Poetry & Attitudes Toward Nature

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

. . .
Some common words found in the essay are:
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Swift Rousseau, Mexico City, GulliversÆs Travels, Road Interior, Lake District, Jerusalem EnglandÆs, Edo Tokyo, Modest Proposal, Hills Groves, knox 1992, nature city, western world, difference european poetry, industrialization western world, poetry lyrics, contributed difference, difference european, european poetry, contributed difference european, world contributed, western world contributed, natural images, world contributed difference, basho industrialization,
Approximate Word count = 880
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page)

More Essays on Poetry & Attitudes Toward Nature