Russell Kirk: “T.S. Eliot was the principal champion of the moral imagination in the twentieth century. Now what is the moral imagination? The phrase is Edmund Burke’s. By it, Burke meant that power of ethical perception which strides beyond the barriers of private experience and events of the moment–’especially,’ as the dictionary has it, ‘the higher form of this power exercised in poetry and art.’ The moral imagination aspires to the apprehending of right order in the soul and right order in the commonwealth. It was the gift and obsession of Plato and Virgil and Dante. … Eliot and some of his contemporaries agreed, tacitly or explicitly (again in Burke’s phrases), ‘that we have made no discoveries, and we think that no discoveries are to be made, in morality…’ Their achievement was to reinvigorate in the twentieth century those perennial moral insights which are the sources of human normality, and which make possible order and justice and freedom.”