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English Letters in the Age of Boredom

April 27, 2013 By 1 Comment
letters

Russell Kirk

by Russell Kirk

Some day I shall write a book with the title The Age of Eliot (ed., published as Eliot and His Age). The span of Mr. T. S. Eliot’s life, extending from the ascendancy of President Cleveland and Lord Salisbury to our present troubled hour, has been characterized by as much material change as any age in the whole of history; and this alteration of society and the very face of the world has been paralleled by a profound change in the realm of letters, and that not a change for the better. When Mr. Eliot was a boy, the great Victorians still thundered, and American letters ranged all the way from Henry Adams to Mark Twain. Since then, much of the virtue has gone out of English and American literature. The English literary world suffers from the disease of acedia, the American from the disease of concupiscence; and both these maladies, I believe, are at once symptoms and products of a deep-seated boredom. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Books, Literature, Moral Imagination, Russell Kirk, T.S. Eliot Tagged With: April 27, 2013

Oak and Stone and the Permanent Things: Some Reflections on Edmund Burke’s Becket

March 4, 2013 By 1 Comment
Edmund Burke

Edmund Burke

by Ian Crowe 

For the present is the point at which time touches eternity.-C.S. Lewis[1]

It was in 1939, in The Idea of a Christian Society, that T.S. Eliot defended what he called “the permanent things” against a world that appeared drunk on the politics of revolution and “change.”  Eliot’s purpose was not a defense of conservatism—which he referred to in the same passage as, too often, “conservation of the wrong things”—but of the vital role of the institution of the Church in Western society.  Eliot considered the province of the “permanent things” to be the “pre-political area,” and their intellectual guardian to be theology.[2]  The social sciences, Eliot mentions sociology and economics specifically, may guide us to what is expedient, or ameliorative, or even utopian—that is, they may inform our ethics and politics—but without a claim on permanence, they cannot really reinforce, and certainly cannot replace, theological understanding. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Edmund Burke, Ian Crowe, Permanent Things, T.S. Eliot, Thomas à Becket March 4, 2013

The Permanent Things

February 9, 2013 By Leave a Comment

by Russell Kirk

T.S. Eliot

T.S. Eliot

By “the Permanent Things” [T. S. Eliot] meant those elements in the human condition that give us our nature, without which we are as the beasts that perish. They work upon us all in the sense that both they and we are bound up in that continuity of belief and institution called the great mysterious incorporation of the human race.

For books by Russell Kirk and T.S. Eliot please visit The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Permanent Things, Quotes, Russell Kirk, T.S. Eliot February 9, 2013

On Popular Fictions, Or How I Learned to Relax and Enjoy Downton Abbey

February 9, 2013 By 3 Comments
Downton Abbey

Dan McInerny

by Daniel McInerny

A friend of mine wrote on Facebook about Downton Abbey: “take away the English accents, the bucolic setting, the period costumes, and the antiquated moral code, and you’re left with Days of Our Lives.Some truth to that, I thought at first. Downton Abbey often suffers from severe melodramatic fits. Such as: the illicit lover who ends up dying in flagrante delicto…the spine-injured war-hero who suddenly and miraculously walks again…the lovers kept apart by social class…the dying fiancée who importunes her betrothed to marry the woman she knows he really loves…the odious newspaper magnate who coerces a young woman into marriage on pains of exposing her awful secret…the prostitute with a heart of gold…the noble valet forced unjustly to do a stretch in the jug…
Pretty fruity stuff, as Bertie Wooster would say. But how different, really, from plot elements that might be found in Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Trollope, or The Great Gatsby? [Read more...]
Filed Under: Art, Books, Culture, Daniel McInerny, Fiction, Film, G.K. Chesterton, T.S. Eliot February 9, 2013

Modernism & Conservatism: Does the culture of “The Waste Land” lead to freedom—or something more?

November 26, 2012 By 3 Comments

by Daniel McCarthy

modernismNearly 30 years before he shocked National Review by endorsing Barack Obama for president, senior editor Jeffery Hart announced a divorce of a different kind from the American right. With “The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to a Modern American Conservatism”—published in The New Right Papers in 1982 and previewed in NR a few months earlier—Hart split with tradition and declared himself on the side of modernism in art, literature, and morals. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Conservatism, Daniel McCarthy, Film, Modernity, T.S. Eliot, The American Conservative November 26, 2012

One Man’s Life

September 26, 2012 By Leave a Comment
by T.S. Eliot
To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man’s life.–The Nobel laureate and poet was born on this day in 1888, from The Use of Poetry & The Use of Criticism
Filed Under: Quotes, T.S. Eliot September 26, 2012

Big Big Train: England is Now

August 30, 2012 By 5 Comments

by Bradley J. Birzer

big big train

In the last of his Four Quartets, “Little Gidding”–arguably the finest work of art to emerge in the twentieth century–the Anglo-American poet, T.S. Eliot, offered the following:

A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.
With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling.

Eliot’s poem has been described by his best critics as an examination of the world from within a mystery. That is, the reader approaches the world from the interior of the mystery itself.  [Read more...]

Filed Under: Andy Poole, David Gregory, David Longdon, G.K. Chesterton, Greg Spawton, Music, Nick D'Virgilio, prog, Progressive Rock, T.S. Eliot, Western Civilization August 30, 2012

The Light Invisible

August 21, 2012 By Leave a Comment

T.S. Eliotby Benjamin Lockerd

T. S. Eliot
 (Longman Critical Readers Series) 
edited and introduced by Harriet Davidson.

)

The current dominance of postmodern literary theory in the Academy may be illustrated by an experience of mine at the relatively conservative institution where I teach. Some years ago, I was examining the course materials of a new colleague who was undergoing a review, and I was shocked to find in the syllabus for her “History of Literary Criticism” course that she covered everything from Plato to Eliot in a few weeks, spending the rest of the term on criticism written in her own lifetime. When I told her this syllabus was not appropriate for a survey course, she admitted that her approach was skewed but said she simply did not find Aristotle’s Poetics interesting. Before long, a proposal was made (and approved by faculty governance committees) to change the course description so as to permit such a syllabus. This postmodern transformation of literary studies is old news now—so much so that it is possible, at the turn of the millennium, to publish retrospective collections of what might be called (oxymoronically) classic postmodern criticism. The “Longman Critical Readers Series” now numbers over thirty volumes containing the most highly regarded essays of the past few decades. The recent addition to this series of a volume on T. S. Eliot offers an opportunity to assess what has been done by several movements in literary criticism over the past quarter century in their encounter with a writer who was extremely well versed in modern philosophy but fundamentally committed to some ancient philosophical principles. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Ben Lockerd, Books, Literature, T.S. Eliot, University Bookman August 21, 2012

Permanent Things: T. S. Eliot’s Conservatism

June 13, 2012 By 4 Comments

by Ben Lockerd

Eliot

Ben Lockered

I want to thank Winston Elliott and the Center for the American Republic for giving me this opportunity to expatiate on a topic that has been much on my mind for many years, but which I have never addressed directly. Let me also say at the outset that I will be following the lead of Russell Kirk throughout this talk. Dr. Kirk first met T.S. Eliot in 1953 just when his blockbuster book, The Conservative Mind, was published. The two carried on a correspondence for the remaining decade or so of Eliot’s life and met several times. Eliot saw to it that his publishing house, Faber and Faber, came out with the British edition of The Conservative Mind. The subtitle of the book was From Burke to Santayana, but in the revised edition Kirk expanded his treatment of Eliot in the final chapter and substituted Eliot for Santayana in the subtitle. Some years after the poet’s death, Kirk wrote Eliot and His Age, which remains today the best introduction to Eliot’s life and writings. Kirk’s books and essays are the definitive guide to understanding Eliot’s political ideas, and this talk is deeply indebted to him. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Ben Lockerd, Conservatism, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Russell Kirk, T.S. Eliot June 13, 2012

T.S Eliot’s Christianity and Culture: the Problem of Establishment

June 11, 2012 By 1 Comment

by Bruce Frohnen

T.S Eliot's Christianity and Culture

T.S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot indisputably was, and remains, in the first rank of poets of any era and any culture.[1] Eliot is almost as well known among literate persons as a critic and literary theorist. His journal, The Criterion, despite its short lifespan, remains the standard of high modernism. Continuing interest in Eliot is shown in the recent re-issue of Russell Kirk’s Eliot and His Age. But Eliot’s stature as a critic has suffered due to the same elements that make his poetry so highly admired—its call to intellectual rigor and demand for active, learned engagement with the Western tradition and with traditions and civilizations outside the West. Thus Eliot’s thought has been dismissed as “arrogant” and “elitist” even as the products of that thought have been accepted as essential elements of our literature.[2] Least regarded in the mainstream of English-speaking letters are Eliot’s writings on culture. Championed by a few religious and traditional conservative thinkers,[3] these writings also are mentioned in connection with charges of Eliot’s anti-Semitism,[4] or more often, simply ignored. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Books, Bruce Frohnen, Political Science Reviewer, T.S. Eliot June 11, 2012

T. S. Eliot, Poetry and Propaganda

June 6, 2012 By Leave a Comment

by T.S. Eliot

poetry and propaganda

“First of all no art, and particularly and especially no literary art, can exist in a vacuum. We are , in in practice, creatures of divers interests, and in many of our ordinary interests there is not obvious coherence.” (598)

“I do not suppose that there ever has been, or will be, a critic of any art, whose appreciation was a separate faculty, quite judicious and wholly isolated from his other interests and his private passions: if there was, is or will be, he was, is or will be a bore with nothing at all to say.” (598)

“But this apparent paradox–this need of aiming at one thing in order to do another–this apparent gospel of hypocrisy or self-deception, is right, it is in the nature of the human soul and embodies its need and craving for perfection and unity. We do tend, I think, to organize our tastes in various arts into a whole; we aim in the end at a theory of life, or a view of life, and so far we are conscious, to terminate our enjoyment of the arts in a philosophy, and our philosophy in a religion–in such a way that the personal to oneself is fused and completed in the impersonal and general, not extinguished, but enriched, expanded, developed, and more itself by becoming more something not itself.” (598-599) [Read more...]

Filed Under: Poetry, Propaganda, Quotes, T.S. Eliot June 6, 2012

Thoughts after Lambeth

May 27, 2012 By 1 Comment

by T.S. Eliot

lambeth conference 1930[TIC readers, I had the privilege of transcribing Eliot's famous essay, "Thoughts on Lambeth" this week.  Below is a significant part of the essay (roughly  2/3 of it).  I have edited it only down in size; I've not made any other changes.  The formatting of the original piece is quite strange (lots of weird characters, etc), and I've done my best to preserve all of these as well as the English (as in UK) spellings.  I did remove all of the footnotes.  This is some of Eliot's most revealing writing, especially regarding The Waste Land as a personal journey not as a critique of modernity).  It also is deeply rooted in time (early 1930s controversies over birth control) but touches upon transcendent themes.  That Eliot saw the Anglican Church as the true Catholic Church with the Roman Catholic Church being the fundamentalist church and the "free churches" as emotional outlets continues to fascinate me.  What would Eliot say about the current state of Christianity?  Of the Anglican church?  Well, please enjoy—Brad Birzer].

Thoughts After Lambeth

The Church of England washes its dirty linen in public. It is convenient and brief to begin with this metaphorical statement. In contrast to some other institutions both civil and ecclesiastical, the linen does get washed. To have linen to wash is something; and to assert that one’s linen never needed washing would be a suspicious boast. Without some understanding of these habits of the Church, the reader of the Report of the Lambeth Conference (1930) will find it a difficult and in some directions a misleading document. The Report needs to be read in the light of previous Reports; with some knowledge, and with some sympathy for that oddest of institutions, the Church of England. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Brad Birzer, Culture, T.S. Eliot Tagged With: May 27, 2012
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