Pal. Jour.

, 2003, 9,1٧:٣٨
Copyright © 2003 by Palma Journal, All Rights Reserved

Preface to Lyrical Ballads, A.D. 1492:

Wordsworth’s "Meanest Flower" and Wang Yang-ming’s
"Principle of Bamboo” as the Universal jen of Romanticism

Jesse Airaudi
Baylor University, Jesse_Airaudi@baylor.edu

Abstract
As Wordsworth complained in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads of the "frantic"
and "sickly" Gothic novels of the late Eighteenth Century, so the Chinese
poet-philosopher Wang Yang-ming (b. 1472 CE) complained of the "depraved
and licentious," "superficial" and "noisy" productions of his era. Wang’s
poetry and his explanation of the poet is and what the poet does is elucidated
in Instructions for Practical Living (published posthumously in 1572)
parallels the poetry and poetics of Wordsworth: the epistemological
foundations found in the thought of both poets results in a similar deontology.
Both poets saw the dominant rationalistic philosophies of their times as false
and the cause of selfishness, malice, murder, and war. To counter "what man
has made of man," both poets counseled a return to nature, things as they were
rather than things as the rational mind "makes" them. "Original being" or
"natural piety" would free the mind and allow it to re-join the one substance or
one mind of the universe, and in its atonement (at-one-ment) "dance" in
harmony (jen) with all things would give a self-assuring, immediate spiritual
experience, rather than the promises of the revealed, conditional religions of
the time. From their belief that man and nature are one, they assumed the duty
of poets to "extend" their knowledge of the Way to the masses enslaved by
mind forged manacles. The universality of Wang Yang-ming and
Wordsworth’s natural and consequent moral philosophy, evident today in the
work of such poets as Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz, reveals the truth of the
saying that Romanticism is older, and newer, than its name.

Like the seasons of the year, like history, truth always repeats itself. --
Ameen Rihani

The universality and timelessness of jen, or "dancing" in harmony

with all things," and the "joy" upon rediscovery of the "Principle of Nature"
as an infallible guide to authenticity of experience can be verified by
comparing two poet-philosophers distant in time and place: William
Wordsworth (1770-1850), the English writer of the British Romantic Period
and the Wang Yang-ming, Chinese philosopher and poet of the 15th Century
Ming Dynasty. Westerners know well Wordsworth's revolutionary book of
poetry, the Lyrical Ballads, published in 1798, and his later detailed
explanation about the revolutionary import of those Ballads in his Preface to
the second edition of 1800. Although Wordsworth put a lifetime of
 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, A.D. 1492: ... 2

memories into a magnum opus, the famous Prelude: Or, Growth of a Poet’s
Mind (published three months after his death in 1850), the Preface of 1800 is
a living record of how an individual mind had awakened from of its captivity
and vowed to bring the rest of the world out of its darkness. Less well
known are the comparable works of Wang Yang-ming, his surviving poetry,
but particularly his works assembled by his disciples as the Instructions for
Practical Living (Ch'uan-hsi lu). Together, the seemingly disparate writers
reveal an astonishing grasp of the causes of human malice and error, and
propose a remarkably similar poetic "rescue" of humankind, or as Master
Wang taught, to "save those who are drowning." 1 Direct quotation in this
study is employed to reveal the remarkable consistency in thought and tone
of these two poet-philosophers despite the fact that they lived centuries apart
on opposite sides of the globe, and frequent reference to other of the British
Romantic poets who acknowledged Wordsworth as their philosophical
leader further reveals the importance of Wang and Wordsworth’s thought.
Finally, an examination of one of the world’s foremost poets, the Nobel-
Laureate Czeslaw Milosz, will reveal the universality and timelessness of
Wang and Wordsworth’s thought in contemporary terms.
In 1492 by the Western calendar, the twenty-year-old Wang Yang-
ming made an earth-shaking discovery, not of a continent or a "new" race of
people as did Christopher Columbus in that year, but of bamboo. He did not
discover anything new and "innovative" about it at all. It had been well-
described and classified botanically, nor did Wang (b. 1472 CE) find any
new use to which bamboo could be put. But his discovery was revolutionary
not only in the usual sense that it was the announcement of something new, a
metaphorical "shot heard round the world," but in the root sense of a return
to a starting place, a complete 360-degree re-volution, as in the turn of a fly-
wheel. In this sense of the word, Wang Yang-ming’s "manifesto" is not a
"published document that aspires to be an event . . . in some sense at
marking a fresh start," which "implies a rejection of older attitudes," whose
"hallmark is a self-conscious air of innovation."2 Wang's true revolution was
actually a protest against such "innovation." The further and further
"segregations" between the things being investigated, say, bamboo tree from
palm tree, but bamboo leaf from bamboo branch, and most disconcerting of
all, to a radical separation between the investigator and the things he was
investigating. This startling flash of discovery was the dawn of Wang Yang-
ming's conviction that his civilization was "declining" because of a new-
fangled, false way of knowing, a "cleavage" between the self and the world
beginning with "dissection" and ending in "murder" on a large scale. As had
Wordsworth, who speaks of the limitations of "the Man of Science," Wang
Yang-ming realized that, in fact, "innovation" was obscuring a profoundly
live-giving old truth, precisely in the way that Husserl in our time would
 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, A.D. 1492: ... 3

charge in his famous Die Krisis that an erroneous way of thinking was the
cause of civilization's sickness in the twentieth century. 3 Wordsworth’s
early poetry and philosophy, and that of the other poets of what later became
known as the British “Romantic” School, claimed as much a century and
more earlier. Much earlier yet, Wang Yang-ming discovered the same error
when he awakening to the mind-shattering fact that no thing could be
properly understood by his master Chu Hsi's empirical investigative
methods.
By 1492, Chu’s new school instruction in "innovative" systems of
division and classification of things based upon their differences were
rapidly replacing the ancient Confuscian doctrine of the investigation of
things themselves (ko-wu). With the same sense of urgency that
Wordsworth felt in his day, Wang set out to reveal the error of such
reasoning, and to re-establish an ancient, universal way of thinking to rescue
his sick civilization. Wang Yang-ming's teaching on the innovative
deformations of primary human nature, that is, the mind in accord and not
"segregated" from nature, and his "rectifications" (ko) as Wang called his
attempts to return to original harmony with nature, 4 were copied down by
his pupils and only published after his death. Those Instructions for
Practical Living are an uncanny and instructive parallel to Wordsworth's
deep uneasiness with "Our meddling intellect," that erroneous use of our
faculties which "mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things," a concern which
Wordsworth took pains to define in the Preface to the Second Edition of
Lyrical Ballads as a "secondary" way of thinking as opposed to the originary
or primary function of the poetic Imagination. Both Wang’s and
Wordsworth’s conviction that human nature and the nature of even the
smallest thing are a "singleness" is unshakable, affirmed by the power of
deeply felt conviction rather than rational thought. Wang says that the "true
secret" of being cannot be "penetrated through intelligence or intellectual
understanding," but as a function of the will, as "seeing as" with the
"Imagination" which, as Wordsworth says not only "modifies and endows"
but "shapes and creates." 5 Wang believed that the Neo-Confucians
beginning with the Sung-era teacher Chu Hsi made and promulgated the
error of taking a mere method for true being; they had confused naming or
labeling things with real substance. By the end of the Fifteenth Century C.E.,
Wang Yang-ming had mounted a protest, pointing out the rationalistic Neo-
Confucians reputation for "destroying later generations by means of
learning." 6 The "later generations" of scholars, Wang charged, were said to
be ignorantly "taking a thief to be a son." 7 Despite being so "self-confident
and self-satisfied" that they were fruitful in their investigations, Wang says
of them that they are "really like an owl that has stolen the rotten carcass of a
rat!" 8 Yet Wang did not disparage intellectual study or the empirical
 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, A.D. 1492: ... 4

method, except when it claimed to be the single way of seeing nature and
humanity. He gives the empiricist his due: "I do not mean to neglect the
names, varieties, and systems of things completely," but "I merely point out
that if we know that first things must come first, then we can approach the
Way." 9 In the Preface, Wordsworth speaks well of the classifying "Man of
science" but, like Wang, puts the emphasis on first things first, or things as
they are, unclassified and unlabeled, and only in their relationship to us and
not in their use to us. In the Preface, Wordsworth "Poetry is the breath and
finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the
countenance of all Science." 10 However, when Science claims its
investigative results to be radical knowledge, both Wordsworth and Wang
protest the deformation.
From the point of this discovery in 1492 until his death in 1529, Wang
investigated the radical cause of the great disorder rapidly spreading from
mind to mind. He found symptoms of the "disease" (as he called it) in the
literature of the time, a sure sign of a fundamental shift in the mind of "the
people" into a false, secondary way of thinking, a "doubleness," as he called
it, 11 echoing Wordsworth’s distinction elaborated in the 1815 Preface of the
integrating faculty of the imagination versus the segregating function of
scientific analysis. 12 Compare Wordsworth, as he writes in the second book
of The Prelude:

. . . No officious slave
Art thou of that false secondary power
By which we multiply distinctions, then
Deem that our puny boundaries are things
That we perceive, and not that we have made. 13

to Wang's similar lines about multiplying distinctions and falling into error:

The soundless, odorless moment of solitary self-knowledge

Contains the ground of Heaven, Earth, and all beings.
Foolish is he who leaves his inexhaustible treasure,
With a bowl, moving from door to door, imitating the beggar. 14

This echo of Wordsworth’s "we have given our hearts away" is also
present in Wang’s prayer-poem for his disciples "On the Departure Home of
My Disciples" in which he Wang speaks of those who bartered away their
living (that is, deeply feeling and connected) hearts in exchange for a
segregating, obscuring way of thinking: their false hearts "are like mirrors in
the mud,/ Enclosing the light within the darkness./ Dust and dirt, once
removed, / The mirror will reflect the beautiful and the ugly." 15 Further, the
 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, A.D. 1492: ... 5

lines suggests Wang’s insistence that the verification of recovery of the

"original" mind signaled by joy will not exclude things as they are, as all
things are, ourselves included, which participate necessarily in inescapable
suffering and pain. Thus both poet-philosophers challenge humankind's fear-
driven tendency to fable away the facts of mutability: "The Teacher said,
'Innate knowledge is same as changes," 16 and a student records Wang's
teaching on the necessity of change and the inevitability of sorrow, insisting
that the deepest sorrow reveals the greatest harmony with all things, jen: on
the death of a parent, the master insists that there is "real joy only if the son
has cried bitterly," that joy means "in spite of crying, one's mind is at peace"
because the original substance of the mind has not been perturbed." 17 This
embracing of loss, the inextricable union of opposites, is for both Wang and
Wordsworth a necessary step to the humility that will lead to compassion
("commiseration" is Wang's usual term) and a love of all things. As Wang
taught, "At bottom Heaven and Hell and all things are in my body. Is there
any suffering or bitterness of the great masses that is not disease or pain in
my own body? Those who are not aware of the disease and pain in their
own bodu are people without the sense of right and wrong. 18 " In this way is
the jen or harmony of the one mind finally achieved. But not without, as
Wordsworth says in the Preface, an acceptance of life in its "infinite
complexity of pain and pleasure." 19
Beyond their concern for the individual mind falling into error, Wang
Yang-ming and Wordsworth decried the general social decline caused by
wrong thinking they saw everywhere. This second concern becomes the
motive for both poets' deontology, the starting point for their social
philosophies which attempts to answer the question, Now that I have
liberated myself from the error, what must I do to free others still in
captivity? Wordsworth continually revised Prelude, Or Growth of a Poet's
Mind up to the time of his death, hoping to derive from his own growth a set
of instructions for rectifying the horrific effects of a world in the grip of
error. Wang devoted his life to cultivating disciples to continue his teachings
which uncovered the great deformation and his hopes of rectification. Both
saw the first step in criticism, because the arts "witnessed" the problem.
According to Wang Yang-ming, the "reason the world is not in order is
because superficial writing is growing and concrete practice is declining.
People advance their own opinions, valuing what is novel and strange, in
order to mislead the common folks and gain fame [by] . . . competing in
conventional writing and flowery compositions in order to achieve fame;
they no longer remember that there are such deeds as honoring the
fundamental, valuing truth, and returning to simplicity and purity. All this
trouble was started by those who wrote [extensively and superficially]." 20 I
quote Wang at length to show the striking similarity to Wordsworth not only
 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, A.D. 1492: ... 6

in idea but in word choice. The phrase "valuing what is novel and strange"
echoes Wordsworth's diatribe against the Gothic thrillers of his day, those
"frantic novels" (as he called them) "sickly and stupid," along with "deluges
of idle and extravagant stories in verse," a consequence of a "degrading thirst
after outrageous stimulation" and "a craving for extraordinary incident," the
product (he concludes) of a tendency "unknown to former times" of life and
manners [to which] the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the country
have conformed themselves." The "most effective of these causes are the
great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing
accumulation of men in cities, and the uniformity of their occupations"
according to Wordsworth, 21 which Wang too lamented as evident in Chinese
poetry and theatrical exhibitions of his day. Wang instructs his students that
"later generations" have forgotten to compose both music and verse in
accord with innate knowledge, and that to "return people's customs to
simplicity and purity, we must take the theatrical music of today, eliminate
all the depraved and licentious words and tunes, and keep only the stories ...
so that everyone among the simple folk can easily understand, and their
innate knowledge can unconsciously be stimulated into operation.” Wang
similarly decried the "superficial" and "noisy" speeches of his day and the
"conventional, meaningless literature" of the day, echoing Wordsworth’s
dismay at the "sickly and stupid," "frantic," "idle and extravagant" literature
of his time. Wang, like Wordsworth, laments for “what man has made of
man.” In the Instructions, he writes that when "all people are in the depths
of merriment, I alone weep and lament, and when the whole world happily
runs [after "erroneous doctrines"], I alone worry with an aching heart and a
knit brow. Either I have lost my mind or there must surely be a great grief
hidden away in the situation. Who except the most humane in the world can
understand it?" 22
The recovery of the "joy" that is "characteristic of the original
substance of the mind” 23 is the proof that the mind has (1) dissolved the false
productions of the ratio-making faculty, (2) has apprehended things as they
are, and (3) has joined with all other things in unity. In the Instructions,
Wang teaches that when the error of dividing things is dissolved in the mind
and the connectedness of all things makes its appearance, "Truly nothing can
be equal to this. If people can recover it in its totality without the least
deficiency, they will surely be gesticulating with hands and feet. I don’t
know if there is anything in the world happier than this." 24 Similarly, in one
of his most powerful lyrics, "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," Wordsworth
traces the creative Imagination as it moves from merely what the poet "saw"
early in the poem to a state where he "gazed--and gazed--," and finally to the
moment recorded at the end of the poem where, in tranquility, the mind-
framed barrier between poet and things dissolved, his "heart with pleasure
 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, A.D. 1492: ... 7

fill,/ And dances with the daffodils." 25 Such "overbalance of enjoyment," as

Wordsworth terms it in the Preface, is paramount for both as signaling the
return of the "primal sympathy" and proof of the universal authenticity of
knowing immediately. “Pleasure” is central to his epistemology, and is the
basis of his poetics of rectification: "The Poet writes under one restriction
only, namely, that of the necessity of giving immediate pleasure to a human
Being possessed of that information which may be expected from him, not as
a lawyer, a physician, a mariner, an astronomer or a natural philosopher, but
as a Man. Except this one restriction, there is no object standing between the
Poet and the image of things...." 26 Likewise, Wang states that the jen is
common to all humans, no matter who they may be, and it the duty of the
one whose mind awakens to the oneness of all things to free others. 27
That part of the task of linking to things as they are -- not what we
label them -- in order to experience jen, Wang calls "trying," that is, human
experience as a matter of the will, as "seeing as" lovely and alive and not
seeing things as objects apart from us, and so dead. 28 "Trying" is an act of
human will, and Wang taught that the trying begins with an "honest effort"
to reduce the error of the classifying mind "even a little bit." 29 Further, this
act of will is intrinsically wound up with feeling, and since, as Wordsworth
says, "objects . . . immediately excite in him sympathies which . . . are
accompanied by an overbalance of enjoyment,” 30 the poet wills toward the
beautiful and, what is the same thing, the true. The Wang Yang-ming scholar
Chang Chung-yuan notes that “trying” is “intrinsically evaluative [and] the
evaluation involved incorporates a specific kind of feeling," and elsewhere
in his reports from the ground-breaking meeting of East-West scholars a few
decades ago, Chang similarly emphasized that while “The ‘reality’ of
original mind is what Wang Yang-ming called liang-chih, or original
knowledge.…, Wang Yang-ming felt that the fulfillment of the function of
the mind required something more, which he expressed in the three
following statements: ‘to be good or to be evil is the action of the will. To
know good or to know evil is original knowledge. To do good or to remove
evil is the reification of the mind.’ In other words, the achievement of liang-
chih, in the highest ontological sense, is not entirely free from ethical
discriminations and conceptualization.” 31
Just as there is no real distinction between active "trying" and poetic
"saying" ("singing"), there is none between the "poet" and the "philosopher,"
except in the sequence of trying and saying for either Wang or Wordsworth.
As Wang puts it, the disciple learns the secret of innate, unmediated
("immediate" in Wordsworth’s explanation 32 ) knowledge by sweeping away
false, "secondary" knowledge. "Sweeping away" is the operative metaphor:
when the student would invariably ask how the Way was to be discovered,
the teacher would hold up a "dust-whisk," 33 a rectification echoing
 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, A.D. 1492: ... 8

Wordsworth’s praise in the Prelude for "thee, unblinded by these formal

arts,/ [to whom] The unity of all hath been revealed." 34 (II, lines 220-21).
That is the first step in the sequence, an act of will to prevent the ratio-
making mind take hold of things themselves, and so distort them into
categories and other mere divisions of methodology. 35 The joy or jen is the
"dancing" of the spirit in harmony with things; it is the realization or
awakening to the truth that "Man is the mind of the universe," that "The
mind is one. That is all." 36 But it is not "saying" or "singing" quite yet.
Knowing the Principle of Nature is the same as feeling what is the right way
of seeing things; the "saying" part is simply a matter of time, according to
Wang’s teaching: "The substance and function of the mind cannot be
equated with its tranquil and active states. Tranquility and activity are
matters of time ... the mind is revealed through its tranquility and its function
through activity." 37 Elsewhere in the Instructions, Wang states that "The
cultivation of the personal life is the part after the feelings are aroused,
whereas the rectification of the mind is the part before the feelings are
aroused. If the mind is rectified, there will be equilibrium. If the personal life
is cultivated, there will be harmony," 38 an early account of the phenomenon
Wordsworth later elucidated as "emotion recollected in tranquility" 39 in the
Preface, and that he "says" or "sings" in the activity of making a poem such
as "I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud":

I gazed—and gazed—but little thought

What wealth the shew to me had brought:
For oft when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the Daffodils. 40

Though not distinguishing "trying" and "saying" except as matters of

time, and paralleling Wordsworth’s elucidation of the "legislative" role of
the poet "singing a song in which all human beings join with him," 41 Wang
taught that "Singing is the prolongation of that expression," the application
of knowledge of primal things to some medium, called by the ancients, li
(literally, "working in jade’). He adds, "When did the ancients seek [the
pure original notes] outside?" 42 --an echo of Shelley’s understanding of the
poet’s "saying" as making "vitally metaphoric" language. 43
Shelley’s elucidation points up the parallel between Nineteenth-
Century Romanticism’s definition of poetry and the social role of the poet to
Wang’s teaching. Their words differ, but the apprehension of the error’s
 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, A.D. 1492: ... 9

wide-spread consequences is identical for both Wordsworth and his Chinese

counterpart. Wang taught that people see "the myriad things" as separate,
and their relations "oppose and injure one another," and thus they "cannot
get rid of the feeling of mutual separation and rivalry." Persisting in this
error of "fragmentation" or investigating things like bamboo as "isolated
details and broken pieces," Wang continues, how can people regard "the
great multitude and the myriad things as one body?" he asks. "No wonder,"
he adds, "the world is confused and calamity and disorder endlessly succeed
each other." 44 And no wonder, the world is too much with us, as
Wordsworth would write centuries later in his famous sonnet, and in
“Tintern Abbey” of that world with its "evil tongues,/ Rash judgments . . .
sneers of selfish men … greetings where no kindness is," and "all the dreary
intercourse of daily life.” The effects of false reasoning caused Wang Yang-
ming to ask in horror if the "erroneous doctrines" of his predecessors could
"destroy truth and violate moral standards to such a high degree as to be
capable of destroying the world?" 45 – an echo of the contemporary Blakean,
Czeslaw Milosz’s “global” concerns, as will be explored later in this study of
“universal Romanticism.”
As the witticism goes, there is no such thing as a hopeless Romantic,
and neither Wang nor Wordsworth was content to play the role of morose
complainers. In the larger moral sense, that is, in the role of poet as
unacknowledged legislator of the world, both championed poetry in the
service of humanity. As Wordsworth writes of the poet in the Preface to
Lyrical Ballads, "He is the rock of defence of human nature; an upholder and
preserver, carrying everywhere with him relationship and love. In spite of
difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and
customs, in spite of things silently gone out of mind and things violently
destroyed, the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire
of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time.” 46
That is to say, there is a further dimension to attaining joy-jen; both
Wordsworth and Wang use such terms as "duty," "obligation," "task" in their
writing. Wang wrote that, first of all, knowledge of true being must be felt
through lived experience, the "true human condition," and that this was the
"setting in which one's humane nature forces moral responses to events." 47
Certainly, the task begins with changing the hearts of men, as Shelley would
later write, in order to change institutions, and though the beginning is a
personal achievement, both Wang and Wordsworth trusted the end would be
gloriously liberating for their societies. In "Lines Written in Early Spring,"
Wordsworth gives the relationship between the "priest" of nature who sees
correctly and those who, as Wang would say, are suffering because of the
error of the empiricists and disciples of classification: "To her fair works did
Nature link/ The human soul that through me ran;/ And [therefore] much it
 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, A.D. 1492: ... 10

grieved my heart to think/ What man has made of man." 48 He who studies
and applies mere instrument knowledge, the "dregs" of experience as Wang
called them, and so muddy the "clear, shining mind" of the "original
substance" of human nature as it shares the essence of primal nature,
becomes "so self-confident and self-satisfied" that he will "destroy things,
kill members of his own species, and ... in extreme cases, he will even
slaughter his own brothers." And when many men engage in such studies
and act upon them so arrogantly, he predicts, "the humanity that forms one
body will disappear completely." 49 Though Wang lamented piteously what
man had made of man, he had within him what Wordsworth in the
"Intimations Ode" calls "a sense of the indomitableness of the spirit within
me," and relies upon the promise of jen returning through the exercise of his
linked human nature. Or at least he is sustained in the belief that his disciples
will "save those who are drowning,” 50 reversing the effects of the great error,
and (like Shelley's Prometheus when unbound), return the world to its
golden age. Wordsworth’s hope--expressed in the "Intimations Ode" as "O
joy! that in our embers/ Is something that doth live,/ That nature yet
remembers/ What was so fugitive!" 51 which may, as the poet’s mind grows,
become the basis for the "philosophic mind" as it sympathizes with the "still,
sad music of humanity" is also Wang Yang-ming’s hope and achievement:
"The man of humanity regards Heaven and Earth and all things as one body.
If a single thing is deprived of its place, it means that my humanity is not yet
demonstrated to the fullest extent." 52
The Poet, as Wordsworth writes in the Preface, is the "upholder and
preserver" of the innate knowledge, and not as a man different in kind but in
degree; that is, as Wang writes, the person who is "the most humane in the
world." To repeat an important similarity, Wang's dual insight into (1) the
recovery of jen, the one mind of humanity and all things signaled by the
dance of joy, as well as the insistence on (2) "working it in jade" so that
others could profit from his experience, is the basis for a Romantic
deontology. Knowing what we know to be true, how should we act? Wang
and Wordsworth would answer, in the Chinese teacher’s dictum, as if the
entire world depended on it, bodies as well as souls, because "the substance
and the task are one." 53 Wang's is a doctrine of transference as opposed to
transcendence, not a linear progress to some here-after, but a return or
revolution into the eternal here-and-now of nature, as Wang taught his pupil,
Lu Ch’eng, and to preserve the peculiarly “Romantic” tone of Wang’s
teaching, his words bear quoting at length:

Take those people today who talk about Heaven. Do they

actually understand it? It is incorrect to say that the sun, the moon,
wind, and thunder constitute Heaven. It is also incorrect to say that
 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, A.D. 1492: ... 11

man, animals, and plants do not constitute it. Heaven is the Way. If we
realize this, where is the Way not to be found? People look at it from
one corner and conclude that the Way is nothing but this or that.
Consequently they disagree. If one knows how to search for the Way
inside the mind and to see the substance of one's own mind, then there
is no place nor time where the Way is not to be found. It pervades the
past and present and is without beginning or end. 54

The doctrine is especially Wordsworthian because it insists on a

religio (re-tying) to nature. Like Wordsworth who taught "natural piety" as
opposed to revealed system religion in such poems as "My Heart Leaps Up
When I Behold”, Wang taught that Buddhist escape from the cycle of nature
or Taoists attempts at everlasting life were misguided. Like the Romantic
quest, Wang's philosophy offered his disciples of a different kind of eternity,
one that had nothing to do with any contradictory "hereafter" but which was
right at hand, one decisive step away, or as Keats wrote, a system of
salvation which does not affront our reason and humanity. 55 These are
revolutionary, fighting words East and West, whether spoken at the end of
the Fifteenth Century or the Eighteenth. Romantic poets were exiled or self-
exiled for real or perceived blasphemy, and the same fate could have
befallen Wang Yang-ming. A letter (collected in a volume called The Great
Learning) to a Chinese high official shows Wang defending himself from
what Wordsworth would have to defend himself, a kind of false
“pantheism”:

Your Honor is skeptical about my theory of the investigation of

things because you undoubtedly believe that it affirms the internal and
rejects the external; that it is entirely devoted to self-examination and
introspection . . . that it submerges itself in the extremes of Buddhist
and Taoist lifeless contemplation, emptiness and silence. . . . If that
were really the case, it would not only be a crime against the
Confucian school and Master Chu Hsi; it would be a perverse doctrine
to delude the people and a rebellious teaching to violate truth, and I
should be punishable by death from all. 56

Wang’s defense of his teaching here is firmly (and Romantically, we

might say) "cyclical" and not falsely transcendent or conditional. Keats’s
way of putting it more imagistically was that since a "THING of beauty is a
joy forever" and "its lovliness increases; it will never/ Pass into
nothingness"; "Therefore, on every morrow are we wreathing/ A flowery
band to bind us to the earth." 57 Likewise, the passage about "perverse
doctrine" to "delude the people" is a defense of Wang’s program to teach the
 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, A.D. 1492: ... 12

masses about the error and to work toward its rectification. Upon winning
the battle of "trying," with its reward of "resolution and independence,"
Wordsworth, too, knew that his duty lay in "singing" the unity he had won,
and not only in joyful celebration, but as an example to help others to free
themselves from the results of the great error Blake famously called
mankind’s "mind-forg’d manacles." Beyond literary examples, of course,
there is the more “real-world” revolutionary sans culotte-ist program of
Liberté of the French Revolution. But neither Wordsworth nor Wang forgot
that such social-political revolution for liberty, fraternity, and equality must
be based upon the mind’s original rectification and Imaginative certainty; the
winning of certitude signaled by jen did not permit a rapturous solipsism but
urged an application to human relationships and action. The "growth of a
poet’s mind" led to the "philosophic mind," the awareness of primal
"relationship,” "Not for these ["delight and liberty, the simple creed of
childhood"], I raise/ The song of thanks and praise;/ But for those obstinate
questionings/ Of sense and outward things,' and further to the moral
dimension of "love": "We will … find/ Strength in what remains behind, / In
the primal sympathy … / In years that bring the philosophic mind." 58 Wang
Yang-ming taught compassion and duty beyond the rescued self as well.
Speaking to his disciples, he pointed out the "selfishness" of the later-
Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian "one-sided" error: "Merely to talk about
manifesting the clear character and not to talk about loving the people would
be to behave like Taoists and Buddhists." Similarly, of Mo Tzu’s teaching
of "universal love" which "makes no distinction between human relations,"
and is not "extended to humaneness to all people and love to all things,"
Wang notes (recalling to Western readers the parable of the mustard seed
which grows into a mighty tree whose branches offer shelter for all creatures
of the world) that since his master Mencius’s "universal love" extends no
trunk, branches and leaves,” it follows “that Mo Tzu’s universal love has no
starting point. It does not sprout. We therefore know that is that no root and
that it is not a process of unceasing production and reproduction. How can it
be called humanity?" 59
For Wordsworth, of course, rectification in the form of “resolution and
independence” carries a similar burden of humane "extension," for if the
error is rectified in the self and joy is attained, yet the world suffers
needlessly. In Wang’s terms, all would be "drowned" if not for the extension
of the jen to the people. The result of individual "Trying" compels "saying."
As Wordsworth succinctly puts it "The Tables Turned," "Sweet is the lore
which nature brings;/ Our meddling intellect/ Mis-shapes the beauteous
forms of things;/ -- We murder to dissect." 60 Thus, the "extension," from "a
man pleased with his own passions and volitions," to one "delighting to
contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of
 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, A.D. 1492: ... 13

the Universe," naturally feel compelled to serve others as the sage who
"binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society,
as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time." 61 As Shelley would
characterize the heroic "sayers" on humankind’s behalf, they not only
"measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a
comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit," they "are the trumpets which sing
to battle…." 62
Wang taught the deontological principle we now take to be Romantic,
Revolutionary, and Democratic -- and even "Modern"): after freeing one’s
self from the mind-forged manacles, it is our duty to free others: "After
several years of effort," Wang’s disciple Huang I-Fang reported, "I began to
see that the original substance and the task are one", and he taught that the
"way of learning is none other than to find the lost mind," and further, that
the way of civilization is to impart this to "the people." Huang learned from
"the Teacher" the radical Romantic lesson about the growth of a poet’s mind,
"The various steps from the investigation of things and the extension of
knowledge to the bringing of peace to the world are nothing but manifesting
the clear character.” 63
To put the "esemplastic" dissolution of error and movement into unity
into Blakean terms, when we stop beholding the universe as our "Creation,"
"Eternity" will appear. At this moment of at-one-ment, or Blakean
"Resurrection into Unity," we will not be able to name what we experience,
but will feel the oneness, the harmony of all things and particpate in the
dance which authenticates the experience. As noted above, if the "sayers"
will bring the "path of attainment" of "the Way" to all the people, according
to Wang Yang-ming, "heaven" will manifest itself, here and now, a parallel
to perhaps the greatest Romantic expression in Wordsworth’s time, that
fully-realized or "said" "Intimations of Immortality," Shelley’s Prometheus
Unbound. There, original human nature is brought into accord with primal
nature, portrayed in Romantic Myth by the re-union of Prometheus, or "the
fore-thinker," and Asia, original light and love. The result, the return of the
Golden Age of unity, does not banish pain and death, for the chaos of the
"Orphic song" in Act IV must remain if nature is to do its destructive-
creative work. Wang’s teaching, unlike the Buddhist promise of escape from
the natural cycles of life and death, is in accord with Nineteenth Century
Romanticism in this regard. Wang’s teaching also assumed that though the
cycles would not, could not, disappear, that fear (which is very different than
the terror which is a function of the sublime and itself a part of "pleasure,"
"joy," and jen) would vanish from the mind. The "tryers" would share their
"relationship" with all people, and thus "love" would banish selfishness,
malice, hatred, and murder, as the masque scene of Act IV of Prometheus
 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, A.D. 1492: ... 14

Unbound "says." 64 In this sense, Wang's "sayers" are the true, though too-
often unacknowledged, legislators of the world.
Like Wordsworth's insistence on "natural piety," and later
"philosophic mind," Wang Yang-ming's instruction is a philosophy for living
a real life, or, as he puts it, a "practical" life, as the title of his collected
teachings, Instructions for Practical Living attests. The Instructions counsel
a life led without illusions about the heavens, especially if conditions are
attached, or with false secondary knowledge about the things of the earth.
Coming to know beyond words or tears "the meanest flower" that blooms or
the "Principle of Bamboo," the disciple whose life is devoted to the single
task of "trying" and "saying" can, in a flash, make a right-angle turn into
eternity, here and now, self-assuredly and not fearfully wagering upon some
promised, highly-conditional here-after. As one of Wang’s disciples noted,
"The Buddhists lure people into their way of life by the promise of escape
from the cycle of life and death, and the Taoists who seek immortality do so
with the promise of everlasting life." 65 The "rationalistic Confucianism" of
the time noted in the editor’s introduction to the Instructions 66 ) was equally
misleading, "progressively stupider and still more stupid segregations" as
Pound would later say. 67 As William Blake's 18th Century characterization
has it, whereas "Deceit" is always cautious and lawful, arbitrary and blind to
all but self-interest, and so forges "fetters for the mind." "Love," however, is
always inclined to "joy," and seeks to break "all chains from every mind." 68
Love and its assurance of authenticity, akin to the Buddhist "spiritual seal"
is, of course, Wordsworth’s definition of the poet, different only in degree
from other men in his "trying," that is, his "seeking everywhere relationship
and love," and in his "saying" as the "rock of defence of human nature." 69
The contemporary reader may raise the objection, a common one in
regard to comparative studies, that the comparison of cultures far distant in
time and place cannot yield significant insights for present-day inquiry.
There can be no better answer to such an objection than that given nearly
thirty years ago at the East-West Philosophers' symposium on the fifth
centenary anniversary of Wang Yun-ming's birth, when, happily, Ronald
Moore reported then no evidence of Western influence on Wang Yang-ming
(or vice-versa) has surfaced. 70 Nor has recent scholarship uncovered any;
studies presented to that organization since that time and published in various
journals continue to cite “affinities” and parallels which admirably elucidate
and further the phenomenological enterprise (for instance the continued work
of A. S. Cua on Wang’s characterization of “liang-chih” and problems that
arise from it; Philip J. Ivanhoe findings that Wang’s philosophy parallels
Western “traditional” philosophies -- and Henry G. Skaja’s counter-finding
that Wang’s teachings more closely resemble Western Pragmatism; Haup
Young Kim’s book-length study of Karl Barth as “dialogue” between Wang’s
 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, A.D. 1492: ... 15

Confucianism and Christianity, and so on), 71 none has so far uncovered

direct connections.
Thus barred “from the laborious pursuit of historical connections by
this fact, whoever seeks to use Wang Yang-ming and Western thought to
illuminate each other is obliged therefore to engage in techniques of
comparison which are more purely philosophic than historigraphic.” Ronald
Moore’s report on the panel discussion, "Wang Yang-ming and Western
Thought" continues, “Instead, we may ask how Wang's insights and Western
insights may cooperate toward the resolving of general, wide-ranging, and
more profound philosophic problems. Indisputably, these are questions and
issues which are so basic to the philosophic enterprise that they arise
wherever philosophy is practiced.” Especially concerned with "naming" and
"reality" issues, phenomenology’s “communication with Chinese
philosophy,” Moore asserted back then, will be of vital importance “because
both phenomenology and Chinese philosophy pay close attention to the
studies of the value of Man in existence.” Moore’s survey concluded by
predicting that “comparative study . . . will be a great convergency of eastern
culture and western culture in the development of world history.” 72
The study of Wang Yun-ming and Wordsworth and other Romantics
finds the two traditions not to be "mere historical objects" but "vital
possibilities," to use Moore's words. As evidence of this, students today
seem to all but worship the famous poet and Nobel Laureate Seamus
Heaney, and consider him of their time, and therefore are surprised to hear
him quote Wordsworth in a video-taped interview in which Heaney speaks
of the contemporary poet’s "responsibility to confront the grievous facts of
what man has man of man." 73 Perhaps after reading Wan Yang-ming’s
Instructions, students would no longer be surprised to see the universality of
the epistemology underlying that statement, and the necessity of acting upon
it. Indeed, today’s students have had many chances to become acquainted
with Romantic "trying" and "saying" from the likes of Heaney and of fellow
Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz, a great favorite of students, it appears from
his campus visits and the general prevalence of his little pocket-sized book,
A Roadside Dog. But few know of Blake’s influence on the Nobel
Laureate’s early and later poetry, and that, from The Captive Mind to his
latest poems, Milosz is "saying" a Romantic idea (in the sense that Coleridge
uses the term as the aim of something). Like Wordsworth, who said he
"never cared a straw about the theory," but felt compelled to write the
Preface to the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, Milosz grudgingly composed
The Witness of Poetry, for the Charles Eliot Norton lectures 1981-1982,
published in 1983, which he prefaced by saying that poets are not the people
to write such books. Nevertheless, he continues, since more books about
poetry are read these days than books of poetry ("This is not a good sign," he
 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, A.D. 1492: ... 16

says), he feels compelled to show that we do not witness poetry; "it

witnesses us." And the news is not good, he reports. Echoing Wang and
Wordsworth, Milosz illustrates amply that literary productions in our time
are "primarily used to debase man.” 74 The reasons he gives for the
debasement are identical to those discovered by Wang and Wordsworth, and
a few brief examples, necessarily directly quoted from the poet, will suffice
to show the similarity in the substance and tone of most of Milosz writings
on this subject to Wang and Wordsworth. From The Witness of Poetry:

It is much the same thing with the vulgarized scientific

Weltanshauung propagated by the schools. The analogy is not perfect,
since it is much more difficult to image the means able to counter an
already universalized way of thinking than to devise measures against
the pollution of rivers and lakes. Nevertheless, there are signs that
allow us to expect a basic transformation at the very source, which
means that technological civilization may begin to see reality as a
labyrinth of mirrors, no less magical than the labyrinth seen bu
alchemists and poets. That would be a victory for William Blake and
his Divine Arts of Imagination’—but also for the child in the poet, a
child too long trained by adults. 75

The reference to Blake shows the Eighteenth-Century link between

Wang and Milosz, as well: "The Spectre is the Reasoning Power in Man, and
when separated/ From Imagination and closing itself as in steel in a ratio/ Of
the things of Memory, It thence frames Laws and Moralities/ To destroy
Imagination, the Divine Body, by Martyrdoms and Wars,” as Blake
famously wrote. As his disciple, Milosz believes that we are thus today
trapped in a "Land of Ulro" (the title of a polemical/critical book by Milosz),
and the consequences for humanity are dire: "I was, it could be feared, a
potential executioner. Every man is whose 'I' is grounded in a scientific way
of thinking" 76
Wang Yang-ming, and Wordsworth, feared as much. But, as we have
seen, both attempted a heroic rescue of the people of their times, as Milosz is
doing today. His words from Visions from San Francisco Bay, in a chapter
revealing entitled "A Certain Illness Difficult to Name," bear repeating at
some length:

An irreversible process or, at the very lest, nearly irreversible,

and it is now joined by the illnesses already well-known in America or
rather with the one illness that spawns the others. This is more than
loneliness, for it also includes estrangement from oneself and those
close to one. Let it be called alienation, though that misused word has
 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, A.D. 1492: ... 17

ceased to have any meaning at all. Before this process is finished,

there will be half measures, partial realizations, flights into rhetoric. If
so, then it truly is a privilege to live in California and every day drink
the elixir of perfect alienation. For, even assuming that the human race
is more resourceful than is generally supposed, it can begin to
extricate itself from the traps it has itself constructed only when forced
to by some ultimate affliction. 77

A review of Adam Zagajewski's New and Selected Poems reveals that

Milosz's struggle to embody "saying" as a moral imperative for our times is
as current and as significant a concern as it was in Wang Yun-ming's and in
Wordsworth's day. The reviewer notes the influence of Husserl on
Zagajewski's early poetry, and Husserl's "presence" in the early poems, and
continuing to recent global events, "echoes Zagajewski's own fascination
with the incongruities between the named world and the real"….
Zagajewski's poems pull us out from whatever routine threatens to dull our
senses, from whatever might lull us into mere existence." 78 This was for
Wang Yun-ming in the fifteenth century, and of Wordsworth in the early
nineteenth, the same fascination and vital moral concern.
The Romantic revolution, by whatever name in whatever time or
place, is a return to harmony and innocence, not by changing institutions, as
Shelley said, but by changing the heart of each person. As these poets have
said, and are saying, our rescue from ourselves will not be by ratiocination,
the Spectre of Urizen we monstrously create, but by the feeling that binds us
to the earth, and our knowing – though not understanding it – as and we
rejoice, we re-jen. Romanticism, older and newer than its name, is universal
for as long as there will be a universe and a mind to feel it, and thus will
remain always morally compelling. As Wang taught, "Man is the mind of the
universe. At bottom Heaven and Earth and all things are my body. Is there
any suffering or bitterness of the great masses that is not a disease of pain of
my own body?" 79 Along with Wordsworth’s instruction, Wang Yang-ming’s
"trying" is clearly "saying" again in our time: “ If one knows how to search
for the Way inside the mind and to see the substance of one's own mind, then
there is no place nor time where the Way is not to be found. It pervades the
past and present and is without beginning or end.” 80
Historically, “trying” and “saying” have become so important because
of Wordsworth’s achievement that the lyric, before Lyrical Ballads a minor
Eighteenth-Century form, became “the most essentially poetic of all the
genres,” as the student learns in his introduction to the Romantic writers. 81
Indeed, the very structure of the personal, meditative poem (and scholars of
fiction, painting, film, and the other arts will see similarities) is now
understood to consist of some personal crisis caused by mistaken ways of
 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, A.D. 1492: ... 18

perceiving, a leading to a resolution and a final expression of independence,

marked by a dancing with the universe, that is, joy or jen. Often, as we have
seen in the brief mention of Czeslaw Milosz's "catastrophic" philosophy, the
duty to free other to experience the same truth through beauty becomes
paramount to the poet in his life's work. To understand the importance and
magnitude of this statement opens the door to a vast number possibilities for
study: countless poets, painters, film makers, and artists of all types have,
like Wang Yang-ming and William Wordsworth, seen, experienced, and
expressed the universal jen.

List of References

Abrams, M.H. Ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature 6th ed. New
York: W.W. Norton, 1996.
Blake, William. The Complete Poems. Ed. Alice Ostriker. London: Penguin
Books, 1977.
Cheng, Chung-yuan. "The Essential Source of Identity in Wang Lung-ch'i's
philosophy.” Philosophy East and West 23.1/2 (Jan./Apr.1973): 31-47.
Ching, Julia. To Acquire Wisdom: the Way of Wang Yang-ming. New York
and London:
Columbia University Press, 1976.
Coleridge, S.T. "Biographia Literaria" English Romantic Writers. Ed.
David Perkins. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967.
Heaney, Seamus. Seamus Heaney. 60 min. Lannan Literary Videos, 1991.
Videocassette.
Husserl, Edmund. The Crisis. Trans. David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern
UP, 1970.
Keats, John. Selected Poems and Letters. Ed. Douglas Bush. New York:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1959.
Fanger, Donald. "Romanticism and Comparative Literature." Prizm(s):
Essays in Romantic Literature 5 (1997): 55-69.
Husserl, Edmund. The Crisis. Trans. David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern
UP, 1970.
Kisiel, Theodore. "Heidegger and the New Images of Science." Radical
Phenomenology: Essays in Honor of Martin Heidegger, ed. John
Sallis. Atlantic Highlands, N. J.: 1978 3-4.
Milosz, Czeslaw. Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition. Trans.
Catherine S. Leach. Berkeley: U California P, 1981.
____________. Road-side Dog. Trans. by the author and Robert Hass. New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.
 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, A.D. 1492: ... 19

_____________. The Witness of Poetry. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP,

1983.
_____________. Visions From San Francisco Bay. New York: Farrar Straus
Giroux, 1982.
_____________. Visions from San Francisco Bay. Trans. Richard
Lourie. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1975.
Moore, Ronald, “Report on the Panel Discussion: "Wang Yang-ming and
Western Thought", Philosophy East and West 23:1/2 (1973:Jan./Apr.):
207-216.
Pound, Ezra. Impact: Essays on the Ignorance and Decline of American
Civilization. Ed. Noel Stock. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1960.
Shelley, Percy. The Poetical Works of Shelley. Ed. Newell F. Ford. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1974.
Wang Yang-ming. Instructions for Practical Living. Trans. Wing-tsit Chan.
New York: Columbia UP, 1963.
Wordsworth, William. "Preface, Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads." English
Romantic Writers. Ed. David Perkins. New York: Harcourt, Brace &
World, Inc., 1967
 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, A.D. 1492: ... 20

1
Wang Yan-ming. Instructions for Practical Living, trans. Wing-tsit Chan (New York:
Columbia UP, 1963), 171. As otherwise infrequently noted, all references to Wang are to the
Instructions.
2
Donald Fanger, "Romanticism and Comparative Literature," Prizm(s): Essays in Romantic
Literature 5 (1997): 55.
3
In the chapter of The Crisis entitled "Crisis of Science as the Loss of Meaning for Life"
Husserl elaborates the fatal error of Galileo and subsequent physicists as Galilean disciples of
"discovery-concealment" (an "entdeckender und vereckender Genuis"): "It is through the garb of ideas
that we take for true being what is actually a method." Edmund Husserl, The Crisis, trans. David Carr
(Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1970), 51-52.
4
Wang, 15.
5
Wordsworth, William, "Preface, Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads," English Romantic
Writers, ed. David Perkins (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1967), 334.
6
Wang, 163.
7
Wang, 152.
8
Wang, 81.
9
Wang, 47.
10
Wordsworth, 326.
11
Wang, 111.
12
Wordsworth, Preface (1815), 334.
13
Wordsworth, Prelude, 223.
14
Wang Yang-ming, "Four Poems on Li-an," in Julia Ching, To Acquire Wisdom: the Way of
Wang Yang-ming (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1976), 242.
15
Ching, 242.
16
Wang, 260.
17
Wang, 230.
18
Wang, 166.
19
Wordsworth, Preface, 326.
20
Wang, 19.
21
Wordsworth, Preface, 322.
22
Wang, 233, 18-19, 322, 163-64.
23
Wang, 230.
24
Wang, 216.
25
Wordsworth, 293-94.
26
Wordsworth, Preface, 326, 325.
27
"The sage… looks upon the all the people of the world, whether inside or outside his
family, or whether far or near, but all with blood and breath, as his brothers and sisters" and teaches
"the people to overcome their selfishness, remove their obstructions, and recover that which is
common to the substance of the minds of all men." Wang, 118-19.
28
As Keats wrote, "Things semireal such as Love, the Clouds &c which requires a greeting
of the Spirit to make them wholly exist – and Nothings which are made Great and dignified by an
ardent pursuit." John Keats, Selected Poems and Letters, ed. Douglas Bush (New York: Houghton
Mifflin Company, 1959), 269.
29
Wang, 62.
30
Wordsworth, Preface, 326.
31
Ronald Moore, "Report on the panel discussion: "Wang Yang-ming and Western
Thought,’" Philosophy East and West 23:1/2 (1973: Jan./Apr.): 215, and Chang Chung-yuan in "The
Essential Source of Identity" in Wang Lung-ch'i's Philosophy,” Philosophy East and West 23.1/2
(Jan./Apr.1973): 36.
32
Wordsworth, Preface, 325.
33
Wang, 224.
 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, A.D. 1492: ... 21

34
Wordsworth, Prelude, 223.
35
Coleridge’s description of action of the “Imagination,” or “esemplastic power” ("molding
into unity") is that it "dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is
rendered impossible, yet still, at all events, it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital,
even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead." S. T. Coleridge, “On the Esemplastic
Power,” Biographia Literaria, in English Romantic Writers, ed. David Perkins (New York: Harcourt,
Brace & World, 1967), 452.
36
Wang, 166; 101.
37
Wang, 69-70.
38
Wang, 55.
39
Wordsworth, Preface, 328.
40
Wordsworth, 293-94.
41
Wordsworth, Preface, 326.
42
Wang, 23.
43
For Shelley, “it marks the before unapprehended relations of things, and perpetuates their
apprehension . . . . In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself
is poetry; and to be a poet is to apprehend the true and the beautiful, in a word, the good which exists
in the relation, subsisting, first between existence and perception, and secondly between perception
and expression. Every original language near to its source is in itself the chaos of a cyclic poem.”
Percy B. Shelley, The Poetical Works of Shelley, ed. Newell F. Ford (Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Company, 1974), 604.
44
Wang, 106.
45
Wang, 163.
46
Wordsworth, Preface, 326.
47
Moore, 214
48
Wordsworth, 197.
49
Wang, 273.
50
Wang, 171.
51
Wordsworth, 281.
52
Wang, 56.
53
Wang, 258.
54
Wang, 47.
55
As Keats was later to write in this vein, "But in truth I do not at all believe in this sort of
perfectibility – the nature of the world will not admit of it – the inhabitants of the world will
correspond to itself – [as well] Let the fish philosophise the ice away from the Rivers in winter time,
288, 289.
56
Wang, 162.
57
Keats, 39.
58
Wordsworth, 281-82.
59
Wang, 42, 56-57.
60
Wordsworth, 209.
61
Wordsworth, Preface, 324, 326.
62
Shelley, 611-12.
63
Wang, 258, 112, 55.
64
An "ontological reversal unparalleled in English poetry" according to the Shelly scholar D.
J. Hughes, in "Potentiality in Prometheus Unbound," eds. Donald Reiman and Sharon B. Powers,
Shelley's Poetry and Prose (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1977), 611.
65
Wang, 40.
66
Wang, xxxiii.
67
As Pound characterized the empirical project in the West as that point when the "life of the
Occidental mind" "fell apart" with the rise of the "experimental method."Ezra Pound, Impact: Essays
 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, A.D. 1492: ... 22

on the Ignorance and Decline of American Civilization, ed. Noel Stock (Chicago: Henry Regnery,
1960), 200-02.
68
Blake, 148.
69
Wordsworth, Preface, 326.
70
Moore, 207-209. An excellent later survey of "naming" and "reality" studies in the
People’s Republic of China which illustrates the parallel nature of East-West thought is provided by
Jing Jian’s, “Phenomenology in the Chinese Perspective," Phenomenological Inquiry X (Oct. 1986),
pp. 84-90, translated into English by Mu Yun-ling.
71
See A. S. Cua”Between Commitment and Realization: Wang Yang-ming’s Vision of the
Universe as a Moral Community,” Philosophy East and West, 43:4 (Oct. 93), 611-47; Philip J.
Ivanhoe, Ethics in the Confucian Tradition: the Thought of Mencius and Wang Yang-ming (Atlanta:
Scholars Press, 1990); Henry G. Skaja, “Ethics in the Confucian Tradition: The Thought of Mencius
and Wang Yang-ming,” Philosophy East and West, 44:3 (July 94), 559-64; and Heup Young Kim,
Wang Yang-ming and Karl Barth: A Confucian-Christian Dialogue (Lanham, MD: University Press
of America, 1996).
72
Moore, 207.
73
Seamus Heaney, 60 min., Lannan Literary Videos, 1991, videocassette.
74
Czeslaw Milosz, The Witness of Poetry (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1983), 4; 10.
75
Milosz, Witness, 57.
76
Czslaw Milosz, Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition, trans. Catherine S. Leach
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 81.
77
Czeslaw Milosz, Visions from San Fransico Bay, trans. Richard Lourie (New York: Farrar
Straus Giroux, 1975), 40.
78
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