Kirk, Russell - George Scott-Moncrieff (review date fall 1972)

George Scott-Moncrieff (review date fall 1972)

SOURCE: Scott-Moncrieff, George. “Eliot Remebered.” Sewanee Review 80, no. 4 (fall 1972): 632-38.

[In the following review of Kirk's Eliot and His Age, Scott-Moncrieff—a longtime friend of Kirk—favorably assesses the work's scholarly intent and accomplishment.]

Dr. Kirk might almost have called this notable tribute [Eliot and His Age] to the thought of T. S. Eliot “Eliot contra His Age”. He sees Eliot as standing in opposition to the general tide of literary thinking of his day with its gravitation towards political rather than moral effort and its tendency towards liberal in preference to conservative principle.

When Prufrock and The Waste Land first appeared they shocked those who considered themselves conservative but who were in fact often merely conventional in their judgments, and tightly bound by convention. It was the neoterists,...

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