The Wilds of Poetry: Adventures in Mind and Landscape (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781611804607)

An exploration of the emerging Western consciousness of how deeply we belong to the wild Cosmos, as seen through the lineage of modern America's great avant-garde poets --a thrilling journey with today's premier translator of the Chinese classics.

Henry David Thoreau, in The Maine Woods, describes a moment on Mount Ktaadin when all explanations and assumptions fell away for him and he was confronted with the wonderful, inexplicable thusness of things. David Hinton takes that moment as the starting point for his account of a rewilding of consciousness in the West: a dawning awareness of our essential oneness with the world around us. Because there was no Western vocabulary for this perception, it fell to poets to make the first efforts at articulation, and those efforts were largely driven by Taoist and Ch'an (Zen) Buddhist ideas imported from ancient China. Hinton chronicles this rewilding through the lineage of avant-garde poetry in twentieth-century America--from Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound and Robinson Jeffers to Gary Snyder, W. S. Merwin, and beyond--including generous selections of poems that together form a compelling anthology of ecopoetry. In his much-admired translations, Hinton has re-created ancient Chinese rivers-and-mountains poetry as modern American poetry; here, he reenvisions modern American poetry as an extension of that ancient Chinese tradition: an ecopoetry that weaves consciousness into the Cosmos in radical and fundamental ways.

Author: David Hinton
ISBN-10: 1611804604
ISBN-13: 9781611804607
Publisher: Shambhala
Language: English
Published: 07/25/2017
Pages: 328
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 0.90d

Review Citation(s):
Foreword 09/21/2017