Eliot’s influence was extensive; he was poet, dramatist, social commentator and literary critic. As one literary critic writing of another, Kirk’s treatment of the subject is one which Eliot himself would commend. Eliot’s impatience with the “lemon squeezer school of criticism” moved his own style of observations toward identification of overarching meaning rather than dissection, and similarly Kirk’s examination adopts a thematic view of Eliot’s life and work. Rather than anatomize each obscure line of Four Quartets, Kirk gives the biographical background and general themes leaving his reader to ask the questions and draw the ultimate conclusions for himself.
Eliot’s emphasis on the importance of tradition and history informed his methodology as well. In this, too, Kirk follows Eliot’s precedent as he draws on the continuity of tradition to show that Eliot was not only relevant and original in his time, but also in ours. As Eliot said, “The real task is to convince each generation in turn that the great writers are great. Not merely to get them to accept it inertly ... but to restate, in terms appropriate to the changed situation, the reasons for that greatness” (pg. 338). Kirk does just that. For an age and generation in strikingly analogous moral, social and spiritual crises, Kirk’s Eliot and his Age, then and now, bequeaths us Eliot’s vision in a penetratingly relevant summation.
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