Eliot and His Age

...If happily married, his mind would have been as strong, he now suggests, but his '"feelings' provided the creative impulse, and his feelings would have been less intense, in brighter circumstances...

...For although he lacked their smug secularism and destructive revolutionary spirit, he spoke long before the likes of Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman were even gleams in the minds of their parents, against the impending disastrous and dehumanizing results of a civilization bent upon ceaseless materialistic change...

...Lewis has called in his book, The Abolition of Man, "The Way" or the Too, and have been variously called throughout intellectual history Natural Law, Traditional Morality, the First Principles of Reason, or the First Platitudes...

...Like Eliot, Kirk maintains that a poet's own emotions are irrelevant or trivial...

...His analysis assumes that the reader has read Eliot before coming to this book...

...As always, Kirk has maintained a highly readable style throughout this book which I find reminiscent of a variety of writers: Bos well, Johnson, Dickens, Henry Adams, G.K...

...is hallmarked as one of extreme cultural and intellectual heterogeneity...

...For my part, I prefer the critic who boldly states his judgments and analyses without relying directly upon previous authorities or secondary sources, unless they provide essential information or their criticism has had such influence that it blocks the path to a clear and unprejudiced understanding of the poem - in other words, a case where the critics must also be submitted to criticism...

...The sentence conveys no meaning, no information, and appears embarrassingly maudlin at that...

...Kirk, though, never clearly explains this adversion to the Conservative Prime Minister nor why conservatives should join him in this feeling...

...Written by one who knew and loved Eliot, Eliot and His Age cannot be closed without the reader feeling, in agreement with the author, that although others might have known Eliot better, Kirk has not "failed to apprehend his character...

...Eliot was the principle champion of moral imagination in the twentieth century," writes Kirk...

...Eliot's task throughout his life was to struggle "for the recovery of order...

...all men who had no truck with Eliot's "permanent things" and who were generally mystified by or disinterested in Eliot as an artist or social critic...

...Kirk, though, never doubted that the original title of his book accurately described the all-pervasive influence that Eliot had upon letters during the first half of this century...

...Eliot would have "lamented over the bent world" even if he had married the Hyacinth Girl...

...Here, Kirk performs the welcome service of unravelling some of the more cryptic passages of Eliot to make his plays comprehensible to a public not well versed in the great Christian and classical literature on which Eliot depended...

...But, he questions whether Eliot would have created The Waste Land, Murder in the Cathedral, Four Quartets, and The Cocktail Party...

...As a conservative and traditionalist, Eliot was the converse of the ideologue...

...Our age, especially apres la fin de siecle...

...Throughout his life Eliot detested Whirl, Speed, Mass, and the evils of social boredom, the destruction of community, social continuity, and the environment that the technological society brought...

...Society is a contract, in Burke's eloquent and enduring words, "not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born...

...But more importantly, it is also a book for conservatives who wish to discover the roots of imaginative conservative thinking...

...I have always been perplexed by Kirk's distaste for Churchill and never understood the reasons behind it - other than once he observed simply that he felt Churchill to be shifty and unprincipled...

...But, this sentence contributes no useful information...

...To discover the clue to the basis of Eliot's social thought, we must turn to Edmund Burke's idea of "moral imagination...

...The major ideologues of the time, Freud, Marx, Sorel, Shaw, had little influence on him...

...This book would have encompassed a study of the poet's life, along with the major literary and intellectual figures of his time, commencing at the First World War...

...The question has been asked frequently, and the answer seldom, if ever, satisfactory...

...At most universities Eliot is rarely taught, and remembered by a few students only as some fuddy-duddy dead poet whose poems they had to struggle with in freshman English...

...On that aspect of Eliot's work, scholars seemed to fall silent...

...Mankind is wrapped in Burke's "great mysterious incorporation of the human race" and whether it be the affairs of government or art...

...With the surprising success of The Conservative Mind and his new duties of "speechifying" and defending the dogma his new fame brought him, the book was put aside...

...More convincingly, he argues that if Eliot had chosen a loving and understanding wife early, his "literary and social principles would have been the same...

...Unlike Robert Sencourt and other biographers of Eliot, too steeped in vulgar Freudianism for their own good, Kirk pointedly avoids any mention of Eliot's sex life...

...At one point, Kirk suggests that it made little difference in his writings...

...His social thought was not built upon formal political theory nor upon any of the popular ideologies of his day, but rather was derived from the experience and pain of life and the inherited wisdom of the Western Civilization...

...rather he believed as did Samuel Johnson that if men's morality is tolerably strong, then almost any political system will work...

...Soon, they were to become fast friends and regular correspondents...

...Kirk takes for granted that the reader is acquainted with Eliot's major works...

...Kirk's criticism and interpretation of Eliot's poems, while not being faulty to the point of embarrassment, is not up to Kirk's usual high quality, nor do his efforts equal what has been obtained from the pens of Hugh Kenner, Elizabeth Drew, and Cleanth Brooks...

...Near the conclusion of the book, Kirk touches upon this subject once more...

...This is not just another Eliot biography, but additionally is the history of a cultural era and a critique of Eliot's major poetic, dramatic, and prose writing...

...When Kirk visited in London, the two men would often lunch at the Garrick or Author's Club...

...The book is certainly no substitute for having read Eliot in the original...

...They are our first source for all value judgments...

...Bantock's little book, T.S...

...Eliot and Education (1970), stood until recently as one of the few exceptions...

...Either you are an Eliotian Tory," Mr...

...Best yet, Kirk is at home with Eliot's social and political writings...

...It is a well-known fact that Eliot had a tragically unhappy first marriage with Vivienne...

...Twenty years passed before Kirk was able to publish a major work on Eliot and then, in spite of his ambitious plans, the work was more centered upon Eliot and his work rather than on the more far-ranging topic of his age...

...In spite of my expressed misgivings with some of the judgments made in the book, I feel that as a whole Kirk has made a major contribution to the literature on Eliot, worthy of the attention of every scholar professing to understand the essence of Eliot's social and literary principles...

...By contrast, however, few have considered Eliot's perceptive and imaginative social criticism...

...W. Wesley MacDonald...

...As to the Freudian critics who find the sexual asceticism of The Waste Land, and The Cocktail Party as evidence of an abnormal man, Kirk replies that a shy man does not necessarily have to be neurotic...

...Much literature throughout Eliot's life and since has dwelt upon his impact on contemporary literature...

...Elsewhere, he observed, "As political philosophy derives its sanction from ethics and ethics from the truth of religion...

...therefore the poet cannot ignore it...

...For myself," he wrote, "a right political philosophy came more and more to imply a right theology- and right economics to depend upon right ethics...

...Kirk even suggested to Eliot that he would like someday to write a book, entitled The Age of Eliot...

...He disliked finances, industrialists, materialism, and the new figure of the mass society, Coriolan, the dictator and savior of a rudderless and confused people...

...As a poet, Eliot felt it to be his duty to defend order...

...Additionally, he was working on a critique for The Month of Eliot's latest play, "The Confidential Clerk," which the poet would warmly greet...

...Too often Kirk relies upon the authority of others for his judgments and does not appear to be making original statements of interpretation...

...The "public order," he wrote, "is intertwined with the order of the soul...

...what matters is the poet's touching on universal emotions...

...In humane letters," Kirk states plainly, "ours has been the Age of Eliot, as once there was an Age of Dryden, and an Age of Johnson...

...As one of the foremost poets and literary critics of his time, Eliot's reputation was indeed considerable and remains so today...

...If men now so infatuated with the ephemeral doctrines of the New Left could understand, or even read him, they would find a defender of some of their better ideas...

...An ambitious work, it was perhaps more than Kirk was capable of tackling at the time...

...Whatever truth that such labels for literary periods may contain, this one appears to me to be less true for this age than most others...

...And, who today among the poets, save Robert Lowell, carries on Eliot's literary traditions...

...What effects could the torments of these early years have had upon Eliot...

...As with Plato, Virgil, and Dante, this power aspires to the apprehending of the right order in the soul and in the commonwealth...

...On a different level of political thinking, both Eliot and Kirk possessed a mutual disliking for Sir Winston Churchill and the kind of statesmanship he represented for England...

...Kirk appears to be much happier as a critic of Eliot, the dramatist, where the themes and characters seem more suited to his tastes...

...Others, your servant among them," Kirk concludes, "have kept their metaphysics warm even in the company of Cupid and Campaspe...

...Nor does he commit what Hugh Kenner has called the Genetic Fallacy of looking for meaning in Eliot's poems by noting the women he frequented...

...Rather, if political philosophy is to provide direction to the decent, just, enduring social order, then man must learn to abide by the "permanent things," - those norms of being, the endurable moral truths that have been held by all civilized men because "all other grounds," as Russell Kirk has written, "are quicksand...

...There is much argument afoot today about the poverty of labels such as "liberal" and "conservative" that would not take place if it were understood that "moral imagination" is the principle which most distinguishes the conservative from the liberal, libertarian, or radical...

...It tells us simply that Kirk has a warm and loving family life (which all friends of Kirk know to be true) and that the scholar may be competent at his work and have a loving family as well, which seems to be too obvious a point to have been made...

...In the last number of The Criterion, a small literary journal which Eliot edited during the inter-war period, Eliot wrote that at the basis of every political philosophy there must be right religious principles...

...Lawrence, e.e...

...Moral imagination" is the "power of ethical perception which strides beyond the barriers of private experience and events of the moment...especially...the higher form of this power exercised in poetry and arts...

...If he is remembered at all, it is as a poet and critic...

...No single man nor doctrine can shore the fragments against the ruins, to paraphrase a line from The Waste Land...

...cummings, Ernest Hemingway, Upton Sinclair, F. Scott Fitzgerald...

...Like Sir Walter Scott, Eliot did not "live and die in the heresy that the world is ruled by little pamphlets and speeches," nor by the schemes of social engineers or planners...

...For example, Frank Kemonde in his rather smug review of this book for The New York Times argues that Kirk has written nothing more than a right-wing effort to make Eliot a conservative champion of "moral imagination...

...Such were the ingredients of friendship which developed into a strong, intimate bond between these two defenders of the "permanent things...

...Tinkering with the political system to improve upon it held little interest for Eliot...

...Fortunately, Kirk manages to fill much of this gap in analysis and criticism in his book...

...Eliot understood, as Bantock has written, that true "originality...can exist only in a context, and that context is itself the creation of many past generations...

...Early on in his book, Kirk tells the reader that he intends his work both "to criticize an important body of literature, and to relate that literature to the events and circumstances and prospects in this century...

...the classical objectivity of Eliot reduces his personal experience to incidental interest...

...Certainly, then, for this generation, Kirk has become one of the chief defenders of Eliot's social principles...

...He is, in fact, so laudatory in his praise of Eliot's social principles that many critics may well dismiss this book as just another effusive attempt to capture the poet as the hero of the Right...

...But an argument which has garnered such extreme interest will not be settled by that...

...At the time, Kirk was attempting to persuade Eliot's publishing firm, Faber & Faber, to publish his magnum opus, The Conservative Mind...

...On these matters, Kirk is close to Eliot in spirit and conviction...

...it is only by returning to the eternal source of truth that we can hope for any social organization which will not, to its ultimate destruction ignore some essential aspects of liberty...

...Here, too, lies also the true meaning of conservatism...

...With Burke and all the great conservative thinkers, Eliot possessed a deep sense of the continuity of history...

...Chesterton, and because of their obvious philosphical similarities, Eliot (although, I believe his prose to be plainer and therefore more enjoyable to read than the poet's...

...Eliot went to the great literary and intellectual figures, such as Saint John of the Cross, Lancelot Andrewes, Samuel Johnson, Burke, Irving Babbitt, to the true defenders of the permanent things, for his political principles...

...Kemonde would have Kirk say, "or a barbarian swilling the wine among the ruins of the great chateaux...

...He was thirty years older than I," remembers Kirk, "but we had read the same books, knew the same places, were almost as one in literary preferences and social convictions and had several old friends in common" (such as Wyndham Lewis and John Betjeman...

...While Shelley's romantic egotism may have made a study of his life a necessity...

...He has, no doubt, developed one of the most pleasurable prose styles in the English language to read, primarily because of his close attention to these writers throughout his life...

...In Dry Salvages, Eliot wrote: "I have said before/that the past experience revived in the meaning/ is not the experience of one life only/but of many generations...

...Kirk observes only that lifelong Eliot "was severe in the encounter of the sexes...

...The "permanent things" are what C.S...

...Eliot's age, after all, contained such diverse significant figures as D.H...