Poetry and the tourist being-in-the-world: connotations behind the Tang Poetry

Abstract

ABSTRACT Poetry discloses the fundamentals of truths and values about lives. Tourism in its purpose enhances tourists’ well-being through inhabiting the environments of poetics and authenticity compared to everydayness. This study employs a hermeneutic phenomenological analysis of Three Hundred Tang Poems, guided by Heidegger’s ideas of Dasein and being-in-the-world, to explore the intrinsic connection between poetry and tourism. This study also proposes a conceptual framework of ‘tourist being-in-the-world’. Through the manual qualitative identification method, the findings reveal that: (a) the interpretation of the tourism essence should be grounded on the existential state of human being; (b) tourist being-in-the-world should be considered as a constitution of Dasein, as the most connotations in Three Hundred Tang Poems are associated with tourism (86.9%). Seeing life as a journey, men are born tourists in philosophy, who make sense of the experience of a tourist being-in-the-world (the appearance of authentic selves). Our findings elucidate how tourism destinations were depicted, manifested, and transcended by the Tang Poetry and highlight that the traditional Eastern ideologies of ‘nature as humanity’ and ‘humanized nature in the sense of spirituality’ were embedded in tourism.