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Review by Roger Bishop
Ezra Pound declared in his ABC of Reading, published in 1934, that "literature is news that STAYS news." That statement could well apply to the works of Pound's good friend and fellow expatriate T.S. Eliot. Eliot's "The Waste Land," published in 1922, is generally considered the most influential poem published in the West in this century. Not only does it continue, along with other of his poetry, drama, and criticism, to be read and studied in classrooms but was recently given an enthusiastically received interpretation on Broadway by the English actress Fiona Shaw. The musical play Cats, suggested by Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, has been playing there since the 1980s. And literary criticism of Eliot continues, 152 book-length studies at my last count.
Since her husband's death in 1965, Valerie Eliot has authorized publication of one volume of Eliot's previously unpublished letters, a facsimile edition of "The Waste Land" with the original drafts and annotations by Pound, who played a crucial role in editing the final version, and an annotated edition of The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, lectures which reveal in some depth the historical sweep of poetry and philosophy that strongly influenced Eliot's intellectual development. Now we have Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917, an early but rich collection of more than 40 poems and fragments, almost all previously unpublished. They include a longer version of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." It should be emphasized that Eliot thought these poems "not worth publishing" and lost track of them after sending the manuscript notebook to a friend and patron, John Quinn, in 1922.
These poems were written at a time when Eliot was seeking his own poetic voice. Christopher Ricks's brilliant editing and annotation add immeasurably to the volume's value and our interest in these manuscripts. Through painstaking research and sophisticated conjecture, we are given fascinating glimpses into Eliot's literary and philosophical interests and development as a poet. One is immediately struck by the broad range of his reading, from Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton to the Bhagavad-Gita and W.S. Gilbert. We see how he was able to appropriate words or phrases or ideas from others and reshape them for use in his own poetry. Ricks, a Boston University professor and critic, quotes extensively from Eliot's later critical writings and his contemporary letters, which allows us better to understand the personal context of this poetry.
Some news articles about this volume have focused on the "bawdy" poems that appear. Their inclusion is perhaps important for the historical record. They certainly do not enhance Eliot's reputation, but, in fairness, he had torn them out of the notebook before he gave it to Quinn.
Perhaps the importance of this volume for readers of Eliot or of poetry in general was best expressed by Eliot himself in a 1924 letter to Virginia Woolf in which he regrets "the absence of any masters in the previous generation whose work one could carry on, and the amount of waste that goes on in one's own work in the necessity, so to speak, of building one's own house before one can start the business of living. I feel myself that everything I have done consists simply of tentative sketches and rough experiments. Will the next generation profit by our labours?" Ricks shows us what was behind some of those tentative sketches and rough experiments. This opportunity to watch the creative process at work is awe inspiring.
Roger Bishop is Contributing Editor to this publication.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.