A Chinese Aesthetics Reading of Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey ---with a Comparison to Chunjiang Huayue Ye

Abstract

The nature poetry written by English Romantic poet Wordsworth is a milestone in English literary history. Its inbuilt aesthetics is much similar with that of ancient Chinese Mountain-Water poetry. The most remarkable aspect is the fusion of feeling and scene, in which philosophy, aesthetics, and poetics are interwoven into a thematic unity. In this perspective, one Chinese nature poem Chunjiang Huayue Ye written by early Tang Dynasty poet Zhang Ruoxu can be well compared. This mutual illumination not only yields a dialogical channel, more importantly, it also discovers the potential values of the two: first, Wordsworth’s unique aesthetical awareness is forwarded; second, it helps to globalize and modernize ancient Chinese literary theory