Four Quartets in the Light of the Chinese Jar discusses how Four Quartets should be explored afresh with a prosodic-philosophically sustained interdisciplinary and cross-cultural literary approach in ways as the often overlooked pivotal image of the Chinese jar so indicates in the great sequence; the pivotal image suggests the subtle but vital elixir from both "The 'shores of Asia and the Edgware Road' [which] are brought together as they had been brought together to The Waste Land." With a steady focus on the function words-mediated and phonemes-facilitated, and "autochthonously" void-suggesting verbal transformation, the book shows how the verbal transformation, especially of the cases with "parts of speech" in the live context, makes Four Quartets truly a "rhythmical creation of [meaningful] beauty"; it demonstrates how the meaningful poetic beauty culminates in a quintessential state or being of poetry not merely being "poetic" particularly in terms of its prosodically sustained philosophical tenets, which are often so serendipitously transformed into "virtuoso mastery of verbal music." As genuine poetry, the great sequence flows freely from inside out at once in accordance with and in spirt of any given rhythmical form or rhyming pattern.
Shudong Chen is professor of humanities at Johnson County Community College.
Chapter 1: Geology of Narrative Cultures: Still Motion, Matrix of Void of the Chinese Jar, and Hidden Message of Function Words Chapter 2: "Burnt Norton": Timely Timeless Time in Motionless Motion Captured in Worded World Chapter 3: "East Coker": Knowing Time as Stranded on Land but Enlivened in Words Chapter 4: "The Dry Salvages": Knowing Oneself through Function Words-Mediated Oceanic View of Time Chapter 5: "Little Gidding": Reconciliation of the Irreconcilable in the Mode of "a Chinese Jar" through Timely Timeless Time in Motionless Motion Chapter 6: Conclusion: Interdisciplinary References that Illuminate from within and across Cultures
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, author of From Comparison to World Literature
