Thomas Stearns Eliot (26 September 1888 – 4 January 1965) was an essayist, publisher, playwright, literary and social critic and “one of the twentieth century’s major poets.” Born in St. Louis, Missouri in the United States, he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927.

The Truth of Beauty: Educating the Moral Imagination

By |2024-07-19T21:33:44-05:00July 19th, 2024|Categories: Beauty, Benjamin Lockerd, C.S. Lewis, Russell Kirk, Senior Contributors, T.S. Eliot, Timeless Essays, Truth|

The answers to the errors of modern times need to be given in philosophy and theology, but it is essential that we also experience the truth imaginatively. Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. —Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” These famous lines of Keats [...]

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The Voice of This Calling: The Enduring Legacy of T.S. Eliot

By |2024-07-11T10:18:12-05:00July 8th, 2024|Categories: Essential, Russell Kirk, T.S. Eliot, The Conservative Mind, Timeless Essays, Tradition|

T. S. Eliot offers neither a program for success nor a recipe of happiness, no remedy, nostrum or elixir, but simply the counsel of hope, the example of his prudence, play, and compassion, all as part of the imperative of the unremitting spiritual discipline of tradition. In 1953, the first edition of The Conservative Mind [...]

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T.S. Eliot: The Light Invisible

By |2024-01-26T05:55:11-06:00January 25th, 2024|Categories: Benjamin Lockerd, Books, Featured, Literature, T.S. Eliot, Timeless Essays|Tags: |

The modern secularist, T.S. Eliot argued, finds meaning either in the brute forces of the physical world or the arbitrary freeplay of the mind or the passing consensus of the human tribe. Looking for meaning in these places has not only led individuals to a sense of nihilism but has led whole nations to slaughter [...]

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Russell Kirk’s “Saviourgate”: Timeless Moments & the Paradisical Journey

By |2024-01-04T13:45:35-06:00January 4th, 2024|Categories: Dante, Ghost Stories, Literature, Russell Kirk, T.S. Eliot|

Set in Yorkshire, England on Christmas Eve, Russell Kirk’s short story “Saviourgate” is a story about the soul’s journey through the afterlife. Whereas many ghost stories explore only the diabolical imagination, “Saviourgate” opens up creative possibilities for thinking about life’s timeless moments and how they may be glimpses of paradise. Ghost stories were standard Christmas [...]

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Permanent Things: T.S. Eliot’s Conservatism

By |2024-01-03T21:50:31-06:00January 3rd, 2024|Categories: Benjamin Lockerd, Conservatism, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Russell Kirk, T.S. Eliot, Timeless Essays|

T.S. Eliot’s conservatism is “pre-political,” offering no simple formula for the modern polity. He reminds us that even if we could have our way in the political arena we would be unable to create a perfect society, given our own fallen nature. Such a wise mixture of hope and humility is what can keep conservatism [...]

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Should Beauty Have a Purpose?

By |2023-09-15T19:49:21-05:00September 14th, 2023|Categories: Art, Books, Culture, Featured, Literature, Philosophy, St. Thomas Aquinas, T.S. Eliot, Timeless Essays|

The love of beauty as such is one of the things that can attract men to the God who is infinitely beautiful. But is it the case that we ought to pursue beauty only to the extent that it is joined to some function? A previous essay of mine published in this journal made passing reference [...]

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The Dilemma of the Conservative Artist

By |2023-08-17T17:54:16-05:00August 17th, 2023|Categories: Art, Beauty, Conservatism, Featured, Literature, T.S. Eliot, Timeless Essays|

Unless we conservatives make an effort to engage in a sustained and regular way with all legitimate developments of the artistic tradition, we will contribute not to the preservation of the tradition but to its ossification into a relic of the past, admired by an increasingly marginalized subculture. Ask a conservative why conservatives tend to [...]

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The Faith of Men of Let­ters

By |2023-08-09T15:25:44-05:00August 9th, 2023|Categories: Benjamin Lockerd, Books, George A. Panichas, Russell Kirk, T.S. Eliot, Timeless Essays|Tags: |

T.S. Eliot cer­tainly pos­sessed cre­ative courage, but he also pos­sessed, as Russell Kirk demon­strates bet­ter than any other com­men­ta­tor, a con­sum­mate spir­i­tual courage. This con­flu­ence of cre­ative and spir­i­tual courage fi­nally per­mits Eliot to at­tain his great­est vi­sion­ary mo­ment in his com­po­si­tion of "Four Quar­tets." Eliot and His Age: T. S. Eliot’s Moral Imagination in [...]

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John Dryden: The Politics of Style

By |2023-07-18T14:17:32-05:00July 18th, 2023|Categories: Art, Conservatism, Culture, Order, Poetry, T.S. Eliot, Timeless Essays|Tags: , |

John Dryden was, for the most part, a man of quiet temperament; yet he presided over a literary revolution. As a poet and critic he destroyed the principal seventeenth-century literary modes and created the style and the methods that would characterize the eighteenth. The rise in John Dryden’s reputation, commencing a generation or so ago, [...]

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T.S. Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday”

By |2024-02-13T20:46:22-06:00February 21st, 2023|Categories: Ash Wednesday, Bradley J. Birzer, Conservatism, Lent, Literature, T.S. Eliot, Timeless Essays|

T.S. Eliot’s “Ash-Wednesday,” a monumental work—the Purgatorio between the Inferno of “The Waste-land” and the Paradiso of the “Four Quartets”—has always been, as long as I can remember in my adult life, a comfort and a mystery to me. I assume it remained as such even to the Great Bard of the Twentieth Century himself. [...]

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T.S. Eliot as Conservative Mentor

By |2023-01-03T12:07:00-06:00January 3rd, 2023|Categories: Conservatism, Roger Scruton, T.S. Eliot, Timeless Essays|

Should modern man devote himself like Sartre to undermining bourgeois society and scoffing at manners and morals? Should he play the part of Socrates, questioning everything and affirming nothing? To answer yes to any of those questions is to grant nothing to human life beyond the mockery of it. T.S. Eliot’s solution was to embrace [...]

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Grace in the Garden: The Fall of Man & the British Pastoral Tradition

By |2022-12-28T20:00:42-06:00December 28th, 2022|Categories: Books, Featured, John Milton, Literature, Poetry, Russell Kirk, T.S. Eliot, Timeless Essays|

The transcendent ‘overcoming’ or reconciliation of the Fall of Man—that symbol of the cause of the disorder that we would wish re-ordered, of the return to the garden—is what great poetry graciously asks of us. “An intermediate nature... prevents the universe falling into two separate halves.” —Plato, Symposium (203b). Almost from the beginning of when human [...]

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