Anyone know a good resource?

Question

Anyone know where I can find a website that would allow me to search for poetry from a specific culture about a specific subject? Or, does anyone know of a chinese poem about superstition?

Answer 1

try here:

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/chinese/frame.htm
http://www.chinapage.com/poetry9.html

A Chinese Epic

These cryptic verses which open the twenty-four hundred year old poem, "Heaven Questions," attest to the skepticism regarding myth that was already in evidence before the Han dynasty when Confucianism finally attained the status of state ideology. Confucius himself considered poetry crucial to the education of worthy men. But for him poetry was primarily a didactic tool of moral instruction, which unfortunately sometimes drained its images of their color. In like manner mythical elements were often allegorized, and literal significance was downplayed in favor of utility. By the time Confucianism was a dominant school of rational thought, "superstitions" were not legitimate subjects for intellectual discussion.

It is fortunate that thinkers who constituted other schools of philosophy, although oftentimes trained in the doctrines of Confucian propriety, were not averse to making reference to mythical tales when expounding their own unorthodox beliefs. By the eclectic Warring States period (403-249 BCE) even commentators on Confucian classics like the Yijing or Book of Changes were employing mythical and mystical explanations. It is in these diverse writings that many fragments of ancient Chinese myth are to be found.

Chinese mythology is surely one of the least familiar of the major world traditions. One reason for this unfamiliarity is the lack of a Chinese epic, a strange omission, especially when one considers that there is no shortage of epical heroes in the pre-classical tradition. Why the Chinese did not collect disparate threads of narrative and weave them into a national epic is a subject that others have discussed. My poem, "In a Calabash," is an attempt to address this literary and historical void.

I searched the corpus of pre-imperial myth for those fragments which pertain to origins, and then joined these elements into a narrative that describes the creation of the world. While a considerable amount of poetic license was employed in connecting heretofore unrelated myths, I adhered as faithfully as possible to the content and spirit of the relevant mythical tales. In no way is this poem a mere translation--the body of fragments I consulted would scarcely fill two or three pages of text. What follows then is a short discussion of those fragments utilized in my poem which have been called cosmogony and theogony.