Kirk Reissuance

Great piece The Imaginative Conservative about the recent reissuance of Russell Kirk's Eliot and His Age. This is one of the few books of Kirk's I haven't read. I was able to write my essay biography of him without it, and when I eventually went to pick it up, I couldn't get into it for some reason. This essay stirs me to try it again.

"Eliot and His Age is a big and thor­ough book that ex­am­ines the to­tal­ity of Eliot's vi­sion. Kirk blends in his commentary all those el­e­ments that are the root-sub­stance of a poet's vi­sion–the cre­ative and the crit­i­cal, the lit­er­ary and the social, the po­lit­i­cal and the eco­nomic, the re­li­gious and the philo­soph­i­cal. If all these el­e­ments are to be elucidated, the critic who ful­fills his true re­spon­si­bil­ity must pos­sess the his­tor­i­cal sense and also es­tab­lish connections proportionately. The pos­ses­sion of these crit­i­cal prop­er­ties helps to de­fine the ex­clu­sive­ness of the critic's function and to make that func­tion per­ti­nent to the mean­ing of civ­i­liza­tion and the des­tiny of man. The critic, no less than the cre­ator, who views the world as an or­ganic whole, en­ables us to un­der­stand the world in all of its manifestations. He en­ables us, as Eliot once ob­served, “to see be­neath both beauty and ug­li­ness; to see the bore­dom, and the hor­ror and the glory.” Such a critic is more than a critic; he is a man of let­ters who, as Ralph Waldo Emer­son wrote, 'has drawn the white lot in life.'"