Buying an edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy in Florence as a student, I was struck by its resemblance to the flood lines marked on the side of buildings to commemorate the great flood of 1966: sometimes the footnotes would creep almost all the way to the top of the page, leaving only one or two lines of actual text. Had Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue adopted footnotes rather than endnotes in their remarkable edition of TS Eliot’s poems, whole pages of apparatus would surge by with barely a line of verse in sight. Volume one contains 346 pages of poems to 965 of commentary. In the second volume, notes follow text on a poem-by-poem basis, but their combined 290 pages is still outweighed by a 367-page “textual history”. It is a monumental achievement, and one that frames important and timely questions about the state of Eliot’s reputation.
“We beg to call to your attention /Some minor problems of the soul”, protests the breeze in the early poem “Goldfish (Essence of Summer Magazines)”. Eliot’s hegira from starchy student to the Nobel laureate who packed out baseball stadiums on an American tour remains one of the most compelling and strange of modern poetic careers. The young Eliot wrote some fine poems in French, and he had his reasons, too: the poet of Prufrock and Other Observations is much more a belated contemporary of Laforgue, Corbière and Rimbaud than of the Georgians Ezra Pound was busy skewering in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. No less than with Yeats, however, the legacy of the 1890s played its part. Eliot was extravagant in his praise for John Davidson’s “Thirty Bob a Week”, a plausible wellspring for the melancholy chambermaids and commuters that stalk his early work. Among the most important of his juvenilia is “The Death of Saint Narcissus”, a poem of guilt, humiliation and martyrdom. An obsession with drowning runs through Eliot’s writing, inspiring section four of The Waste Land (“Death by Water”). In later life he would deride his early poems, but their reservoirs of buried feelings served him well, keeping his desert places from drying out entirely. They also contain their share of genuine near-masterpieces, such as “Oh little voices in the throats of men”, almost as good in its way as “Portrait of a Lady” or “La Figlia Che Piange”.
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