SOURCE: Introduction, in Wordsworth and the Zen Mind: The Poetry of Self-Emptying, State University of New York Press, 1996, 288 p.

In the following essay, Rudy applies several key concepts of Zen Buddhism—wholeness, the state of "no-mind," and the Zen idea of emptiness—to his study of the poetic metaphysics of William Wordsworth.

In his Prospectus to The Recluse (1814), the work which announces that the chief aim of his poetry is to examine and to celebrate the mind, William Wordsworth writes:

Not Chaos, not The darkest pit of lowest Erebus,
 Nor aught of blinder vacancy, scooped out
 By help of dreams—can breed such fear and awe
 As fall upon us often when we look Into our Minds,
 into the Mind of Man—
 My haunt, and the main region of my song.

(35-41)

Though it emerges as a potential nightmare realm, the mind appears here as a distinctively human...