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Living Poems

© Kirk Johnson

When I decided to write this article, I looked through several books for a good description of what a poem is. The best description that I have come across is from Louis Untermeyer's preface to his book A Treasury of Great Poems: English and American, copyright 1942, "If a poem may be said to have an aim, it must be to make the reader see with a new acuteness and feel with a new awareness".

Many people might say that this is the definition of all great art, but it doesn't describe all great gardens.

Garden design is one of the oldest and most traditional of the arts. While a painting usually needs to be a bit innovative in order to be interesting, this isn't true of gardens. Gardens are often collections of plants, the emphasis is on the individual plants. In a collector's garden, the designer's job is to arrange this collection into a unified garden, the plants are seen as being interesting in and of themselves. Gardens are also often designed to be settings for architecture or for social events, the gardens of Vaux le Vicompte and the palace of Versailles are great works of art, but I wouldn't call them living poems.

There are two main traditions in garden design, the Eastern and the Western. For most of the past three or four thousand years, the formal garden has been dominant in the West. Many poems were composed and read in formal gardens, and overgrown formal gardens often have a poetic quality, but the idea of a garden being a visual poem is mainly a product of the Eastern tradition.

The earliest Chinese gardens were created for Qin dynasty Emperors, these gardens were displays of power, rather than retreats for spiritual refreshment. Under the Han dynasty, Confucianism became the state doctrine. Confucius required an ethical man to render service to the state, a civil service was developed in which advancement was based upon the merits of a Confucian education, rather than wealth or family connections. For two thousand years, until the fall of the Ching dynasty in 1912, anyone who desired a position of authority had to pass rigorous exams. The result was a society where most of the people who were wealthy enough to afford gardens were very intelligent, exhaustively educated and highly cultured.

The Han dynasty slowly collapsed, and it was followed by four hundred years of almost constant warfare, as warlords competed with each other for the ultimate power. Confucius had said that the Emperor ruled by the mandate of heaven, but having so many warlords claiming that they ruled by the mandate of heaven caused many Confucian scholars to become deeply cynical, many of them fled from the north to the less populated areas of southern China. During the Han dynasty, Confucian scholars had filled the ranks of the bureaucracy, but during these four hundred years of chaos, there was little need for cultured bureaucrats, so it became acceptable for scholars to become hermits. Most of them didn't become solitary hermits or celibate monks, many continued to marry and raise families, but they did preserve Chinese culture in the same way that European monks preserved fragments of classical culture after the fall of Rome.

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