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

Modern Age, Fall, 2003 by Clinton A. Brand

1. The Dry Salvages, I. 233. Quotations of Eliot's verse are from Collected Poems 1909-1962 (New York, 1970). 2. On Kirk's first meeting with Eliot and their ensuing friendship, see Eliot and His Age (Peru, Ill., 1971), 4-5 and passim, and The Sword of Imagination: Memoirs of a Half-Century of Literary Conflict (Grand Rapids, 1995), 212-216.

Though sadly out of print, Eliot and His Age remains perhaps the best and most engaging introduction to Eliot's life and times, as well as the range of his writings, including poetry, drama, essays, lectures, reviews, and letters. Though Kirk does not offer particularly original readings of the poems, his literary criticism is unfailingly judicious, and he provides lucid guidance through some of the most challenging verse of the century. 3. Eliot and His Age, 9-10. 4. Ibid., 7. 5. Ibid., 429. 6. Ibid., 428. 7. Ibid., 432. 8. Ibid., 433-434. 9. "Tradition and the Individual Talent," in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York, 1975), 38. 10. The Dry Salvages, I. 93. 11. Cynthia Ozick, "T. S. Eliot at 101," The New Yorker (November 20, 1989): 119. 12. Ibid., 122. 13. Ibid., 152-53. 14. Ibid., 154. 15. The Dry Salvages, II. 97-99. 16. See Denis Donoghue's Words Alone: The Poet T. S. Eliot (New Haven, 2000). 17. Especially interesting in light of Ozick's piece in The New Yorker is Mark Krupnick's essay, "Cynthia Ozick as the Jewish T. S. Eliot," Soundings 74 (1991): 351-368. 18. East Coker, I. 190 and Little Gidding, I. 237. 19. See Alasdair Maclntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, 1988), esp. Ch. 18. "The Rationality of Traditions." 20. Burnt Norton, I. 104. 21. Little Gidding, II. 126-128. 22. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, ed. Garrett Barden and John Cumming (New York, 1982), 258. 23. See Jens Zimmerman, "Confusion of Horizons: Gadamer and the Christian Logos," Journal of Beliefs & Values 22 (2001): 87-98. 24. In a letter to Paul Elmer More, dated 3 August 1929, Eliot wrote, "Most critics appear to think that my catholicism is merely an escape or an evasion, certainly a defeat. I acknowledge the difficulty of a positive Christianity nowadays; and I can only say that the dangers pointed out, and my own weaknesses, have been apparent to me long before my critics noticed them. But it [is] rather trying to be supposed to have settled oneself in an easy chair, when one has just begun a long journey afoot." Quoted in John D. Margolis, T. S. Eliot's Intellectual Development 1922-1939 (Chicago, 1972), 143. 25. Burnt Norton, II. 149-50 and Gerontion, I. 35. 26. Truth and Method, 321. 27. Quoted in R. P. Blackmur, "In the Hope of Straightening Things Out," in T. S. Eliot: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Hugh Kenner (Englewood Cliffs, 1962), 140. 28. See Truth and Method, 278-289. 29. Five-Finger Exercises, V. "Lines for Cuscuscaraway and Mirza Murad Ali Beg," II. 6-8. 30. Truth and Method, 91. 31. Ibid., 446. 32. Ibid., 302. 33. The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, 95. 34. Truth and Method, 101. 35. Ozick, "T. S. Eliot at 101," 143. 36. Truth and Method, 320. 37. Eliot and His Age, 5. 38. East Coker, I. 147 and Little Gidding, II. 167-168. 39. The Dry Salvages, I. 170. 40. Little Gidding, I. 238 and The Dry Salvages, I. 214.