Eliot's edited highlights

Writing in 1914 to Harriet Monroe, an excited Ezra Pound enthused that Eliot had "actually trained himself and modernized himself on his own". Christopher Ricks's fine edition of previously unpublished early poems, along with draft versions of many of those published in Prufrock, Ara Vos Prec, and Poems, contributes significantly to the reconstruction of that education. Through contextual annotation of an extraordinary sensitivity and scope, Ricks implicitly interrogates Pound's comment, while tacitly reaffirming the value of reading with, as well as against, the grain.

Inventions of the March Hare, commissioned by Valerie Eliot, takes its name from the deleted title of the manuscript notebook Eliot sold in 1922 to John Quinn. This edition restores leaves excised by Eliot (labelled by Pound, their trustee, "T. S. E. Chancons Ithyphallique"), and includes a digest of Eliot's comments on influence. Ricks separates the unpublished from the early drafts of published work, justifying this and other decisions in a preface full of editorial good sense. This separation expedites the printing of the final text of unpublished but the earliest version of published poems, and emphasises the contrast between what Eliot rejected and saved. It is instructive to witness Eliot editing himself, before Pound's intervention.

The "new" poetry is rich with familiar concerns, vocabulary, and cadences, but the characteristic ironic observation is interrupted by an awkward, if unremittingly intelligent tendency to indulgence ("Prufrock's Pervigilium" is a case in point). Although the "need for self-expression" confessed to in a deleted digression from "Portrait of a Lady" is already not as straightforward as that phrase suggests, this is a more naked, a less certainly uncertain Eliot, striving for indifferent urbanity via disaffected urbanism. The "man who suffers" is painfully, touchingly evident, the "self" incompletely "sacrificed".

Ricks insists, with the necessary caveats, that his 200 pages of notes favour information over interpretation. That this appears to result at times in information being withheld is no drawback. It allows readers familiar with either Eliot or any of the myriad sources Ricks identifies to exercise their own detective skills, and grapple for themselves with the critical paradigms at stake. Does not "Bottles and broken glass" ("First Caprice in North Cambridge") suggest "Trams and dusty trees", especially when combined with the sound of "Trampled mud" that follows? Are the Wordsworthian connotations of the wickedly proximate "resolution" and "incompetence" less worthy of note (or any more interpretive) than those of "late and soon" in the preceding line ("Entretien dans un parc")? The faint possibility of the editor's eye and ear having momentarily faltered only increases the pleasure.

It might be objected that Ricks's annotations, for all their claims to impartiality, reaffirm a canonical and "elitist" reading of modernist poetry: Inventions of the March Hare will doubtless elicit from Eliot's admirers no less than his detractors, to quote Ricks on the latter, "the wrong kind or the wrong amount of attention". But this is to miss the point. Ricks's edition is a timely reminder that poetry and poets, like all writing and writers, exist by virtue of the history of the language they use, a relationship whose complexity increases with the writer's awareness of this condition. Eliot's career, including those elements that are now adjudged repugnant, offensive, or unacceptable, is a continuous meditation on this "historical sense". This fact must be incorporated into any reevaluation of Eliot and the modernist canon, for which Inventions of the March Hare will be an invaluable resource.

Robert M. Jones is researching a DPhil, University of York.