UK Edition
Review
The Poems of TS Eliot, vols 1 & 2, review: 'teases out every allusion'
Reading this two-volume edition is like falling down a rabbit hole that drops you not into a world of hookah-smoking caterpillars and smug cats but into something much more curious: a textual reconstruction of TS Eliot’s brain.
The editors, Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue, have built a vast and fascinating world out of their annotations, a world in which you can become lost, only to emerge much later dazzled and disoriented by your Adventures in the Waste Land.
For example, let’s say you want to read “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock”, the poem that announced Eliot’s revelatory talent to literary London in 1915 when it was published in Poetry. You crack open Volume One and there it is, the first poem in the book:
"Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;"
Excellent: let us go then to the editorial commentary. To get there you follow the instructions at the foot of the page: off to page 374. Here we discover that the title alone gets a page of commentary.
We learn that the title of Rudyard Kipling’s “The Love Song of Har Dyal” had become “obstinately stuck” in Eliot’s head; that the “J” stands for Joseph; that Eliot apparently got the name “Prufrock” (having dallied with “Proudfoot”) from a St Louis furniture dealer, although he had no memory of the dealership.
He chose the name, he said, because it sounded “very very prosaic”. The attention to such granular detail obviously has consequences for the scale of this project, which teases out every allusion and connection in every line of every poem.
Thanks to a small font and much abbreviation, the editors squeeze the entire commentary into just 900 pages, which might be considered a triumph of brevity.
About those abbreviations. The short forms of all the different editions stumped me until I discovered the “Key to Editions” housed in the annex of Volume Two, which also contains each poem’s textual history, for which the deciphering reader also requires a glossary.
Scuttling back and forth between the two volumes, you start running out of fingers and for bookmarks resort to car keys and telephones. It is like reading Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest at the same time.
It comes as some relief that Eliot only published a relatively small number of poems. “They should be perfect in their kind,” Eliot wrote, “so that each should be an event.”
Every release had to be a hit single; he had no time for album tracks. There were B-sides and bootlegs, unpublished poems and juvenilia, but when, in 1963, he compiled his greatest hits – the final version of his collected poetry – it only contained some 50 poems.
The problem for modern editors is that these “official” poems have been published in an astonishing number of variants.
With the exception of “Cousin Nancy”, every poem in the 1963 edition exists differently in at least one earlier printing, let alone in manuscript.
There are many reasons for this, not least that Eliot himself was evidently a pretty terrible proofreader. Take “The Hollow Men”, Eliot’s bleaker follow-up to “The Waste Land”. In every edition since Poems 1909-25, the last two stanzas of the second section go like this:
"Let me be no nearer
In death’s dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer –
Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom"
Ricks and McCue point out that when the poem was first published in The Criterion and The Dial in the winter of 1924 there was a further line: “With eyes I dare not meet in dreams.”
Why was it then missing from subsequent editions? Had Eliot ditched it? If so, why was there not a full stop after “twilight kingdom”, when every other section of “The Hollow Men” ends with a full stop?
Ricks and McCue argue that Eliot simply failed to notice when it was accidentally left out. The editors’ approach to the commentary is not to interpret the poems but to give as much contextual information as possible (which, mind, is a kind of interpretation) and it is an approach to which they stick.
Just as rigorous, although less rewarding, is their commitment to publishing all the poetry. This includes juvenilia the 11-year-old Eliot wrote for his school magazine (“I thought I saw a elephant”) and the strange racist poems he inserted into letters to certain friends (“King Bolo’s big black bassturd kween”).
More interesting is the publication, for the first time, of some erotic (in the loosest sense of the word) poems to his second wife, Valerie, which give us further insight into quite how buttoned-up Eliot was. Even in these private verses, he ducks squeamishly behind euphemism: “our middle parts are busy with each other” and, worse, “the swelling of my concupiscence”.
So well known is Eliot’s poetry that it is tempting to spend time fussing around the margins of his oeuvre. While these volumes certainly enable you to do just that, it is far more rewarding to return to the centre.
The real strength of this edition is in its comprehensive treatment of the most important of Eliot’s poems; it is a stirring reminder of the multitudes they contain.
Order The Poems of TS Eliot vols 1 & 2 from the Telegraph bookshop