Readings in Chinese Literary Thought

This is an amazing because thoughtful book and deeply steeped, as it is, in Chinese literary history, history, and philosophy. It sat on my shelf for a while, while I dreaded approaching it, it was sooooo large and daunting. But as a practical matter, it's a little like a daybook for a contemporary poet interested in a probing of aesthetics, and the mindwarp it sends me into while I realized (as in see with real-eyes just as those in that time looked into the matters of poetry) that in the first century A.D. these poetic dicta were opening up subjects still discussed today, and subjects too on which contemporary poetry written in English are based, though mostly not so carefully brought into front-brain recognition as they are by Professor Owen's enlightened commentaries.(No, I do not know the author.) The connections, for example, between government, Confucian thought, and poetry are drawn in the early pages. That alone is worth the price of admission, but it is by far not the greatest treasure in this book for a practicing poet. This book is an intellectual treasure--and something of an emotional hit for one who has been reading in the philosophies and the poetry for years, nay, decades, and wondering about the how and why of these supposedly simple ancient poems. R.B. Burnett MA, California State University, Long Beach; MFA, Vermont College of Fine Arts