The Voice of This Calling: The Enduring Legacy of T.S. Eliot (Conservative Minds Revisited‪)‬

IN 1953, THE FIRST EDITION of The Conservative Mind was subtitled From Burke to Santayana; the second and every edition thereafter bore the subtitle From Burke to Eliot. Not only did this adjustment afford Kirk a bookend better consisting with Burke, but the change was also fortuitous as one element of a broader clarification of Kirk's premise and purpose. For the second edition, Kirk enlarged his discussion of Eliot, and he also recast the final chapter, changing its final section from one called "The plan of action for American conservatives" to one entitled "The conservative as poet." Thus, Kirk emphasized formally an argument that runs throughout his book--that the most vital expressions of conservative thought are not to be measured so much by effective political activity as by their reflection in the tradition of humane letters, particularly in those writers who (to borrow Kirk's habitual wording) furnished anew the wardrobe of the moral imagination. In T. S. Eliot, Kirk found just such an exemplar of thoughtful conservatism informed by an acute literary sensibility. Perhaps more importantly, in selecting Eliot as something of a latter-day counterpart to Burke--certainly as a figure more substantial than Santayana and one still living at the time of his writing--Kirk was looking ahead, beyond the tradition of thought he had surveyed, to identify possible models and resources for cultivating the "Conservatives' Promise," as he titled his concluding chapter. The golden anniversary of the original publication of The Conservative Mind offers an occasion to reassess that promise and to suggest what the legacy of T.S. Eliot has to offer another generation as we work the fields of a different cultural landscape, venturing to renew what Eliot called "The life of significant soil." (1)