PRE-PRUFROCK

Eliot’s biographers and critics have long known of these poems from the letter of thanks in which Quinn refused to accept the notebook as a gift and sent the poet $ 140. But with the lawyer’s death in 1924, the poems disappeared and did not resurface until 1968, three years after Eliot’s passing, when they were discovered in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. Though the draft of The Waste Land appeared in print in 1971, the notebook poems remained unpublished for a variety of reasons, some apparently having to do with Valerie Eliot’s careful protection of her husband’s copyright — until now, when the Boston University scholar Christopher Ricks has at last collected and annotated them in this new edition, Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917.

There’s plenty here to gladden the heart of the coldest scholar. The collection is a mine of tropes, motifs, and turns of phrase to which Eliot was still returning as late as The Four Quartets in the early 1940s. And if there is a muse of scholarship, it descended upon Christopher Ricks as he prepared the nearly 350 pages of notes that accompany the poems. The poet’s evocation of “dusty roses, crickets, sunlight on the sea” in the poem ” Goldfish” incites Ricks to a wild barrage of cross-reference. He journeys from lines in Eliot’s own “A Song for Simeon,” “Animula,” “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” and “Burnt Norton” to a minor illustration in Henri Bergson’s Introduction to Metaphysics, not to mention a halfdozen similar images in the poetry of Austin Dobson, George Meredith, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Annotating these poems written in the decade before the publication of Eliot’s first collection, Prufrock and Other Observations, in 1917, Ricks provides everything — and more than everything — necessary for understanding their place in the history of English literature and the career of T. S. Eliot.

The only thing he can’t do is make the poems very good. Inventions of the March Hare is a fascinating collection of early failures and false starts, with a first draft of “Gerontion,” an excised section of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and the publication at last of a long-rumored set of scatological and pornographic comic verse about a mythical explorer named Columbo and a native king named Bolo. Mostly what the poems prove is that the young man had the tools to be the poet we think of as T. S. Eliot nearly a decade before he had much idea what to do with them.

When he writes, in “Goldfish,”
 
And should you ever hesitate
Among such charming scenes —
Essence of summer magazines —
Hesitate, and estimate
How much is simple accident
How much one knows
How much one means

the readers who remember the broken repetitions in the 1925 “The Hollow Men” and the 1930 “Ash Wednesday” know exactly what Eliot is up to in this 1910 poem with the repetition of “hesitate” and “How much.” The readers of ” Prufrock” know what crushing irony the poet intends with the words “charming scenes.” The readers of The Four Quartets know how much poetry Eliot can perform with such Latinate philosophical terms as “essence” and “accident.” But the poem itself is a disaster.

I suppose it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that T. S. Eliot should prove the best writer of bad verse in the style of T. S. Eliot. Sometimes the defeat of our expectations is unintentionally hilarious, as when the young poet, in a quatrain concluding a meditation on death and writing, adds a final line perfectly awful in sentiment, phrasing, and rhyme:
 
My brain is twisted in a tangled skein
There will be a blinding light and a little laughter
And the sinking blackness of ether I do not know what, after, and I do not care either.

But mostly what we experience in these early poems is a constant sense of not-quiteness, an imperfect foreshadowing of what we know the poet will later do:
 
of what are you afraid?
Hopeful of what? whether you keep thanksgiving,
Or pray for earth on tired body and head,
This word is true on all the paths you tread
As true as truth need be, when all is said:
That if you find no truth among the living
You will not find much truth among the dead.

This sense of not-quiteness is exactly what we ought to feel in any collection of juvenilia — though the poet, born in 1888, was no child when he wrote them. When the poems appeared in England last year, however, they suffered from a general overestimation of their importance, and early notices suggest they are about to find the same fate here in America.

Part of the explanation is the fact that in many ways English poetry still remains where it has been since the 1920s: squarely in the Age of Eliot. We are fascinated with Eliot because he is our last magisterial poet, our last artist to write — as we all knew, as he himself knew — for the ages. The many volumes of his critical essays had a great deal to do with his dominance: An offhand comment that he didn’t much care for Shelley wrecked study of the Romantic poet for a generation. So too his verse plays, especially Murder in the Cathedral, contributed to his prestige — as did even his minor comic verse gathered in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, repopularized in the apparently curtainless musical Cats. But mostly his authority derived from his serious poetic work, an astonishingly small body of poetry that made him known to every serious reader of English. No poet — not Keats, not Poe, not even Thomas Gray — has gained so high a reputation with so few poems. Everyone who went to school in America after 1950 read some Eliot, and the standard anthology selections they read — “Prufrock,” ” Gerontion,” The Waste Land, “The Hollow Men,” “Ash Wednesday,” The Four Quartets — represent a larger proportion of his verse than any other poet enjoys. The nearly fifty previously unpublished poems in Inventions of the March Hare represent a major addition to the body of his work.

In many other ways, however, the Age of Eliot is long over — dead even before the poet himself died in 1965, for he had no real followers and founded no real school. You could compose in one of the several styles of Ezra Pound if you tried, and many poets — from the horrendous Amy Lowell to the interesting Hilda Doolittle — did. You could learn to write like William Carlos Williams; Robert Lowell once remarked that his own precise poetic confessions in Life Studies and the sprawling Beat effusions of Allen Ginsberg in Howl represented not so much two opposed schools of poetry as two opposed schools of William Carlos Williams. You could even imitate William Butler Yeats; much of the best work of John Berryman and Deltaore Schwartz reads like a gloss on late Yeats.

But who ever wrote like T. S. Eliot? The influence of Eliot radiates through mid-twentieth century poetry — in the classicism of John Crowe Ransom, the anti-romanticism of Wallace Stevens, the jazzy voice of W. H. Auden, the historicism of Allen Tate, the religious density of Robert Lowell’s early poems. And a thousand minor poets through the 1950s, especially would-be religious poets, strove to be Eliotian in their verse. But none of them possessed all the pieces that went together to make an Eliot poem. By the 1960s, not merely Eliot’s late religious sensibility, but even his early modernism — together with his vast learning, intellectual seriousness, and philosophically dense lines — had come to seem impossible for new poetry.

Proof both that we are still fascinated with Eliot and that his age has utterly ended is the controversy that swirled through the intellectual world last year with the publication of T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form by Princess Diana’s English lawyer, Anthony Julius. Picking up the evidence assembled some years earlier by Christopher Ricks, and arranging it in a virtual legal indictment, Julius argues that the references to the Jews in Eliot’s verse and critical writing prove the poet to be an anti-Semite — still a great writer, but one to be known henceforth as a hater of the Jews, much as Villon is remembered as a thief, Pound as a traitor, Kipling as an imperialist, and Swinburne as a nasty little neurotic who liked being whipped.

A similar controversy has begun to swirl around the comic poetry in Inventions of the March Hare. In 1915 it was of course the pornographic and scatological quality that kept the verses out of print: “I fear,” Eliot wrote Pound, “that King Bolo and his Big Black Kween will never burst into print. I understand that Priapism, Narcissism, etc. are not approved of, and even so innocent a rhyme as pulled her stockings off/With a frightful cry of ‘Hauptbahnhof!!’ is considered decadent.” “They are excellent bits of scholarly ribaldry,” Wyndham Lewis wrote in explanation of his refusal to publish them, “but [I] stick to my naive determination to have no words ending in -Uck, -Unt, and -Ugger.”

Nowadays, however, it is the political incorrectness of the verse that seems to indict the poet. In the poems beginning “Ladies, on whom my attentions have waited” and “There was a jolly tinker came across the sea,” Eliot revels in a comic misogyny. And in the five pages of Columbo and Bolo verses, he proves willing to indulge comic racial comments, of which such lines as
 
King Bolo’s swarthy bodyguard
Were called the Jersey Lilies
A wild and hardy set of blacks
Undaunted by syphilis.

form relatively mild examples.

One defense of the poet — though not of his wife or Ricks — might be that Eliot did not in fact print these early verses. Though in showing them to Lewis, he made some desultory effort at having them published in 1915, by 1917 he was firmly in control of his poetic career — and deliberately kept the body of his published work small.

He sent the manuscript to Quinn in 1922 with the injunction, “I beg you fervently to keep them to yourself and see that they never are printed.” In a letter in 1963, he called them “unpublished and unpublishable” and in 1964 added, “I cannot feel altogether sorry that . . . the notebook [has] disappeared.”

Such a defense, however, seems neither ennobling nor convincing, admitting Eliot’s racism and misogyny even while dismissing them as a sort of private vice. A far better account emerges from recognizing the place of these early verses in his career. Not just the unpublished work in Inventions of the March Hare, but also the early drafts of “Prufrock,” “Gerontion,” and the other poems Eliot eventually published show that the poet possessed from age 21 nearly all the poetic elements we think of as Eliotian — all the elements, that is, except what can only be called his voice, the mastering principle that would unite and turn these poetic elements to a single purpose.

The early work reveals such wellknown aspects of Eliot’s poetry and criticism as his burgeoning interest in Dante, his real knowledge of French poetry, his classical education, his training in philosophy, and his deep distaste for the Georgian romanticism that dominated poetry between the 1880s and World War I. More than anything else, however, the notebook poems show that Eliot had a systematic and virtually complete knowledge of the history of English poetry at an astonishingly early age — long before he knew how to use his knowledge.

The result has more to say about poetry than it does about T. S. Eliot. Little of the young man — newly arrived in England, painting his lips green to recite modern French verse to uncomprehending undergraduates — is revealed in these early poems.

Trying out trope after trope from the history of English poetry, he indulges comic misogyny and racism to the same degree to which the language itself does. Unlike Auden, who never entirely gave up writing humorous pornographic verse, Eliot stopped at the same time he found his adult voice. The progress of the artist, he later declared, is “a continual extinction of personality,” and as he grew into a world-famous poet, he deliberately wrapped himself and his life in a mantle of bland unobtrusiveness. The poems in Inventions of the March Hare date from the days when Eliot was a much more interesting man, and a much less interesting poet.

Perhaps this suggests as well a way to understand the anti-Semitism that found its way into such major published poems as “Gerontion” and generated the recent attacks on the poet. It sounds absurd to say that Eliot didn’t despise the Jews, the English language did. But it is true that deep in the language there is a little hatred of the Jews — together with a little hatred of Catholics, Africans, and many others. Eliot was, of course, much less sensitive to the consequences of indulging anti-Semitic tropes than we are after the Holocaust. But our rightful sensitivity on this score ought not to blind us to the poet’s project to grasp the language as a whole. Only if we understand Eliot’s desire to redeem in modern times the entire history of English poetry can we understand what he reveals to us in his greatest work: his horror at the abyss in The Waste Land and “The Hollow Men” and the solution he found with God in “Ash Wednesday” and The Four Quartets.

J. Bottum is a contributing editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.