Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909 - 1917 by T. S. Eliot: Edited by Christopher Ricks - Hardcover

Eliot, T.S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0571178952 ISBN 13: 9780571178957

Publisher: Faber and Faber, 1996

Synopsis

A few months before The Waste Land was published in 1922, the manuscript was given by Eliot to his benefactor John Quinn. At the same time he sold Quinn a notebook containing about fifty poems written during Eliot's twenties. It was not until 1968, three years after the poet's death, that the double cache was unveiled within the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. The early poems, from the notebook and the accompanying leaves, are now at last published, all but a few of them for the first time. (Five appear in the first volume of Eliot's letters, edited by Mrs Valerie Eliot.) Fascinating to all lovers of Eliot's work, the poems are various in their matter (love, social nuance, dismay - the boredom, the horror and the glory); in their kinds (urban pastoral, satire, lyric, the prose poem); and in their life of language (two are in French, and many are diversely indebted to Jules Laforgue). Here, to add to Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), are Other Observations. Many are of great beauty; all are of great interest, technical and human. The poems are fully annotated. Editorial appendices reproduce, first, the verses on leaves excised by Eliot from the notebook; second, the early drafts of poems published in 1917; third, drafts of 1920 poems now with the notebook; and fourth, Eliot's revelatory statements, gathered from his criticism, correspondence and interviews, about the many influences which went to the creation of his early poems.

About this title

About the Authors

Christopher Ricks is co-director of the Editorial Institute and Warren Professor of Humanities at Boston University. He is author of numerous works of literary criticism, including Beckett s Dying Words (1993) and is responsible for the forthcoming new edition of The Complete Poetry of T. S. Eliot (2011). He was knighted for his services to scholarship in 2009.

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1888. He came to England in 1914 and published his first book of poems in 1917. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Eliot died in 1965.

Edition details

• Publisher: Faber and Faber
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0571178952
• ISBN 13: 9780571178957
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 480
• Editor: Ricks Professor Christopher