Where Is the West-Running Brook Flowing? Robert Frost in Taoist Perspective
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Yin Qiping
Abstract
Some critics have argued that the commonality between Frost’s poetic philosophy and Taoism lies in “a quest for a thorough freedom,” namely, freeing oneself from the bonds of nature, society and the self. While there is validity in such a view, their interpretation seems a bit too reductive in the sense that too much emphasis is given to the tendency, in both Frost’s and Taoist philosophy, to Chu Shi (to renounce the world), while this tendency is subtly balanced by a willingness to Ru Shi (to accept the world). The present paper, therefore, seeks to examine the way in which Robert Frost bears affinities to Taoism in the aspect of Ru Shi as well as that of Chu Shi. “West-Running Brook,” with its central image of the brook which is at once water and road, offers itself as a good point of entry into the similarities between the themes of Frost and such philosophical ideas as proposed by either Lao Tzu or Zhuang Tzu, and makes us realize Frost’s balanced philosophical attitudes toward life
© 2014 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co.
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- Confessions of a Thug: The Voice of the Criminal in Colonial Crime Fiction
- Stowe and Brown Revisited: Fiction-Made Characters in Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada
- Where Is the West-Running Brook Flowing? Robert Frost in Taoist Perspective
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- Buchbesprechungen
- Bucheingänge
- Die Autoren dieses Heftes
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Inhalt
- Editorial
- Confessions of a Thug: The Voice of the Criminal in Colonial Crime Fiction
- Stowe and Brown Revisited: Fiction-Made Characters in Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada
- Where Is the West-Running Brook Flowing? Robert Frost in Taoist Perspective
- A Complex Kind of Feminism: Margaret Drabble’s “A Success Story”
- “Remember, or now know”: Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker and the Politics of Melancholia
- Lineages of the Present: Mukul Kesavan’s Looking Through Glass and India’s Embattled Secularism
- Buchbesprechungen
- Bucheingänge
- Die Autoren dieses Heftes
