Eliot and His Age: T. S. Eliot’s Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century by Russell Kirk (PDF)

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Though much has been written about T. S. Eliot since it was first published, Eliot and His Age remains the best introduction to the poet’s life, ideas, and literary works. It is the essential starting place for anyone who would understand what Eliot was about. Russell Kirk’s view of his older friend is sympathetic but not adulatory. His insights into Eliot’s writings are informed by wide reading in the same authors who most influenced the poet, as well as by similar experiences and convictions.Kirk elaborates here a significant theory of literary meaning in general, showing how great literary works awaken our intuitive reason, giving us profound visions of truth that transcend logical processes. And he traces Eliot’s political and cultural ideas to their true sources, showing the balance and subtlety of Eliot’s views. Eliot and His Age is a literary biography that will endure when much of the more recent writing on Eliot is gathering dust.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: About the Author Russell Kirk (1918–94) was an independent man of letters whose best-known book is The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot. Several of his other books, including The American Cause, The Roots of American Order, The Politics of Prudence, Redeeming the Time, and The Sword of Imagination, are available from ISI Books.New introduction by Benjamin G. Lockerd Jr. Lockerd is a professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Grand Valley State University. He is a former president of the T. S. Eliot Society and is currently on the society’s board of directors. His books include The Sacred Marriage: Psychic Integration in “The Faerie Queene” and Aethereal Rumours: T. S. Eliot’s Physics and Poetics.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐The American-born Nobel Prize winning poet and influential literary critic and adult convert to Anglicanism (in 1927, from his and his family’s Unitarianism – and from his fascination with Buddhism) Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) published his most famous poem The Waste Land in 1922.As part of my own personal commemoration of its publication, I decided to take a look at the book T. S. Eliot’s Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century by the American author and eventual adult convert to Roman Catholicism Russell Kirk (1918-1994), whose doctoral dissertation at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland was published in 1953 as the book The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana (Henry Regnery) – but its subtitle was changed in a later edition to “From Burke to Eliot” – and its final chapter was expanded. Kirk’s book The Conservative Mind was widely read in the United States in the 1950s.The Wikipedia entry on Kirk says that he “was an American political theorist, moralist, historian, social conservative, and literary critic” whose publications include “three novels and 22 short stories” and whose “prose style” “became renowned.”Now, the 2008 reprint of the 1984 second edition of Kirk’s 1971 book Eliot and His Age: T. S. Eliot’s Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century was published by ISI Books/ Intercollegiate Studies Institute. It includes Kirk’s 1984 “Postscript: Pilgrims in the Waste Land” (pp. 357-368) and the 1984 “Introduction” by Benjamin G. Lockerd, Jr., of Grand Valley State University in Michigan (pp. xiii-xxxi).The back cover of the 2008 edition of Kirk’s book features impressive blurbs about it by Ronald Schuchard, Lee Oser, William Harmon, and Robert Crawford.Robert Crawford of the University of St. Andrews is the authors of the two-volume biography of Eliot: (1) Young Eliot: From St. Louis to “The Waste Land” (2015) and (2) Eliot After “The Waste Land (2022) – both published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.Ronald Schuchard of Emory University in the general editor of the eight volumes of The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot (Johns Hopkins University Press; Faber and Faber, 2021).Now, in Lockerd’s “Introduction” to Kirk’s book Eliot and His Age: T. S. Eliot’s Moral Imagination and the Twentieth Century, he says that Eliot was impressed with Kirk’s book The Conservative Mind and that Dr. Kirk knew Eliot. Lockerd says, “Kirk tells us of their Edinburgh meeting in his memoirs” (p. xiv).The Wikipedia entry on Kirk says that his 1966 novel A Creature of the Twilight includes “his pseudo-memoir.” But Kirk also published a 1995 memoir titled The Sword of Imagination: Memoirs of a Half-Century of Literary Conflict.So what does Kirk mean by the moral imagination? Kirk operationally defines and explains the moral imagination as follows:“What we call ‘the moral imagination’ has connections with [John Henry] Newman’s ‘illative sense’ [in An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870; also known by the short title as A Grammar of Assent)]. Its evidences may be fragmentary and irregular, but they are numerous; and entering the mind over a long period of time, they may bring conviction. The moral imagination, embracing tradition, looks to theology and history and the permanent things [a phrase used by Eliot, according to Kirk]. Through the moral imagination, one may escape the pit of solipsism: the moral order is perceived to be something larger than the circumstances of one’s time or one’s private experience; one learns that consciousness and rationality did not commence with one’s self or with one’s contemporaries” (p. 39).As a thought experiment, we may wonder if there is indeed such a thing as the conservative mind that Kirk delineates in his book The Conservative Mind. However, if we may allow that there may be such a thing, we might then wonder why Kirk begins his account of the conservative mind in his book with the Irish-British Roman Catholic politician and author of Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) Edmund Burke (1729-1797). But Kirk clarifies this a bit in his book Eliot and His Age: T. S. Eliot’s Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century: “The moral imagination aspires to the apprehending of right order in the soul [right order in the soul = virtue] and right order in the commonwealth. It [the moral imagination] was the gift and obsession of Plato and Virgil and Dante” and also in “Eliot, Frost, Faulkner, Waugh, and Yeats” in the twentieth century (p. 5).Now, Kirk sees the activation of the moral imagination in Eliot’s 1917 “slim book of verse Prufrock and Other Observations” (p. 9). Subsequently Kirk says the following:“To explain what Eliot was saying, rather than to praise the manner in which he said it, is the principal purpose of this book. One needs to commence this task with ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’ so obscure, so evocative, so surprising a poem. At heart, ‘The Love Song’ is the first of Eliot’s several poems about Hell. In this instance, it is the Hell of the solipsist, unable to credit the reality on those who appear about him: a genteel solipsist unable, even when he has had some glimpse of the essence of things, to tell his phantam neighbors the Truth. ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ is not merely a description of a vacillating gentleman at a tea party, too timid to declare his affections; nor is it a condemnation of bourgeois society; nor yet an effusion of world-weariness. Really, Prufrock is a flaccid Everyman – though a modern man surfeited with comforts and embarrassed when he is confronted by revelation – who refuses to bear witness to the truth. [But] J. Alfred Prufrock is not identical with Thomas Stearns Eliot, except so far as the characters created by every poet must contain something of their authors; but the poem does not reflect the mind of a young man is search of firm ground” (p. 48).Kirk also says, “What no reviewer of Prufrock predicted in 1917, with that slim book of verse there commenced a renewal of the moral imagination in literature” (p. 49).For the review of Eliot’s 1917 book Prufrock and Other Observations, see the book T. S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by Jewel Spears Brooker of Eckerd College in Florida (Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 1-17; for the reviews of Eliot’s most famous 1922 poem The Waste Land, see pp. 75-120).Now, about The Waste Land, Kirk says, “Were The Waste Land only the poetic lament of a man whose marriage [in 1915] had not fulfilled his hopes, and who had worked himself to the bone, it would remain interesting – but it could not have spoken as a conscience to a multitude of other consciences. A widespread decay of love is no accident: causes may be discerned, and remedies – however difficult – may be suggested. In short, Eliot has described in The Waste Land not merely his ephemeral state of mind; much more important, he has penetrated to causes of a common disorder in the soul of the twentieth century” (p. 62).For a perceptive discussion of conscience as the inner subjective and personal factor of Christians hearing the call to respond, see the American Jesuit theologian and ethicist James F. Keenan’s new 2022 book A History of Catholic Theological Ethics (Paulist Press, esp. pp. 11-12 and 13; for further specific page references to conscience, see the “Index” [p. 424]).We may pause here for a few other observations as well. We should note that Kirk here does not explicitly advert to Hell or to solipsism as the defining problem. Yes, the waste land, figuratively speaking may be likened to Hell. But Kirk here singles out “[a] widespread decay of love” as the defining problem.What Kirk here characterizes as Eliot’s own personal “ephemeral state of mind” calls to mind the Victorian Jesuit poet and classicist Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poems that literary scholars refer to as his sonnets of desolation.The American Jesuit Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955) discusses Hopkins’ sonnets of desolation (also known as his dark sonnets as his terrible sonnets) in his book Hopkins, the Self, and God (University of Toronto Press, 1986, pp. 62 and 145-159), the published version of Ong’s 1981 Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto.To spell out the obvious here, Hopkins in his sonnets of desolation does not also include what Kirk refers to as Eliot’s concern in The Waste Land with “a common disorder in the soul of the twentieth century” – [a] widespread decay of love.”In the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556), the founder of the Jesuit order, he refers to the soul’s experiences of desolation.In any event, if we credit the activation of the moral imagination in Eliot to, at least in part, what Newman refers to as the illative sense in A Grammar of Assent (18???), then we may posit that the “widespread decay of love” “in the soul of the twentieth century” may be due, at least in part, not just to solipsism but also to the illative sense not being activated in the souls of many people in the twentieth century.Newman’s Grammar of Assent deeply influenced the Canadian Jesuit theologian and philosopher Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984), perhaps most notably in his 1957 philosophical masterpiece Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, 5th ed., edited by Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (University of Toronto Press, 1992).Now, in Kirk’s book Eliot and His Age: T. S. Eliot’s Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century, Kirk says, “At the heart of this poem of exploration [The Waste Land] lies the legend of the Grail, and more especially the symbol of the Chapel Perilous. . . . How may a man be born again and a blasted land made to bloom anew? . . . In some versions of the Grail legend, questing knights who entered the Chapel Perilous – ringed about with tombs – beheld the cup, the lance, the sword, the stone. If they found the hardihood to inquire, they would be answered: they would be told at once, perhaps, or perhaps later. And of that questioning great good would come: the Fisher King’s wound would be healed, and the desolate land would be watered again” (pp. 67-68).Kirk also says, “For authoritative guidance, Eliot turned especially, in this poem, to Saint Augustine, the Buddha, and the Upanishads” (p. 69). Kirk subsequently says, “Infatuation with transitory impulses, the Buddha had said in his Fire Sermon, oppresses man; abjure desire. And as Augustine sought redemption from the unholy loves of Carthage, so the Seeker prays that eh Lord may pluck him as a brand from the burning“ (p. 73).Kirk comments on “the concluding part of this poem, ‘What the Thunder Said’” (p. 74). Noting that the thunder of DA [Indo-European root ‘DA’] utters three sounds that are answers – sibylline indeed to the Seeker’s questions. They are ‘datta,’ ‘dayadhvam,’ and ‘damyata,’ from the Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad. And they signify ‘give,’ ‘sympathize,’ and ‘control.’ So saith the Lord: give, sympathize, control. But though the Seeker had found courage to carry him to the Chapel Perilous and to ask the dread questions, has he resolution and faith sufficient to induce him to obey the thunder? Some rain has fallen but the sacred river wants a flood: mind and flesh are feeble. For lack of human daring the Waste Land may remain ghastly dry” (p. 75).“Give? That means surrender – yielding to something outside one’s self” (p. 75).“Sympathize? That means love and loyalty, and the diminishment of private claims” (p. 75).“Control? That, as [Irving] Babbitt had said, is to place restraints upon will and appetite [through self-discipline]” (p. 75). As Kirk explains elsewhere, Babbitt was one of Eliot’s teachers at Harvard (pp. 22-28).Kirk has delineated the heart of Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land – and Eliot himself took the advice to give, sympathize, and control to heart, leading in due time to his 1927 conversion to trinitarian Christianity. (For specific page references to The Waste Land in Kirk’s book, see the “Index” [p. 400].)

⭐Russel Kirk delivers a tour de force with his superb study of T.S. Eliot. Those who love T.S. Eliot will be constantly edified by Kirk’s detailed and contextual study. Secondly, those who enjoy intellectual biography will find, I believe, this monograph to be quite rewarding. It is not as much of a psychological study as it is a rich and rewarding contextual study of a man in his time. It demonstrates again and again the subtle and intelligent conservatism of the poet scholar. To this effect, it is, thirdly, a very good examination of Eliot’s traditionalism and conservatism that Kirk describes generally as “moral imagination.”Kirk writes in elegant prose that may strike readers as terse if not a little difficult at first, but patience will grant a reward. Eliot and His Age is absolutely as moving as it is thought-provoking. I highly recommend this excellent book.

⭐Recently, the National Review On-Line “corner’, carried scornful, ignorant remarks about Eliot by three marginally talented literary hacks: The glib ‘popular mathematics” writer, John Derbyshire, whose literary reputation rests on a fairly good novel about a Chinese immigrants fascination with Calvin Coolidge, and who is stupid enough to find Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees” a great poem, the talented polemicist ( and frankly, tedious Star Trek enthusiast, Jonah Goldberg),and finally, the film critic for the Weekly Standard, who apparently owes his position, not to his rather meager intellectual virtues, or his very limited taste, but to the fact that he is the son of two very gifted neo-conservative publicists. ( What IS his name again? No matter, it’ not important.)Nothing, I think, could better illustrate the vulgarity and decadence of much- not all- but much of contemporary “conservativism” than such dismissals of the greatest Conservative-and Christian- literary figure and intellectual of the twentieth century. This book-which I urge every intelligent young conservative to read- is a powerful antidote. ( incidentally, it also reminds us of how intelligent the conservative movement in this country used to be.) It is a humane, generous, beautifully written,and beautifully thought out book of great learning, with surprises on virtually every page. Eliot was not without flaws and blindspots, but this book reminds us of the depth of his moral imagination, the acuteness of his mind, and the breadth of his intellectual and human sympathies. READ it..it is the next best thing to reading Eliot himself.One caveat. The copy I got from Amazon.com has poor binding. The first eight pages actually fell out. the problem is, how do I contact Amazon.com to get a less shoddily bound replacement? I have searched this web-site, and found no place to issue consumer complaints.

⭐The book is well written and comprehensive. The author may be biased toward Eliot ad a model for his own work but this book is one of the better ones I have read without spending too much emphasis on the poetry of Eliot

⭐Not as good as i expected, especially for the price.

⭐Although written, and subsequently revised, in 1971, this biography of T. S. Eliot remains – still- the “go to,” preeminent book on the life of the great bard. Kirk does a wonderful job of showing how Eliot’s life shaped his poetry. Most often, Eliot’s life experiences went into his work. This is forever the case in the discussion of “The Waste Land.”Although Kirk left us in 1994, this great work opens up a new generation to the greatness of poetry and the greatness of T. S. Eliot. I most especially like how the myth of Eliot’s facism and anti-semitism were fabulously destroyed by Kirk.If you own anything by Eliot, you should own this book!

⭐On time and perfect condition

⭐The author is too much present. But he knows all about Eliot

⭐Helpful

⭐Obra de capital importância no corpo dos trabalhos de Kirk, apresentando aspectos fundamentais de Eliot, através da visão de um dos maiores pensadores conservadores do século passado.

⭐

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