T.S. Eliot Archives ~ Page 5 of 10 ~ The Imaginative Conservative

The Conservatism of Robert Nisbet

By Bradley J. Birzer|2021-04-27T21:06:48-05:00January 7th, 2018|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Christopher Dawson, Conservatism, Culture, Edmund Burke, History, Imagination, Irving Babbitt, Religion, Robert Nisbet, Romano Guardini, Russell Kirk, T.S. Eliot, Tradition|

Robert Nisbet, in direct contrast to Russell Kirk, argued that conservatism was purely a modern ideology. For Nisbet, the entire history of conservatism began as a reaction to the French Revolution… When it came to the history of conservatism, the grand sociologist and man of letters, Robert Nisbet, disagreed with the mighty founder of modern [...]

Beauty Will Save the World

By Gregory Wolfe|2021-05-26T16:53:32-05:00December 10th, 2017|Categories: Art, Beauty, Books, Christianity, Conservatism, Culture, Imagination, Modernity, Religion, Richard Weaver, Russell Kirk, T.S. Eliot, The Imaginative Conservative, Timeless Essays|

If art cannot save our souls, it can do much to redeem the time, to give us a true image of ourselves, both in the horror and the boredom to which we can descend, and in the glory which we may, in rare moments, be privileged to glimpse. Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series [...]

The Language of Neurosis: T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”

By Ryan Hess|2019-07-11T11:39:21-05:00October 30th, 2017|Categories: Christianity, Modernity, Poetry, T.S. Eliot|

In The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot gives us a terrifying gaze at the spiritual reality of the world. All men are cracked, thirsty and longing for death… “The awful daring of a moment’s surrender / which an age of prudence can never retract / by this, and this only, we have existed / which is not [...]

Irving Babbitt’s Higher Will

By Bradley J. Birzer|2021-04-27T21:24:14-05:00September 18th, 2017|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Christian Humanism, Conservatism, Featured, Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, Religion, T.S. Eliot|

Irving Babbitt believed that man defined himself not by his rights, but by his duties, and particularly how willing he was to restrain his darker impulses and sacrifice himself for another… Famously, when Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt were debating one another while on a walk, the former, exasperated, asked: “Good God, man. Are [...]

Making Peace With the World: T. S. Eliot & the Purpose of Poetry

By David Withun|2019-10-08T17:40:59-05:00August 23rd, 2017|Categories: Literature, Modernity, Poetry, T.S. Eliot|

Poetry is able to grant the reader the ability to perceive that reality, in spite of its often chaotic and random appearance, has some underlying unity by which it is bound together. This insight, in turn, provides the terms by which one may make peace with the world... A 2012 survey found that only 6.7% [...]

T.S. Eliot’s “The Fire Sermon”: Of Memory & Salvation

By Nayeli Riano|2024-01-04T14:12:46-06:00August 8th, 2017|Categories: Conservatism, Featured, Modernity, St. Augustine, T.S. Eliot|

T.S. Eliot reminds us that the answers to our soul’s depravity are all around us, in our collective culture—the books we read, the places we inhabit, the music we listen to—but also that culture can only survive if we remember it and keep it alive. “These things I do within, in that vast chamber of [...]

The Return of Christian Humanism

By David G. Bonagura Jr.|2022-03-17T17:39:50-05:00August 3rd, 2017|Categories: Books, Christianity, Communio, G.K. Chesterton, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literature, Pope Benedict XVI, T.S. Eliot|Tags: 1MA, David G. Bonagura Jr.|

Even when addressing non-Christians, Christian humanism’s willing receptiveness of the supernatural opens itself to the truths of revelation and of the human religious experience, allowing it to speak intimately and truthfully to the whole person… The Return of Christian Humanism: Chesterton, Eliot, Tolkien, and the Romance of History by Lee Oser (University of Missouri Press, [...]

“Eeldrop and Appleplex”

By T.S. Eliot|2017-07-18T22:55:58-05:00July 20th, 2017|Categories: Culture, Fiction, Imagination, Literature, T.S. Eliot|

The majority not only have no language to express anything save generalized man; they are for the most part unaware of themselves as anything but generalized men... I Eeldrop and Appleplex rented two small rooms in a disreputable part of town. Here they sometimes came at nightfall, here they sometimes slept, and after they had [...]

There and Back Again: A Conversion Story

By Dwight Longenecker|2019-01-07T15:16:56-06:00May 13th, 2017|Categories: Catholicism, Christianity, Dwight Longenecker, England, T.S. Eliot|

Other boys wanted to be football or basketball stars, millionaires, politicians, engineers, businessmen, lawyers, and doctors. My aim was to be an Anglican country parson. T.S. Eliot and George Herbert were my role models… From time to time, I am invited to speak to groups who want to hear my conversion story. The audiences are always [...]

Ten Books That Shaped America’s Conservative Renaissance

By Jeffrey O. Nelson|2022-01-17T13:57:28-06:00March 12th, 2017|Categories: Conservatism, Economics, Edmund Burke, Eric Voegelin, Featured, Friedrich Hayek, George Nash, Ludwig von Mises, M. E. Bradford, Robert Nisbet, Russell Kirk, T.S. Eliot, The Conservative Mind, The Imaginative Conservative, Timeless Essays, Wilhelm Roepke, William F. Buckley Jr.|

If we are to know and rebuild a conservative civil social order in this country, then we need to “rake from the ashes” of recent American history the books that influenced a generation of conservative scholars and public figures, books whose message resonated with much of the American populace and resulted in astonishing political triumphs. [...]

Russell Kirk’s “Eliot and His Age”

By Louis Bredvold|2017-01-05T10:08:53-06:00January 3rd, 2017|Categories: Books, Featured, Russell Kirk, T.S. Eliot|

T.S. Eliot faced metaphysical crises of which even the most talented of the avant-garde were completely oblivious… Eliot and His Age: T.S. Eliot’s Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century, by Russell Kik (Random House, 1972) Only late in Eliot’s life did Russell Kirk enjoy the personal intimacy which adds a special appeal to this biography, [...]

What T.S. Eliot Taught Me About the Inadequacy of Words

By Dwight Longenecker|2017-12-19T00:08:29-06:00December 25th, 2016|Categories: Culture, Dwight Longenecker, Featured, Literature, Poetry, Senior Contributors, T.S. Eliot, The Imaginative Conservative|

I am weary of words and wonder why. It is perhaps because I want to ascend to that silence that echoes the innocence of the sub-linguistic bliss. I want to attain what the hymn writer called “the silence of eternity, interpreted by Love"... For twenty years I have been writing, writing, writing. It began after [...]

The Integrity of the Pilgrim Scholar

By Marion Montgomery|2021-08-12T10:08:18-05:00December 10th, 2016|Categories: Conservatism, Featured, Marion Montgomery, T.S. Eliot|

The primary responsibility of the young scholar is to an integrity as person—that is, to a fulfillment of his gifts as this person, limited in gifts but sharing with humanity a nature as intellectual soul incarnate… Polonius: “What do you read, my lord?” Hamlet: “Words, words, words.” At this turning of a millennium it is [...]

Can a Conservative Embrace Romanticism?

By Bradley J. Birzer|2021-04-27T21:47:33-05:00August 30th, 2016|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Christian Humanism, Christopher Dawson, Edmund Burke, Irving Babbitt, Senior Contributors, T.S. Eliot, The Imaginative Conservative|

Undoubtedly trying to shock many of his readers—most of whom understandably associated him with radicalism in poetry and the Bloomsbury group in London—T.S. Eliot exclaimed rather baldly in the late 1920s, “I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.” […]