T.S. Eliot Archives ~ Page 6 of 10 ~ The Imaginative Conservative

“Portrait of a Lady”

By T.S. Eliot|2022-08-03T20:18:08-05:00August 21st, 2016|Categories: Poetry, T.S. Eliot|

Thou hast committed — Fornication: but that was in another country, And besides, the wench is dead. (The Jew of Malta) I Among the smoke and fog of a December afternoon You have the scene arrange itself—as it will seem to do— With "I have saved this afternoon for you"; And four wax candles in [...]

Caterpillar Destinations: A Defense of Classical Education

By Kate Deddens|2021-07-09T14:35:19-05:00August 2nd, 2016|Categories: Classical Education, Education, Featured, St. John's College, T.S. Eliot|

Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. —The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot I moved frequently in the later years of my childhood—not just from town to town, state to state, or country to country, but from [...]

“Little Gidding”: T.S. Eliot’s Final Answer

By Dwight Longenecker|2022-01-04T04:20:05-06:00June 11th, 2016|Categories: Dwight Longenecker, Literature, Poetry, T.S. Eliot|

The first three of the Four Quartets provide deep connections between significant geography and significant biography for T.S. Eliot. In Burnt Norton, the site of a ruined manor house became the locus for a meditation on what might have been. His visit there with an old college flame, Emily Hale, prompted a poem of nostalgia and [...]

The Man of Letters & the Future of Europe

By T.S. Eliot|2016-06-05T23:28:16-05:00June 5th, 2016|Categories: Culture, T.S. Eliot, The Imaginative Conservative, Timeless Essays|

Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join T.S. Eliot as he considers what it means to be a man of letters. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher I wish first to define the sense in which I shall use the term “man of letters.” I shall mean the writer for [...]

Youth and Age in T.S. Eliot’s “Dry Salvages”

By Dwight Longenecker|2020-08-12T15:51:07-05:00May 28th, 2016|Categories: Dwight Longenecker, Homer, Odyssey, Poetry, T.S. Eliot|

In the midst of the tumultuous trials of the modern age, and in a world as dangerous and unpredictable as the sea, T.S. Eliot offers in “Dry Salvages” a path of peace, and a road to redemption. As the Second World War raged around him, T.S. Eliot composed the third of his Four Quartets. Conscious [...]

T.S. Eliot’s Beginning and “East Coker”

By Dwight Longenecker|2016-05-21T22:35:57-05:00May 21st, 2016|Categories: Dwight Longenecker, Poetry, T.S. Eliot|

In 1939, four years after the publication of Burnt Norton, T.S.Eliot worried that he would write no more poetry. Increasingly interested and involved in the production of his verse drama, he attempted another poem using fragments of Burnt Norton and written in the same style. […]

T.S. Eliot’s Lost Love

By Dwight Longenecker|2016-05-13T21:43:16-05:00May 13th, 2016|Categories: Dwight Longenecker, Love, Poetry, T.S. Eliot|

T.S.Eliot argued that the biographical details of the poet were irrelevant to the understanding of the poetry, and yet his own poetry is so deeply personal that it often remains obtuse until illuminated by an understanding of his personal life. Eliot’s masterpiece—The Four Quartets—are the perfect example, and Burnt Norton—the first of the four—reveals its [...]

Oak and Stone and the Permanent Things

By Ian Crowe|2019-08-15T15:15:11-05:00April 24th, 2016|Categories: Edmund Burke, Permanent Things, T.S. Eliot, Timeless Essays|

Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Ian Crowe as he explores the thought of T.S. Eliot, Edmund Burke on the permanent things. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher For the present is the point at which time touches eternity. —C.S. Lewis[1] It was in 1939, in The Idea of a [...]

East of Early Winters: The Poetic Craft

By James Matthew Wilson|2019-09-12T12:05:31-05:00February 19th, 2016|Categories: Poetry, Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot|

East of Early Winters, by Richard Wakefield (The University of Evansville Press, 2006) No period in the history of the arts more doggedly insisted on its concern with craft—its identification of artist with artisan—than did the Modernist period at the beginning of the twentieth century. And yet, at no time were the familiar features of [...]

Saving the World from Suicide

By T.S. Eliot|2016-02-12T21:51:21-06:00February 17th, 2016|Categories: Christianity, Quotation, T.S. Eliot|

The Universal Church is today, it seems to me, more definitely set against the World than at any time since Pagan Rome. I do not mean that our times are particularly corrupt; all times are corrupt. I mean that Christianity, in spite of certain local appearances, is not, and cannot be within measurable time, ‘official.’ [...]

T.S. Eliot on Literary Decadence & Cultural Ruin

By Russell Kirk|2023-10-19T09:00:40-05:00January 26th, 2016|Categories: Imagination, Literature, Morality, RAK, Russell Kirk, T.S. Eliot|

T.S. Eliot’s slim book about moral and immoral fiction may surprise anyone who first comes upon a copy. After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy consists of three lectures delivered at the University of Virginia in 1933. These present an uncompromising denunciation of liberalism—both the liberalism of the nineteenth century and that of the twentieth [...]

Taking Idols into Their Hearts

By T.S. Eliot|2016-01-02T12:35:17-06:00January 6th, 2016|Categories: Christianity, Faith, Quotation, T.S. Eliot|

The number of people in possession of any criteria for discriminating between good and evil is very small; the number of the half-alive hungry for any form of spiritual experience, or what offers itself as spiritual experience, high or low, good or bad, is considerable. My own generation has not served them very well. Never [...]

T.S. Eliot’s “Christianity and Culture”

By Bruce Frohnen|2016-08-03T10:36:15-05:00December 21st, 2015|Categories: Anglicanism, Bruce Frohnen, Christendom, Christianity, Culture, Featured, T.S. Eliot, Timeless Essays|

(Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to journey with Bruce Frohnen as he explores T.S. Eliot’s understanding of the role of literature and Christianity in culture. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher) T.S. Eliot indisputably was, and remains, in the first rank of poets of any era and any culture.[1] [...]

English Letters in the Age of Boredom

By Russell Kirk|2018-10-16T20:24:31-05:00July 31st, 2015|Categories: Books, Featured, Imagination, RAK, Russell Kirk, T.S. Eliot|

Some day I shall write a book with the title The Age of Eliot. 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 [...]