Mirages on the Sea of Time: The Taoist Poetry of Ts’ao T’ang

Since the early seventeenth century, Taoism---the native religion of China---has been regarded as superstition and potentially subversive. Chinese arbiters of taste systematically ignored the Taoist poetry of medieval China, and until recently most Western scholars and translators accepted this judgment uncritically. A corpus of beautiful verse, with analogues in the poetry of Christian mysticism, has thus remained virtually unknown in our time.