POET AS SOCIAL CRITIC

...The attraction Eliot exerts, especially the early Eliot, for readers who dislike his political opinions is a curious phenomenon...

...In 1934, critic Robert McAlmon remarked that "where Eliot is moldy and sogs and is everlastingly the adolescent who will be an old man blubbering, Ezra [Pound] is hard, and his images flash at you and awaken clear and stimulating response...

...Kirk is primarily concerned with Eliot as a critic and observer of society and the human predicament, rather than with his belletristic attributes as a poet and literary figure...

...The "moral imagination," Kirk says, "embraces tradition" and "looks to theology and history and humane letters, especially, for evidences of human nature and the permanent things...

...However, Kirk puts forward his own judgments persuasively when he beHeves other commentators have overlooked matters of importance or misinterpreted Eliot's lines...

...His insistence that the outer disorder could not be dealt with effectively until the inner disorder had been quieted by religious faith is perhaps less vehemently disputed today than it was a generation ago...

...He has produced a major work, embodying impressive scholarship and mature critical judgment...

...Essentially, Eliot brooded and wrote evocatively about the "inner disorder, not the outer," the "boredom and horror and glory" of man's private experience...

...Kirk, by the way, holds that The Waste Land "might have been more coherent and less puzzling had Ezra Pound let it alone—although then it would have stirred up less of a sensation . . . Had he not yielded to Pound's energy, we might have had a long poem less magical, yet better fulfilling Eliot's intention...

...The author has perceptively examined the abundant literature on Eliot's works, and where others have made satisfying analyses, he bows to their views, warning that "in every poem of Eliot's even the careful reader must beware of confounding his own principles and experiences and prejudices with Eliot's...

...There is no other study of T.S...

...When Kirk's influential book The Conservative Mind was published in 1953, critic John Crowe Ransom astutely observed that the author was "no common conservative, but a religious humanist...

...One learnt by degrees that genius didn't necessarily wear a beard and have neurotic love-affairs, but might be found in a Kensington churchwarden...

...But Kirk writes for readers who may not be fully conversant with all of Eliot's published works, a sizable body of literature—particularly when one remembers that the man spent much of his early life in the basement of a London bank, working as a clerk...

...This is true today for many persons who approached intellectual maturity in the 1930s and 1940s...

...To some extent this commentary is true of Eliot himself...

...After all, the tide wasn't running that way...

...Kirk's book resolves some of the ambiguities, refines and sharpens one's admiration or dislike...

...Eliot (1888-1965) of comparable amplitude...

...Theology and religious conviction should be stressed, for Eliot believed, as does Kirk, a Catholic convert, that the secular "humanism" of Harvard professor Irving Babbitt (1865-1933), from whom both men learned much, is good but not good enough...

...To explain what Eliot was saying, rather than to praise the manner in which he said it, is a principal purpose of this book...

...Its cause is perhaps best suggested, certainly well expressed, by Desmond Hawkins: "It happened because the poetry got into your head like a song-hit, because the essays acquired imperceptibly the momentum of authority: the ifs and buts, the cautious buttressing, are reminders that this was an unpopular popularity...

...McCann, a free lance writer and critic, edited "Ambrose Bierce's America...

...Eliot once said of Montaigne that "by the time a man knew him well enough to attack him, he would be thoroughly infected by him...

...Explication and exegesis constitute a large part of Kirk's book...

...a more coherent denunciation of modern disorder, more fully representative of Eliot's own intellect and method...

...Eliot's greatness as a man of letters (his superiority, according to Kirk, puts him in the company of John Dry-den, Samuel Johnson, and Samuel Coleridge) is attributable, Kirk contends, to the strength of his "moral imagination" and the consistency with which he applied it to the circumstances of his time and of his private experience...

...Years ago the British critic and poet, William Empson, said of Eliot: "I do not know for certain how much of my own mind he invented, let alone how much of it is a reaction against him or indeed a consequence of misreading him...

...reviewed by William McCann Russell Kirk says the object of his book is "to discuss the significance of Eliot's convictions for his age, and to set in his social perspective the most eminent writer of the past half-century...

...McAlmon's observation is not only pertinent to the recent disclosure of Pound's important role in editing The Waste Land but points, wittily if unfairly, to the "softness" which some readers who are generally sympathetic toward Eliot's views believe they detect in him...

...To this it might be objected that Eliot was eminently capable of saying exactly what he wanted to, no more, no less...

...However that may be, it is because of Eliot's deep, tenacious concern about the human predicament, the desperate futility of the "unexamined life," that Russell Kirk assigns him such a lofty position in modern literature...

...One need not be a classicist, a conservative, and a Christian to concede that Kirk, who lauds Eliot and endorses most of his views, has performed his task conspicuously well...

...In our present time of discontent and disarray—The Age of Mailer— Eliot and His Age, by a learned, philosophically rooted conservative, invites the scrutiny of serious readers of all persuasions...