Ordering the World through Imagery：Western Metaphysical and Eastern Jin Xuanyan Poetry Responding to Their Crises

From the perspective of cultural poetics, this article employs a typological comparative method to examine how the seventeenth-century Western Metaphysical poetry and the Eastern Jin Xuanyan poetry (东晋玄言诗) diverged in their poetic responses to crises of order and their subsequent reconstruction. The study finds that the two traditions responded to crises of order distinct in nature: the Western Metaphysical poetry confronted a “cognitive disorder,” in which the Scientific Revolution and religious warfare shattered the world-picture into fragments, rendering it unintelligible; the Eastern Jin Xuanyan poetry, by contrast, faced a “value disorder,” in which aristocratic politics and the transience of life suspended the meaning of individual existence. From these distinct crises emerged two fundamentally different poetic paths: the Western Metaphysical poetry, employing conceit and paradox as its instruments, established momentary, intellectually ignited cognitive order through an “intellectual reconstruction”—creating order within paradox and rebuilding meaning out of fragments; the Xuanyan poetry, taking natural imagery as its vehicle, realized a continuously subsisting cosmological order through a “philosophical return to the root”—not to remake the world, but to roam with the Dao. In terms of historical influence, the former followed a pattern of “rupture—oblivion—recall,” while the latter exhibited a pattern of “transformation—permeation—sedimentation,” patterns respectively rooted in the Western progressive view of history characterized by “paradigm revolutions” and the Chinese continuous view of history characterized by “all-embracing inclusiveness.” In cross-cultural transmission, the Western Metaphysical poetry was reimagined by modern Chinese poetics as an “avant-garde methodology,” while Xuanyan poetry was envisioned by Western ecological poetics as a “mirror image of Eastern wisdom,” each reborn through productive misreadings by the “Other.” This article contends that in the face of contemporary compound crises—ecological crisis, the impact of artificial intelligence, and disciplinary fragmentation—the two poetics require deep dialogue and mutual complementarity: we need both the momentary intellectual reconstruction of the Western Metaphysical poetry to break cognitive impasses, and the enduring rooted settlement of the Xuanyan poetry to rebuild our spiritual home. The two, like yin and yang, together constitute a complete poetic wisdom: possessing both the courage to confront disorder and the composure to settle body and mind.