Eliot and His Age: T. S. Eliot's Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century

Eliot and His Age remains the best introduction to T. S. Eliot’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 meanin…