Eliot and His Age: T. S. Eliot's Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century

Kirk argues that T. S. Eliot's significance lies in his 'moral imagination'—the power of great literature to awaken intuitive reason and convey truths that logical argument cannot reach. The book rejects both the psychobiographical approach that reduces Eliot's work to his personal life and the view that his conservatism was merely reactionary or nostalgic. Kirk, a friend of Eliot's later years, presents a sympathetic but not adulatory portrait, contending that Eliot's cultural criticism and poetry formed a coherent defense of Christian civilization against ideological fanaticism.

Kirk defines moral imagination as the means by which literature establishes order in the soul and the commonwealth—a faculty that gives readers profound visions of truth transcending logical processes. He elaborates this as a significant theory of literary meaning in general, not merely a tool for reading Eliot. The argument leads Kirk to treat Eliot's poetry and criticism as continuous with his social and religious thought, refusing the separation of aesthetic appreciation from moral judgment that dominates much modern literary criticism.

Kirk traces Eliot's political and cultural ideas to their true sources, showing what he calls their balance and subtlety, and reads Eliot as opposing both fascism and communism from a Christian conservative standpoint. This positioning has been contested. A contemporary Kirkus review charged that Kirk 'wishes to corral Eliot into the conservative camp' while noting little evidence Eliot would have felt at home in the pages of National Review, and argued that Eliot's quarrel with liberalism was shot through with ambiguities that Kirk's sectarianism tended to fudge.

Kirk and Eliot became friends after Kirk sent Eliot a copy of The Conservative Mind in 1953, when Kirk was a young author and Eliot the Nobel laureate. Eliot was impressed by the book and arranged for its British publication at Faber & Faber. Kirk reviewed Eliot's play The Confidential Clerk with unusual penetration, and Eliot wrote to him expressing surprise that a critic had understood the work so fully from a single performance. This friendship, formed roughly thirty years before the book appeared in 1971, gives Kirk's account access and sympathy that later biographers often lack.

Kirk's book was originally published in 1971, revised and enlarged in 1984, and reissued in 2008 and 2023. The publisher's claim that it 'remains the best introduction to the poet's life, ideas, and literary works' has been repeated across editions, though the work is not without critics who find it overly sympathetic and ideologically directed. Benjamin G. Lockerd Jr., a former president of the T. S. Eliot Society, provided a new introduction for the 2008 ISI Books edition, lending scholarly credibility to its continued circulation.

Eliot and His Age extends the genealogical project of The Conservative Mind, which traced conservatism 'from Burke to Eliot.' Where the earlier book mapped a tradition through figures including Eliot as its modern terminus, this study gives Eliot sustained and sympathetic treatment as both poet and social thinker. Kirk's reading emphasizes that Eliot's conservatism was cultural and religious rather than partisan, a distinction Kirk uses to present Eliot as a model of the conservative man of letters rather than a political operator.