The Awakening Art Of Tao Yuan-ming

The poems of the 4^th Century Chinese poet of reclusion, Tao Yuan-ming, have always been framed by biography of whether to take up official posts in the government bureaucracy of the Jin Dynasty, the indecisions and the final retreat to a quiet life. These two ideas of indecisiveness and retreat have become the key mode to understand his poems. Indeed this debate between the body and the spirit and the artist being torn between two worlds can be found in his best works. The standard reading of Tao's oeuvre is that when he finally gave up on the material world to return to the natural world, it marked an end of his life journey and in some aspects, his creativity. This is an incorrect view which this thesis will dispute: in actual fact, by giving up on the constraints of the worldly titles and social positions, Tao gained an inner world that is limitless. It was not death but life that awaits Tao when he returns to the countryside: a return to the true self, the essential core of what we are and our original state of being. Such a natural state is reflected in the form of Tao's poems as well - they were marked by an elegance of simplicity and the real; no artifice, unlaboured. The value of Tao's poems becomes all the more apparent in this heightened age of post-industrial consumerism. Materialism has dominated our lives. Perhaps Tao's poems can guide us like candles in the dark, lighting the way to what and who we really are.