This paper looks at the various attitudes toward nature and the city that one finds in Basho, Blake, Wordsworth, Swift and Rousseau. It also touches upon how the how the industrialization of the western world contributed to the difference between European poetry and the lyrics of Basho.
Let us start with Basho (1644-1694), JapanÆs greatest haiku poet. Regarding nature and the city, he can be compared to William Shakespeare, (1564-1616) EnglandÆs greatest dramatist, who divided his time between the busy city of London and his bucolic home in Stratford-on-Avon, Warwickshire. Like Shakespeare, the Zen poet Basho divided his time between the JapanÆs capital city of Edo (now Tokyo) and an austere simple hut five-foot square (Keene, 1996) far removed from civilization at Fukagowa. There is no doubt, especially as he got older, that he loved leaving the city and being in nature. The poetry that we find, for instance, in his best-known work, The Narrow Road of the Interior, is crammed with natural images (e.g., cherry blossoms, pines, willows, woodpeckers, nightingales, waterfalls, moonlight, mountains, fields of clover and the sea) and his affection for the natural world and all the glories that it contains shines through so very brightly in the pages of his work.
To find out what William Blake (1757-1827) believed about nature and the city one only has to turn to his poems ôAnd Did Those Feetö and ôLondonö in Songs of Innocence and Experience. In "London," this man who wanted to ôbuild Jerusalem in EnglandÆs green and pleasant landö finds only ôdark satanic mills,ö ômind-forged manacles,ö ôMarks of weakness, marks of woe,ö ôinfantÆs cry of fear,ö and ôthe youthful harlotÆs curse.ö (Knox, 1992)
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) loved nature. He was born in EnglandÆs rustic Lake District and, at 29, moved back again to spend the better part of his remaining 50 years there. In nature, Wordsworth sought solace ...