Volume 44, Number 8 · May 15, 1997
How Eliot Became Eliot
By Louis Menand
Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917
by T.S. Eliot, edited by Christopher Ricks
Harcourt Brace, 428 pp., $30.00
The Waste Land, the 75th anniversary edition
by T.S. Eliot, with an afterword by Christopher Ricks
Harcourt Brace, 47 pp., $4.00 (paper)
In the summer of 1910, when he was twenty-two, T.S. Eliot bought a notebook at a bookstore in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where he was vacationing with his parents, and transcribed into it the poems he had written since the previous fall. He continued to use the notebook as a depository for final, or near-to-final, drafts of his work until 1917, when his first volume of poetry, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published by the Egoist Press in London. Two years later, the Hogarth Press, run by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, who had befriended Eliot after he moved to England in 1914, printed seven more of Eliot's poems in a pamphlet entitled Poems. Then, in 1920, Eliot put the contents of those two books plus several new poems into a single volume which was published in England as Ara Vos Prec and in the United States as Poems. The American publisher was Alfred A. Knopf, who also brought out an edition of Eliot's first volume of criticism, The Sacred Wood.
Review, 5022 words
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