The voice of this Calling: the enduring legacy of T.S. Eliot

Modern Age, Fall, 2003 by Clinton A. Brand

IN 1953, THE FIRST EDITION of The Conservative Mind was subtitled From Burke to Santayana; the second and every edition thereafter bore the subtitle From Burke to Eliot. Not only did this adjustment afford Kirk a bookend better consisting with Burke, but the change was also fortuitous as one element of a broader clarification of Kirk's premise and purpose. For the second edition, Kirk enlarged his discussion of Eliot, and he also recast the final chapter, changing its final section from one called "The plan of action for American conservatives" to one entitled "The conservative as poet." Thus, Kirk emphasized formally an argument that runs throughout his book--that the most vital expressions of conservative thought are not to be measured so much by effective political activity as by their reflection in the tradition of humane letters, particularly in those writers who (to borrow Kirk's habitual wording) furnished anew the wardrobe of the moral imagination.

In T. S. Eliot, Kirk found just such an exemplar of thoughtful conservatism informed by an acute literary sensibility. Perhaps more importantly, in selecting Eliot as something of a latter-day counterpart to Burke--certainly as a figure more substantial than Santayana and one still living at the time of his writing--Kirk was looking ahead, beyond the tradition of thought he had surveyed, to identify possible models and resources for cultivating the "Conservatives' Promise," as he titled his concluding chapter. The golden anniversary of the original publication of The Conservative Mind offers an occasion to reassess that promise and to suggest what the legacy of T.S. Eliot has to offer another generation as we work the fields of a different cultural landscape, venturing to renew what Eliot called "The life of significant soil." (1)

I

Kirk's substitution of Eliot for Santayana was not merely an afterthought but rather indicative of his sustained engagement with Eliot as he sought to honor an intellectual debt. Shortly after arriving at Saint Andrew's University in 1948 to commence his doctoral studies and to compose the manuscript that would become The Conservative Mind, Kirk discovered Eliot's Notes towards the Definition of Culture; immediately, he felt a sense of intellectual kinship. The two men met for the first time in Edinburgh in 1953, and that meeting began a friendship that lasted until Eliot's death in 1965, and which issued in the publication six years later of Kirk's long-germinating study, Eliot and His Age: T.S. Eliot's Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century. (2)

Kirk's book on Eliot makes explicit and endeavors to substantiate a strong claim more modestly adumbrated in his survey of conservative thought: "ours has been the Age of Eliot." In the years from the end of the First World War through the first score after the Second, Kirk argued, "Thomas Stearns Eliot, a shy colossus, bestrode the period as Virgil or Dante or Dryden or Johnson had dominated very different times." (3) In thus characterizing Eliot's dominion, Kirk was not simply designating an era of literary history or weighing the poet's considerable influence; nor was he just paying tribute to the one who gave us in The Waste Land the preeminent metaphor for our times; rather, for Kirk, "Eliot was the principal champion of the moral imagination in the twentieth century." Eliot summed up the spiritual loss and longing of an epoch so "that, beyond the boredom and the horror, men might perceive the glory." (4)

Kirk saw in Eliot a vital link to the past and a promising link to the future. But he was also aware at the time he finished Eliot and His Age in 1971 that the "Age of Eliot" was waning and that forces were mustering to launch a post-mortem assault on Eliot's authority, reputation, and credibility: "Catholic, royalist, classicist--a writer so bold as to describe himself thus sets himself up as a mark to be shot at by folks who worship strange gods." (5) Kirk also predicted that the figure who had been so widely lionized in his lifetime, often for all the wrong reasons, would with the inevitable sharpening of ideological knives become prey to "the rising fad of psychobiography" and grist for the mill of the hermeneutics of suspicion. (6) Even a cursory survey of writings on Eliot over the last two decades amply confirms the worst of Kirk's fears. Yet Kirk's sympathetic study of Eliot was not, it needs emphasizing, an exercise in hagiography. Actually, the book is remarkably judicious and at points sharply critical of its subject. Kirk sought to rescue Eliot as much from misguided deification as from malicious demonization.

Accordingly, Kirk's task was (and it remains ours today) to discern the enduring value of Eliot's life and work behind the associations, misconceptions, and half-truths conjured by the poet's name: the upstart American who took the European literary establishment by storm; the iconoclastic pioneer of poetic modernism; the romantic nihilist and connoisseur of the aesthetics of despair; the arch architect of obscurity; the neurasthenic neo-medievalist and fusty Anglican; the literary dictator and mandarin arbiter of elite taste (though even Kirk indulges this last one a bit, repeating a touch too solemnly the facetious sobriquet of the aging director of Faber & Faber, "the Pope of Russell Square").