Freedom Is Not Enough: T. S. Eliot for Liberation, Resistance, and Hope

How does literature from the past speak to the present? What can we, as readers committed to combatting oppression, learn from figures whose writing we love but some of whose beliefs we may oppose? Quite a lot, according to Patrick R. Query. To make this case, Query turns to a writer and critic as canonical as he is controversial-T. S. Eliot. Passionately argued and eminently readable, Freedom Is Not Enough shows how Eliot makes a surprising yet vital ally in the struggle to fill the world with more freedom, equality, and human dignity. Without ignoring or downplaying the bigotry and elitism that are ineluctable parts of Eliot’s legacy, Query argues that we need today what Eliot has to teach us: about migration, peace, friendship, radicalism, anti-fascism, liberation, resistance, and hope. Drawing on the full scope of Eliot’s oeuvre-from his most well-known poetry and prose to newly available archival materials-Freedom Is Not Enough demonstrates how to use Eliot and literature more broadly to confront the forces conspiring to turn our world into a waste land.

Patrick R. Query is Professor of English at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. He is the author of Ritual and the Idea of Europe in Interwar Writing and the editor of The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh: A Tourist in Africa.