This research focuses on the “Still Point,” a core concept in T.S. Eliot’s poetics. Represented primarily by Four Quartets, Eliot’s poetic texts manifest this concept as a temporal hiatus—a convergence of past and future within the present. In doing so, it departs from the linear temporal paradigm of instrumental rationality, embodying a reflexive power that pits metaphysical eternity against historical time. By introducing Walter Benjamin’s “crystalline time” as a comparative framework, this study finds that both thinkers attempt to reconstruct temporal dimensions using the “now-time” (Jetztzeit) as a fulcrum to resist the “empty time” prevalent since the 19th century. As a quintessential model of modernist poetics, Eliot’s concept of time is not merely a product of the modernist movement but a profound revelation of the inherent paradoxes and tensions within modernity itself.

Still Point, Non-Linear Time, Modernist Poetics