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Will Eliot Endure?
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10231 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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8 / 1993 |
3,457 Words |
| Author
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Russell Kirk
Russell Kirk is the author of more than thirty books,
including The Conservative Mind, now available in its seventh
revised edition. |
When concerned with great literature, we speak of an Age of Chaucer, of Shakespeare, of Dryden, of Samuel Johnson. Our century has been the Age of Eliot. From 1921 to the present, the realm of humane letters has been dominated by the accomplishment of T.S. Eliot--and so it will be, I expect, to the end of the twentieth century, if latterly by Eliot's ghost. (Ghosts pop up fairly frequently in Eliot's poems.)
Nor has this literary domination prevailed in English-speaking countries merely: Throughout the world during 1988, the centenary of Eliot's birth, in most centers of civilization Eliot was given his due. At the venerable city of Monza, in Italy, for instance, there was carried on for several months, at the expense of the commune, an elaborate celebration of Eliot's achievement--plays, exhibitions, readings, lectures--this writer delivering the final address, "T.S. Eliot: A Testimony," in the elegant antique theater of the vast Villa Reale. Schooled Italians all recognize Eliot's affinity to Dante and sometimes speak of the two as equals.
English literature now being read and taught worldwide, one encounters circles of Eliot admirers in India and Japan--and critical studies of Eliot's work being produced in those lands. Round the globe, Eliot is more studied than any major British or American writer of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and eclipses in reputation his contemporaries. Perhaps, then, it is time to examine the character of his attraction, and whether Eliot's power over the imagination will endure.
THE PERMANENT THINGS
In every era, the dominant man of letters has been a champion of what Eliot called "the permanent things"--the norms of the human condition. Frequently that dominant man of letters has swum against the strong intellectual currents of his time. In the twentieth century, Eliot became the great poetic arbiter of this ethical continuity.
Like Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century, Eliot held in contempt the climate of opinion in which he found himself. Like Johnson, in some degree he succeeded in altering that climate of opinion. A recent spate of books about Eliot's life and works suggests his continuing relevance to our present discontents, literary and moral and political--and his enduring power over minds and hearts. Because Eliot's poems and plays and essays all are pertinent to the permanent things, they survive into what is called our Information Age--which might more truthfully be labeled the
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