Lanka.
Paper Abstract
In premodern Chinese poetry, many writers sought communion with place as a salve for the fraught political realities of their time. The great T'ao Ch'ien (365-427) lamented his entanglements in Six Dynasties politics, taking up refuge in a simple agrarian life in his hometown in Jiangxi province, which became the primary subject of his lyric poetry. After a period of banishment, T'ao Ch'ien's contemporary Hsieh Ling-yün (385-433) also retreated to his ancestral home on the margins of empire, drawing inspiration from the biodiversity of the surrounding Zhejiang mountains. The later T'ang Dynasty poet Han-Shan (circa 700-780) embodied an even more extreme form of asceticism by renouncing worldly life for his famous hermitage in the T'ien-t'ai mountains. These poets' visions of a pristine natural state on the margins of empire contrast with other conceptions of the natural world—particularly those of the poet Xie Tiao (464-499), who described his intimate connection to nature within the aristocratic palace of Chien-k'ang. In this paper, I argue that there is an underlying tension between conceptions of nature and culture in premodern Chinese poetry, and that the Song dynasty poet Su Shih (1037-1101) reconciles these polarities by communing with nature as both a civil servant and an exile at various times of his life. Taken together, I will highlight how these poets help us imagine place as a site of healing and transformation in the face of crisis.