Eliot went from starchy student to Nobel laureate who could pack out baseball stadiums on an American tour. This landmark study provides the background to a groundbreaking body of workBuying 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 nearly 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 Eliots poems, or 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 moment 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 notable and timely questions approximately 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, and 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, and 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 notable of his juvenilia is “The Death of Saint Narcissus”, a poem of guilt, or 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 (to ridicule, laugh at with contempt) his early poems, but their reservoirs of buried feelings served him well, and keeping his desert places from drying out entirely. They also contain their share of genuine near-masterpieces,such as Oh miniature voices in the throats of men”, nearly as ample in its way as “Portrait of a Lady” or “La Figlia Che Piange”.
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Source: theguardian.com