Product Review

Poetry and Politics is the first full-length study in any language of the life and works of the Chinese poet and thinker, Juan Chi (AD 210-263). This book contains translations of all Juan Chi's important works, in verse and prose, his letters and all the historical accounts of his life. The reader is thus enabled, for the first time in a work of this kind, to see a Chinese writer in the round, in his works and in his setting. Juan Chi's attachment to traditional Confucian values kept him in the centre of political and social life, but eventually his disgust with the disloyalty and self-seeking he saw in Wei society made him turn away. He attempted in Taoism and in the pursuit of Taoist immortality to find the purity and permanence so lacking in the world, but without an ultimate commitment. Juan Chi was accused both in his lifetime and subsequently of being a Confucian hero and a Taoist iconoclast, and in him can be seen the contradictory intellectual and religious forces t hat were slowly bringing in the Chinese Middle Ages.