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Eliot and His Age: T. S. Eliot's Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century
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.
460 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1971
27 people are currently reading
406 people want to read
About the author
Russell Kirk
185 books304 followersFor more than forty years, Russell Kirk was in the thick of the intellectual controversies of his time. He is the author of some thirty-two books, hundreds of periodical essays, and many short stories. Both Time and Newsweek have described him as one of America’s leading thinkers, and The New York Times acknowledged the scale of his influence when in 1998 it wrote that Kirk’s 1953 book The Conservative Mind “gave American conservatives an identity and a genealogy and catalyzed the postwar movement.”
Dr. Kirk wrote and spoke on modern culture, political thought and practice, educational theory, literary criticism, ethical questions, and social themes. He addressed audiences on hundreds of American campuses and appeared often on television and radio.
He edited the educational quarterly journal The University Bookman and was founder and first editor of the quarterly Modern Age. He contributed articles to numerous serious periodicals on either side of the Atlantic. For a quarter of a century he wrote a page on education for National Review, and for thirteen years published, through the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, a nationally syndicated newspaper column. Over the years he contributed to more than a hundred serious periodicals in the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain, Bulgaria, and Poland, among them Sewanee Review, Yale Review, Fortune, Humanitas, The Contemporary Review, The Journal of the History of Ideas, World Review, Crisis, History Today, Policy Review, Commonweal, Kenyon Review, The Review of Politics, and The World and I.
He is the only American to hold the highest arts degree (earned) of the senior Scottish university—doctor of letters of St. Andrews. He received his bachelor’s degree from Michigan State University and his master’s degree from Duke University. He received honorary doctorates from twelve American universities and colleges.
He was a Guggenheim Fellow, a senior fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, a Constitutional Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a Fulbright Lecturer in Scotland. The Christopher Award was conferred upon him for his book Eliot and His Age, and he received the Ann Radcliffe Award of the Count Dracula Society for his Gothic Fiction. The Third World Fantasy Convention gave him its award for best short fiction for his short story, “There’s a Long, Long Trail a-Winding.” In 1984 he received the Weaver Award of the Ingersoll Prizes for his scholarly writing. For several years he was a Distinguished Scholar of the Heritage Foundation. In 1989, President Reagan conferred on him the Presidential Citizens Medal. In 1991, he was awarded the Salvatori Prize for historical writing.
More than a million copies of Kirk’s books have been sold, and several have been translated in German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Korean, and other languages. His second book, The Conservative Mind (1953), is one of the most widely reviewed and discussed studies of political ideas in this century and has gone through seven editions. Seventeen of his books are in print at present, and he has written prefaces to many other books, contributed essays to them, or edited them.
Dr. Kirk debated with such well-known speakers as Norman Thomas, Frank Mankiewicz, Carey McWilliams, John Roche, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Michael Harrington, Max Lerner, Michael Novak, Sidney Lens, William Kunstler, Hubert Humphrey, F. A. Hayek, Karl Hess, Clifford Case, Ayn Rand, Eugene McCarthy, Leonard Weinglass, Louis Lomax, Harold Taylor, Clark Kerr, Saul Alinsky, Staughton Lynd, Malcolm X, Dick Gregory, and Tom Hayden. Several of his public lectures have been broadcast nationally on C-SPAN.
Among Kirk’s literary and scholarly friends were T. S. Eliot, Roy Campbell, Wyndham Lewis, Donald Davidson, George Scott-Moncrieff, Richard Weaver, Max Picard, Ray Bradbury, Bernard Iddings Bell, Paul Roche, James McAuley, Thomas Howard, Wilhem Roepke, Robert Speaight
Dr. Kirk wrote and spoke on modern culture, political thought and practice, educational theory, literary criticism, ethical questions, and social themes. He addressed audiences on hundreds of American campuses and appeared often on television and radio.
He edited the educational quarterly journal The University Bookman and was founder and first editor of the quarterly Modern Age. He contributed articles to numerous serious periodicals on either side of the Atlantic. For a quarter of a century he wrote a page on education for National Review, and for thirteen years published, through the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, a nationally syndicated newspaper column. Over the years he contributed to more than a hundred serious periodicals in the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain, Bulgaria, and Poland, among them Sewanee Review, Yale Review, Fortune, Humanitas, The Contemporary Review, The Journal of the History of Ideas, World Review, Crisis, History Today, Policy Review, Commonweal, Kenyon Review, The Review of Politics, and The World and I.
He is the only American to hold the highest arts degree (earned) of the senior Scottish university—doctor of letters of St. Andrews. He received his bachelor’s degree from Michigan State University and his master’s degree from Duke University. He received honorary doctorates from twelve American universities and colleges.
He was a Guggenheim Fellow, a senior fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, a Constitutional Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a Fulbright Lecturer in Scotland. The Christopher Award was conferred upon him for his book Eliot and His Age, and he received the Ann Radcliffe Award of the Count Dracula Society for his Gothic Fiction. The Third World Fantasy Convention gave him its award for best short fiction for his short story, “There’s a Long, Long Trail a-Winding.” In 1984 he received the Weaver Award of the Ingersoll Prizes for his scholarly writing. For several years he was a Distinguished Scholar of the Heritage Foundation. In 1989, President Reagan conferred on him the Presidential Citizens Medal. In 1991, he was awarded the Salvatori Prize for historical writing.
More than a million copies of Kirk’s books have been sold, and several have been translated in German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Korean, and other languages. His second book, The Conservative Mind (1953), is one of the most widely reviewed and discussed studies of political ideas in this century and has gone through seven editions. Seventeen of his books are in print at present, and he has written prefaces to many other books, contributed essays to them, or edited them.
Dr. Kirk debated with such well-known speakers as Norman Thomas, Frank Mankiewicz, Carey McWilliams, John Roche, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Michael Harrington, Max Lerner, Michael Novak, Sidney Lens, William Kunstler, Hubert Humphrey, F. A. Hayek, Karl Hess, Clifford Case, Ayn Rand, Eugene McCarthy, Leonard Weinglass, Louis Lomax, Harold Taylor, Clark Kerr, Saul Alinsky, Staughton Lynd, Malcolm X, Dick Gregory, and Tom Hayden. Several of his public lectures have been broadcast nationally on C-SPAN.
Among Kirk’s literary and scholarly friends were T. S. Eliot, Roy Campbell, Wyndham Lewis, Donald Davidson, George Scott-Moncrieff, Richard Weaver, Max Picard, Ray Bradbury, Bernard Iddings Bell, Paul Roche, James McAuley, Thomas Howard, Wilhem Roepke, Robert Speaight
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
August 9, 2021
This has to be the most pedantically interesting book I have ever read. It’s so long that I was unbelievably tempted to start skimming (and succumbed on occasion), but I was so terrified I would miss a profound insight into the life and work of T.S. Eliot. This is so much more than a biography (which it doesn’t claim to be); rather Kirk constructs the entire literary and political landscape in which Eliot lived and wrote. It is in that context given by Kirk that one can see how truly monumental of a man and poet T.S. Eliot was and continues to be. I will return to this book many times as I continually revisit Eliot’s poetry.
May 7, 2016
A 400-page dose of T.S. Eliot, 20th-century history and politics, and other writers and thinkers from the time, who he was friends with, how things got published. There is a large focus on Eliot's twenty-year work as editor of The Criterion, showing how influential and involved he was. It's a good book to balance out books like Helen Gardner's The Art of T.S. Eliot that focus more on his poems.
March 21, 2018
Very informative, if a bit too long. I really enjoyed the parts when Kirk discussed Eliot and his philosophy and the philosophy of specific poetry (esp. Waste Land, Hollow Men, and Prufrock) but the other parts that discussed the world of the time had a tendency to drag.
December 17, 2016
This is a book whose real good points get obscured by the enormous limitations of the author's ethos: this is simply the smuggest book I've ever read. Kirk's thesis: "As champion of the moral imagination, Eliot had begun by describing the abyss into which we fall if we reject the inner order and the outer; he had concluded by suggesting that it is not impossible to recover the order of the soul and the order of the commonwealth." I happen to think his thesis is untrue; I happen to think his Eliot is a simplistic, tendentious one.
Kirk spends roughly a third of the book describing times (or rather, ideas which he can lodge into the narration of the time) after Eliot stopped writing poetry. During that time, he pats himself gratuitously on the back because he had met Eliot and had some correspondence with the man. Observe: "That Christmas he sent to me--as to a good many others--his newly published Ariel Poem, 'The Cultivation of Christmas Tees': an appropriate token of friendship in my case, for I had planted several thousands of pines and spruces on my ancestral acres that year." (By observing my students, I know that an adequate rejoinder here is "cool story, bro.") This last third of the book offers roughly one revealing detail about Eliot, amid several thousands of them about Kirk.
"The last temptation is the greatest treason," Mr. Kirk?
Kirk spends roughly a third of the book describing times (or rather, ideas which he can lodge into the narration of the time) after Eliot stopped writing poetry. During that time, he pats himself gratuitously on the back because he had met Eliot and had some correspondence with the man. Observe: "That Christmas he sent to me--as to a good many others--his newly published Ariel Poem, 'The Cultivation of Christmas Tees': an appropriate token of friendship in my case, for I had planted several thousands of pines and spruces on my ancestral acres that year." (By observing my students, I know that an adequate rejoinder here is "cool story, bro.") This last third of the book offers roughly one revealing detail about Eliot, amid several thousands of them about Kirk.
"The last temptation is the greatest treason," Mr. Kirk?
November 23, 2020
I understand more of my favorite poet than I did before reading. The last 100 pages justify the length for those looking for a personal recounting of Eliot’s thoughts on himself, his place in time, and his work that refuses to be limited by it.
February 5, 2022
This is something of an intellectual biography and intellectual history. It not only satisfies those like myself who are very keen on Eliot, but will also edify and amuse those who are interested in the history of ideas, conservatism, and modern letters. I do think that one needn't be interested in Eliot per se to enjoy this very thorough study, as it is engaging in all the ways mentioned previously. But, if you are seeking a deep study of Eliot I have yet to find anything to match this. Kirk even engages in some literary analysis, which is quite good.
All in all, it reads smoothly and keeps one engaged throughout. But, it is also very astute and intelligent.
All in all, it reads smoothly and keeps one engaged throughout. But, it is also very astute and intelligent.
October 24, 2018
This is a masterpiece. Eliot and Kirk were a generation apart but they were of one mind about the important things, the permanent things. They were both students of Burke of the 18th Century. They believed in ordered Liberty and the part Christianity plays in Western Civilization. This book needs to be read slowly and savored.
June 8, 2023
Russell Kirk’s “Eliot and His Age” is a magisterial intellectual biography: it is a study that thoroughly examines T.S. Eliot’s corpus, while managing to eschew the fever swamps of literary theory. Eliot and Kirk were not contemporaries; yet despite a thirty year age difference they shared a common temperament, an allegiance to what Burke termed the permanent things. Both men were widely read, and adhered to a belief in ordered liberty along with the historical ascendancy of Christendom.
Kirk borrows from Edmund Burke the concept of “the moral imagination” to indicate the theoretical grounding for Eliot’s endeavor in both verse and prose. Both Burke and Eliot would have agreed that a society devoid of a belief in transcendent values, is a society which risks its very demise. In addition, both men were deeply committed to the humanities, a pursuit Eliot deemed necessary to buttress the West from the ongoing ravages of positivism and scientism. In short, Burke's "moral imagination"-really intellect informed by faith- was, for Eliot, an integral response to the total crisis of modernity.
Kirk probably overstates Burke’s influence on Eliot, but the poet’s dissent from the zeitgeist does bear a family resemblance to the writings of the later Burke. Like Dante before him, or his contemporary Roy Campbell, Eliot was a poet out of step with his age, a poet willing to call for a return to fundamental values; all three were in accord with respect to their vision of man’s place in the cosmos. As Kirk demonstrates, Eliot’s poetry and prose exhibited a subtle yet withering dose of self-criticism. "The Wasteland" would disturb the complacency of the postwar West, and forever change modern poetry. Kirk’s biography is a readable and admirable examination of Eliot’s aims and of his work. While Kirk’s use of "the moral imagination” suggests a heuristic that some will find contentious, this is a book that is exceedingly edifying.
Kirk borrows from Edmund Burke the concept of “the moral imagination” to indicate the theoretical grounding for Eliot’s endeavor in both verse and prose. Both Burke and Eliot would have agreed that a society devoid of a belief in transcendent values, is a society which risks its very demise. In addition, both men were deeply committed to the humanities, a pursuit Eliot deemed necessary to buttress the West from the ongoing ravages of positivism and scientism. In short, Burke's "moral imagination"-really intellect informed by faith- was, for Eliot, an integral response to the total crisis of modernity.
Kirk probably overstates Burke’s influence on Eliot, but the poet’s dissent from the zeitgeist does bear a family resemblance to the writings of the later Burke. Like Dante before him, or his contemporary Roy Campbell, Eliot was a poet out of step with his age, a poet willing to call for a return to fundamental values; all three were in accord with respect to their vision of man’s place in the cosmos. As Kirk demonstrates, Eliot’s poetry and prose exhibited a subtle yet withering dose of self-criticism. "The Wasteland" would disturb the complacency of the postwar West, and forever change modern poetry. Kirk’s biography is a readable and admirable examination of Eliot’s aims and of his work. While Kirk’s use of "the moral imagination” suggests a heuristic that some will find contentious, this is a book that is exceedingly edifying.
April 13, 2025
Excellent profile of Elliot, both his life and work. Great insights into the nuances of his often-misunderstood political views, especially his criticisms of Fascism and Communism during the mid-twentieth century.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews