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

First published just a few years after Eliot's death – authored by a younger American friend of Eliot and intellectual founder of post-WW2 American conservatism – this may still be the best general introduction to Eliot. My only quarrel, and hence knocking of ½*, is that Kirk's analysis of The Waste Land is skimpy (for that I would recommend Cleanth Brooks's 1938 essay), but his summary analyses of the other poems (especially the Quartets) and the plays is excellent.

Kirk himself, like Eliot, was more a cultural than a political conservative; and this literary biography also includes substantial discussion of Eliot's essays on culture and education, the latter a particular interest of Kirk's that he wrote on in his own magazines show more (Modern Age and The University Bookman) after he, a lifelong anti-interventionist, started drifting away from Buckley and National Review during the Vietnam era. show less