This long-awaited critical edition of T. S. Eliot’s poems is a scholarly milestone, a watershed in publishing history. The elaborate notes Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue have provided for each line—indeed, each word—of each and every Eliot poem are so informative and the overviews for each stage of Eliot’s career contain so much of the poet’s own germane commentary that one can now trace Eliot’s poetic development using no further aids than these two volumes.
The opening background section, “A Beginner in 1908,” for instance, reproduces every key statement Eliot made, whether in essays, lectures, or letters to friends, about his literary origins. From a 1946 essay on Ezra Pound, for example:
And further, in a 1924 letter to Pound not widely known, Eliot similarly dismisses British turn-of-the-century poets, especially the “Swinburnians,” with the words, “I am as blind to the merits of these people as I am to Thomas Hardy.” Again—and to me surprising, given the London milieu in which he was circulating—in a 1945 letter to A. Benedict Crannigan, Eliot insists, “I had no knowledge of the so-called Imagists until 1915, and Imagism made very little impression upon me.” Henry James was important but, after all, he wrote novels and hence was not much use to a poet.
Indeed, the only significant contemporary, so far as Eliot was concerned, was his great friend Ezra Pound, to whom he repeatedly acknowledges his debt. Otherwise, he insists, his inspiration came from France—from “Baudelaire and his immediate followers, Laforgue, Corbière, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé.” And the editors provide references to Eliot’s most important remarks on French Symbolist poetry and especially his views on vers libre: “The pleasure one gets out of the irregularity of such verse is due to the shadow or suggestion of regular metre behind.” The kind of “free verse” D. H. Lawrence wrote, says Eliot scathingly in a 1924 essay on Whitman, produces “more notes for poems than poems themselves.”
Nine pages of close commentary elucidate the background of Eliot’s first volume Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), and the title poem is given 17 further pages. No matter how well we think we know “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” there is sure to be new information here. I did not know, for instance, that in a little-known essay (1959) in the Kipling Journal, Eliot remarked that “I am convinced [the poem] would never have been called Love Song but for a title of Kipling’s that stuck obstinately in my head, The Love Song of Har Dyal.” And under the notes for “Hysteria,” one of Eliot’s rare prose poems (1917), the editors have culled some of the poet’s most important—and little-known—comments on the genre, which are tersely caustic, as in “I have not yet been given any definition of the prose poem which appears to be more than a tautology or a contradiction.” Or, conversely, “verse, whatever else it may or may not be, is itself a system of punctuation“—a pithy comment made in a set of letters to the Times Literary Supplement under the heading “Questions of Prose” (1928).
Such notes are more than helpful: They are transformative, and Eliot scholarship and criticism will never be the same. For The Waste Land, the editors have supplied “An Editorial Composite,” which is to say “a 678-line reading text of the earliest available drafts of the various parts and passages of the poem.” These drafts will be familiar to readers of the facsimile edition of The Waste Land, edited by the poet’s widow, Valerie Eliot (1971); but to read the text in its earliest form, before Eliot and then Pound made the crucial cuts and changes, is a sobering experience. It is not just that the overwritten imitations of Popean satire were eliminated, but Pound challenged every phrase, every modifier so that
becomes
The change of “Terrible” to “Unreal” was Eliot’s own, thus cementing the echo of Baudelaire’s “Fourmillante cité.” But the qualifier “I have sometimes seen and see,” which dilutes the force of the apostrophe, is bracketed by Pound, and the latter also understands that the “winter dawn” should not be “your” (the city’s) but “a.”
Indeed, comparing The Waste Land drafts with the final copy reminds us that when Eliot was good he was very, very good but when he was bad he could be quite horrid. No 20th century poet writing in English has written more memorable, more resonating, and brilliant poems than “Prufrock,” “Gerontion,” and The Waste Land, with “Portrait of a Lady,” “Preludes,” the Ariel Poems, Ash Wednesday, and Four Quartets coming in a close second. But Eliot, as this edition inadvertently makes clear, often compromised his genius by letting his innate snobbery, his schoolboy nastiness, and his inveterate racism hold sway.
In the 1960s, when I was in graduate school, the quatrain poems, especially “A Cooking Egg” and “Sweeney Among the Nightingales,” were widely studied and admired for their condensation and reinvention of so much difficult classical source material. But reading the quatrain poems here with fresh eyes, and noting that those grotesque mechanized humans who look and behave like zoo animals have names like “Apeneck Sweeney,” “Rachel née Rabinovitch,” and “Sir Ferdinand Klein,” I find myself less than enchanted.
The hundred-odd pages of “Uncollected Poems” contain passages like the following from “Ballade pour la grosse Lulu”:
This dates from Eliot’s student days (1911), but after all, so does “Prufrock.” And the race-baiting doesn’t disappear: Here is “Dirge,” a 1921 draft for The Waste Land, whose first stanza reads:
Add to such tasteless passages the youthful pornographic King Bolo poems, originally sent in letters to Conrad Aiken and other friends, which take up more than 40 pages of Volume Two, as well as the (to me) embarrassing love poems Eliot evidently wrote to his wife in his last years, and for which the editors depend on the fair copies in Valerie’s Own Book—poems that contain lines like My fingers move softly below, to her navel / And touch the delicate down beneath her navel / coming to rest on the hair between her thighs—and one is left wondering how Eliot himself would have felt about this “complete” edition of his poetry.
In a few cases, he registered his disapproval: “Defence of the Islands,” for example, which is the first poem included under “Occasional Verses,” was written in 1940 at the request of E. McKnight Kauffer, who was then working for Britain’s Ministry of Information. Eliot explained to his friend John Hayward that this “collection of captions” would appear as an inscription “to go round the walls of a room of war photographs for the New York [World’s] Fair,” and the headnote to “Defence” tells us that Eliot did want to preserve this piece because it was written just after the evacuation of Dunkirk and commemorates that tragedy. But a year later, he wrote Hayward, “I was disconcerted to find it featured as a poem.” And again in 1953, “I have always declined to republish these lines as they are not self-explanatory, and furthermore, I did not intend them to be considered as poetry. They are merely a kind of prose commentary on a series of photographs of the war effort in Britain.”
I cite these remarks from the Ricks-McCue commentary: The editors are obviously well aware of Eliot’s feelings. Their case for inclusion is that any poetic scrap Eliot wrote in the course of his life is germane to the oeuvre, that we may learn something about that oeuvre from reading even the most minor bits and pieces. My own preference would have been to move the relevant textual notes now in Volume Two to the first volume, and in exchange move the “Occasional Verses” and “Uncollected Poems” to Volume Two, alongside Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats and the “Improper Rhymes.” The translation of St. John Perse’s Anabasis (in Volume Two) might be omitted altogether, since translation is, after all, another story and belongs, perhaps more properly, with Eliot’s critical prose, especially his essays on Paul Valéry. And it would be good to make clear that Volume Two is secondary, a volume for specialists, rather like one of those side-rooms at the Louvre or the Uffizi where lesser paintings or small studies by the masters are shown.
As it stands, I fear, Volume One will not enhance Eliot’s reputation in America. Yes, the wonderful poems are here in all their glory: No other poet of the 20th century has written lines more memorable than the concluding ones of “Prufrock”:
Or as rhythmically daring as these lines from “Gerontion”:
But the nasty streak that runs through the “Uncollected Poems”—and even some of the collected ones—remains problematic, reminding us that Eliot was a profoundly elitist poet, one with a marked distaste for the lower classes, especially those of its members who were Jews, Irishmen, Eastern Europeans, blacks, and for that matter, women. Woe to the poor little typist who, in the first draft of “The Fire Sermon,” “lays out squalid food in tins.”
It is one of the ironies of literary history that Eliot’s friend Ezra Pound, a poet who was to be so severely judged for his own brand of antisemitism, had no such contempt for the lower classes. Pound’s solution, so far as ordinary people were concerned, was to mythologize them, to make them part of his grand classical-Confucian design. For Eliot, the only poetic solution—a solution found, after the poet’s conversion to Anglo-Catholicism, in Ash Wednesday and the Quartets—was to eliminate the real people completely: A people without history / Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern / Of timeless moments.
Marjorie Perloff, professor emerita of humanities at Stanford, is the author, most recently, of Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire.
