In the dedication of “The Waste Land,” T. S. Eliot called Ezra Pound il miglior fabbro or “the best craftsman,” and like Pound, Eliot also turned to the East for spiritual resources as well as poetic materials. Shudong Chen has made a great effort to explore that aspect of Eliot’s poetic vision that has not been sufficiently discussed in any depth, and this book will be valuable reading for anyone interested in Eliot and modernism, particularly from the perspective of East-West comparative studies.
— Zhang Longxi, City University of Hong Kong
This book by Shudong Chen marks a successful attempt to approach Four Quartets, the classic of the twentieth century,a masterpiece “to be moved towards, not reached,” It demonstrates new ways of exploring the infinite dimensions of this magnificent poetic work; it reveals the ingenious insight into its “les mots justes,” decodes its meaning-generating void, and opens up the intercultural discourse still hidden behind, between, and beyond the great sequence. From the perspective across linguistics, aesthetics and philosophy, this book is a nice model of stimulating and reflecting the inexhaustible vitality of literature and words, par excellence.
— Wang Xiaodan, Associate Professor of English Language and Literature, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, China
This book opens up a philosophical horizon that facilitates and deepens our understanding of the motion, movement, momentum, mode in Chinese intellectual and cultural landscape; it provides us a wonderful resource for an interplay between literature and philosophy as well as a joy in function-words-mediated flows of verbal music.
— Robin R. Wang, author of Yinyang: The Way of heaven and Earth in Chinese Thought and Culture
Shudong Chen takes his readers on a dance through the Four Quartets like none other. He artfully interprets the text with attention to the invisible patterns, images and words that weave meaning throughout Eliot’s extraordinary poetry. Chen’s scholarship is reliable and meticulous, and he has made a valuable contribution to comparative literary studies.
— Ann Pirruccello, Professor of Philosophy at The University of San Diego
This interdisciplinary and cross cultural approach to Eliot in Shudong Chen’s new book opens up Eliot’s Four Quartets, exploring new ways to look at the “slippery nature of time,” revealing the flow within the stillness of Eliot’s poetry. This fascinating exploration of the power and eloquence of Eliot’s “moving stillness” resonates through Four Quartets and beyond.
— Tom Patterson, Ph.D., Director of International Education, Johnson County Community College
I was happy to read this uniquely well-informed and compelling study of Eliot’s Four Quartets. Shudong Chen has a vivid sense of the radiance of Eliot’s meditations, and he approaches the ‘still point of the turning world’ with his own strong reading. Eliot’s great sequence benefits from this kind of scrutiny. I can recommend this capable and thought-provoking book to anyone who wishes to go more deeply into Eliot’s poetic world.
— Jay Parini, author of New and Collected Poems, 1975-2015
Shudong Chen in Four Quartets in the Light of the Chinese Jaras inall of his publications demonstrates a deep and passionate appreciation of the interpenetration and thus continuing evolution of our always hybridic cultural ecologies. He is keenly aware that his reading is just one more seat on the carousel of well-argued, textually grounded, and yet bottomless interpretations that Eliot continues to inspire. Still his hermeneutic reading of Eliot is from a cultural perspective that begins and ends with the Book of Changes and its “persistence in change” (biantong) thinking, and takes “a Chinese jar still” that “moves perpetually in its stillness" as his entry point to join Eliot and us all in exploring the still point in the contrapuntal tension between change and persistence, between form and function, between fullness and emptiness, between time and eternity, between what is human and what divine.
— Roger T. Ames, Peking University
Shudong Chen carefully connects T. S. Eliot’s emphasis on the timeless with the “motionless motion” of a humble Chinese jar that holds and shapes emptiness, yet its anonymous emptiness proves fundamentally useful as do those almost invisible “function words” and, but, and other conjunctions that structure language and support it. He details in his book how T. S. Eliot’s poem The Four Quartets reveals both the Homeric tradition’s delight in everyday physical existence and the Hebraic tradition’s emphasis on the sublime, the mystical, and the religious, thus making explicit the intersection of the visible and the invisible.
— Steven P. Faulkner, Longwood University