by T. S. Eliot
this sense: OED 2: “A feeling of anger, resentment or offence”, first cited from G. Harvey, Letter-book (1573).
Kierkegaard and Rilke shouting in the lava
Kierkegaard and Rilke shouting in the lava
And Lorca semaphoring “expropriate the owners”;
Who shall dilate with a lingering loofa
The focus of the foetus or the onus of the anus?
Not my angry Madonnas, with fists like bananas
And pharmacopeas of gushing mucous
Or O my lovely boy, with eyes like gopher’s,
The albacore sorrow, and an icicle in his penis.
The foregoing is merely a selection from my Imitations of the Poets, to be published with facsimile marginal annotations by Old Possum.
To John Hayward, 5 Aug 1944.
Pope’s Imitations of English Poets include a Chaucerian fabliau, ending “Better · · · Then trust on Mon, whose yerde can talke.” For an imitation by TSE of contemporary poetry, sent to Hayward, 27 Jan 1937, see A Proclamation in “Uncollected Poems”: “You know my aversion to Modernism in all forms, and especially in Poetry; and you know that Movements like Surrealism are things that I cannot make Head or Tail of.”
1] against this line, TSE wrote “why?”, perhaps because of the shortening of “lavatory”, not to “lav” (OED from 1913) but to the unrecorded “lava”.
3 dilate: underlined by TSE with “do you mean delate or delete? Use a dictionary.”
4–8 anus · · · O my lovely boy · · · icicle in his penis: “emotions that turn out isiculous · · · stick it up your ass”, The Triumph of Bullshit 15–16. Shakespeare sonnet 126: “O thou, my lovely boy, who in thy power | Dost hold Time’s fickle glass, his sickle, hour”. For “icicle”, see note below to the limerick The Blameless Sister of Publicola.
6 pharmacopeas: underlined by TSE with “cornucopias, I think”.
7 gopher’s: emended by TSE to “a gopher’s”.
8 albacore · · · penis: “Then he knew that he had been a fish | With slippery white belly held tight in his own fingers”, The Death of Saint Narcissus 24–25.
The Blameless Sister of Publicola
I know a nice girl named Valeria
Who has a delicious posterior
And beautiful thighs
Where her true lover lies
While his penis explores her interior.
Valerie’s Own Book: fair copy, one page, dated “16. ix. 59”.
Coriolanus V iii, VOLUMNIA: “Do you know this lady?” CORIOLANUS: “The noble sister of Publicola; | The moon of Rome: chaste as the icicle | That’s curdied by the frost, from purest snow, | And hangs on Dian’s Temple: dear Valeria!”
Textual History
“I shall certainly delete nothing from my collected poems. As Pilate, and after him Robert Browning, said, ‘what I have written I have written’. It is all part of the progress.” To Henry Eliot, 1 Jan 1936
1. Scope 2. Notation 3. Key to Editions
4. Proofs and Association Copies
5. The March Hare Notebook and Accompanying Leaves
6. Valerie’s Own Book 7. On Composition and Manuscripts
1. SCOPE
The Textual History provides information about the writing of the poems and their history in print. Although considerations of scale mean it cannot claim to be comprehensive, notably with regard to punctuation, it attends closely to drafts and early printings of each poem. It includes a selection of mis-writings or mis-typings which may indicate readings that were momentarily considered. For instance, in a typescript of Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar the “D” of “Descending” in the second line is typed over “A”. This is recorded because it suggests that “Ascending” (or some other word) may have been in TSE’s mind. The mis-typing “phthsic” for “phthisic” is retained as indicating that a word was not entirely familiar to TSE. Not recorded, however, is TSE’s typing “Sg” before correcting to “Stares”. Other errors are recorded in acknowledgement of their having appeared in previous editions, sometimes for many years. In other cases, although individual variants are trivial, the pattern of them offers evidence about the relation between drafts, the reliability of an edition, or the likelihood that an intervening draft has been lost.
The Commentary to each poem lists its transmission through the principal editions. To these witnesses the Textual History adds drafts, proofs and printings which encompass a series of poems (such as Landscapes, Four Quartets or “Occasional Verses”), listed at the head of each section of the Textual History, and those which relate to a particular poem, given beneath its title.
Drafts are generally listed and numbered in order of composition, but in some exceptionally complex cases such as The Waste Land, manuscripts are grouped before typescripts. Typescripts that are cognate—that is ribbon and carbon, or first and second carbons—are designated ts1a and ts1b but when the readings of each are identical, they are given simply as ts1. (The designations of drafts of Ash-Wednesday include the relevant Part number: tsIa, tsIIa etc.) Collective drafts or copies are designated by names indicating their history or location, such as Hayward’s ts sheaf for John Hayward’s collection of typescripts of Practical Cats, or ts Chamb for the typescript of The Rock in the Lord Chamberlain’s Papers. Lines drafted on a manuscript or typescript but not part of its principal text are sometimes designated by a separate abbreviation such as msAdd of Gerontion or ms3 of The Waste Land. When constituents of a draft are now physically separated this is specified in the description, but the whole draft is given a single designation. Most of ms1 of Portrait of a Lady, for instance, is in the Berg Collection, New York Public Library, but another part is the Beinecke Library at Yale.
TSE’s texts are characterised by experimentation and overlappings of all kinds. Just as he returned again and again to particular passages in other writers, adapting them to his new purposes, so he returned to materials of his own, excerpting, adapting and recombining. Boundaries and categories were not fixed, because what he wrote for or learnt from one kind of writing often appeared in others, but he consistently divided his poems between those that were part of his Collected Poems and those that were not, and then into periods most of which coincide with the sections in that volume and in the present edition. The order, groupings and whereabouts of drafts also help to structure this history.
The earliest significant collection of TSE’s poems in draft is the March Hare Notebook with its accompanying leaves, from which some poems were first collected in three books published in his lifetime: Prufrock and Other Observations, Poems (1919) and Ara Vos Prec (with its equivalent, US 1920). The contents of the Notebook, published as Inventions of the March Hare (1996), are tabulated at the head of the Textual History of Prufrock and Other Observations.
After 1920, the next period is represented by The Waste Land and its associated miscellaneous poems, the drafts of all of which were sent—like the March Hare Notebook—to John Quinn in 1922. The drafts of the Parts of the poem are listed in the Textual History, and WLComposite provides a reading text. The story of the associated miscellaneous poems and their relations to The Waste Land is given in an inventory within the headnote to the Commentary on the poem, 1. COMPOSITION.
One of these miscellaneous poems, Song (“The golden foot I may not kiss or clutch”), was largely re-used in The wind sprang up at four o’clock. In this form, along with Eyes that last I saw in tears, it became part of the writing and publishing of The Hollow Men. The various combinations of publication are tabulated at the head of the Commentary on The Hollow Men. Likewise, Ash-Wednesday was the final product of experiments with several combinations, and these are tabulated at the head of its Commentary. The bibliography of Four Quartets is complicated by the first of them, Burnt Norton, having appeared as a section within 1936.
The Textual History of the poems in Vol. I, as also of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats and Anabasis, is given here. Textual details of “Other Verses”, Noctes
Binanianæ and “Improper Rhymes” are briefly given within those sections.
2. NOTATION
Each entry in the Textual History has a lemma which begins with the line number or numbers, or a descriptive term such as Title or Epigraph. Ordinarily, the line number is in roman type. In the few cases where more than one text of a poem is printed, the line numbering of the secondary text is given in bold, as for instance WLComposite 25 or The Cultivation of Christmas Trees 25 (for the earliest full draft of that poem, given in the Textual History). When passages not amounting to a full draft are printed within the Textual History, they have their own numbering in square brackets: for instance, the two draft stanzas between lines 8 and 9 in A Cooking Egg, within which “I wanted Peace here on earth,” is line [5]. This is the case also with Prufrock’s Pervigilium and with some draft passages of Little Gidding. The full reference to a variant might for instance be The Cultivation of Christmas Trees 10–11 ts6 [3]. Here, the bold numerals indicate that the readings are variants not of the published text but of the earliest full draft, and [3] indicates that in place of lines 10–11, ts6 has a variant passage of which this is the third line. In the Commentary, references are abbreviated to the easiest unmistakable form, such as “16 variant”.
The lemma’s line reference is followed by the lemma reading: the word or words (and if necessary the punctuation) of which variants are being noted. The lemma ends with a square bracket:
114 prince; no doubt,]
Where no lemma reading is given before the square bracket, the reference is to the whole of the specified element: II 20] bracketed by Pound ts2 means the whole line is bracketed, while
I 7] And all the disturbing things that are left unsaid ms1 1st reading
means that this was the first reading of the whole line in ms1. (The superscript forms “1st reading”, “2nd alt” are used to distinguish readings from “1st ed.”, “2nd draft” etc.)
Readings and proposed readings are given in roman type, while other annotations, intended as comments, whether or not by TSE, are given in italics between quotation marks. For instance,
337] with “Keep” ts3
indicates that “Keep” was TSE’s reminder to himself and is not a variant. Proposed readings by others are attributed:
[2] change] change, Hayward ts3
Likewise comments:
II 80, 81] transposed with “?” Hayward ts10b
The symbol ‖ is used to separate different readings within the collations:
24 sleep and feed] feed and sleep 1919 ‖ sleep and eat AraVP
In cases where the lemma began as one reading among others before becoming established, its history too is spelt out:
8 Where the] ms1 1st and final reading ‖ Where ms1 2nd reading
If only a 1st reading is specified, it was superseded by the lemma reading. If a 2nd reading is specified but not a 1st reading, the first was as the lemma. If a 1st reading and a 3rd reading are given but not a 2nd reading, the second was as the lemma.
Where a 1st reading was not deleted, an added alternative is described as alt. Where the first reading was deleted and more than one replacement was added, these are 2nd reading alts. Where John Hayward commented on the typescripts of Four Quartets, he did not delete words, so his suggested revisions are each technically alt, but this is not specified.
Where readings are the same in consecutive versions, the notation is abbreviated.
started;] started: ts3–ts5
means that the reading is “started:” in the three typescripts ts3, ts4, ts5.
Where one or more of the intermediate drafts does not include the passage, a swung-dash is used:
small] little ts2~ts9
means that the reading is “little” consistently from ts2 to ts9, although in at least one of these typescripts the passage in question does not appear.
A plus sign after an abbreviation (ts4+ or 1925+) means “and in derived texts”. However, not all editions after a given date do necessarily derive from the one text, and there are anomalies such as continuing discrepancies in American editions, so exceptions may be listed, but “+” signals a firmly established text. In poem headnotes, “+” indicates that the poem itself continued to appear in collected editions.
Typed and manuscript revisions are not distinguished, and the collation does not generally specify how a revision was effected (for instance by deletion or transposition). The collation is a record not of all the marks on the paper, but of the resulting readings, which may combine type with manuscript, as well as combining words or punctuation marks that were not revised with others that have additions or deletions and with transpositions and material altogether new. For instance,
23] I’ve kept a decent house for twenty years, she says ts1 2nd reading
does not specify that the second reading was formed by the deletion of three words at the head of the original typed line (“Sergeant, I said,”) with the words “I’ve · · · years” retained and “she says” then added in manuscript.
Many of TSE’s manuscripts lack titles. Generally, his typescripts have a centred title, in capitals, with a full stop. The titles are rarely underlined. Publishers’ house styles then determined their capitalisation and italicisation. Variations are not recorded here except in the case of The “Boston Evening Transcript”, which has appeared with several combinations of quotation marks and roman and italic type (and where the style of the present edition departs from that of 1963, which was in error). TSE’s epigraphs were usually centred and printed in italics, but this too varied according to house styles. Their presentation is not recorded other than in exceptional cases such as The Hollow Men, where the pagination is involved, and Marina, where the short prose extract from Seneca has consistently been set as two lines of verse. Full stops after titles (in drafts) and after the attributions of epigraphs are not noted.
Within the Textual History, titles and epigraphs have been standardised in roman type within the collations, to make them distinct from editorial matter:
two] two of the ts1, printings prior to US 1920
avoids the confusion of
two] two of the ts1, printings prior to US 1920
Different journals, editions and publishers have different conventions for the use of capitals, italics and quotation marks in the presentation of poetry. Mostly such differences are of only minor significance, and they are not systematically collated, but the practice of some of the more important volumes is specified in 3. KEY TO EDITIONS. “¶” is used to indicate a new paragraph. When typing, TSE usually omitted the space after “Mr.”, which is not noted. Changes from capitals to small capitals or from “” to “and” are not noted. “^” is used to indicate the point at which the adduced material was deleted or added:
IV 10 ^ 11] And del
III 12 ^ 13] Seen from the depths of a New York street, added then del
The Bodleian Library’s manuscript classmarks “MS Eng. misc c.” and “MS Eng. misc d.” are abbreviated to “c.” and “d.” in references such as “c. 624 fols 107–108”.
3. KEY TO EDITIONS
Cath Anth: Catholic Anthology 1914–1915 [ed. Ezra Pound] (Elkin Mathews, 1915).
1917: Prufrock and Other Observations (The Egoist Ltd, 1917).
1919: Poems (The Hogarth Press, 1919).
AraVP: Ara Vos Prec (The Ovid Press, 1920).
US 1920: Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 1920). The new editions of 1927 and 1929, each entirely reset, are as US 1920 except where noted.
Boni: The Waste Land (Boni & Liveright, 1922). To Marianne Moore, 23 Mar 1934: “What a very kind thought of you to get me a copy of the original edition of The Waste Land … not being a collector of first editions, I have almost none of the earlier editions of my own work. I admit, however, that the first thing I do when I receive a second-hand bookseller’s catalogue, is to look for my own name, and usually find ‘Daniel Deronda, two volumes, uncut’.”
Hogarth: The Waste Land (The Hogarth Press, 1923).
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1925: Poems 1909–1925 (Faber & Gwyer, 1925). Published on 23 Nov, a month before the firm moved to Russell Square (28 Dec); memoirs of Ethel Swan (Faber archive). A limited edition was printed separately but is textually identical except where noted, as are the impressions 1926, 1928 and 1930 (which is the first under the imprint of Faber & Faber). Each poem, like each section of The Waste Land, opens with a word or words in capitals and small capitals.
1932: resetting of 1925, apparently following the text of the first impression. (Text as 1925 except where noted.) The aim was to produce an American edition that would end the demand for unauthorised printings of US 1920 and of Boni (letter to Henry Eliot, 3 Sept 1931). A printing in May 1932 was probably for this purpose, but appears to have been withdrawn because the paper was inferior. The sheets were cut down and issued in the Faber Library. A replacement printing in September, on large paper and with the errors in Portrait of a Lady II 7 corrected, was used for the American edition. Another in November was used for a second American impression and for a large-format “Sixth Impression” (actually the seventh) for Faber.
Rock: The Rock: A Pageant Play Written for Performance at Sadler’s Wells Theatre 28 May – 9 June 1934 on behalf of the Forty-Five Churches Fund of the Diocese of London. Book of Words by T. S. Eliot (Faber, 1934). Published 31 May 1934. American edition (US Rock) published 23 Aug 1934.
1936: Collected Poems 1909–1935 (Faber, 1936). Set from a copy of 1932 with corrections (Conversation Galante 16, The Waste Land [V] 428). The text remained the same through the eighteen impressions to 1961 except where noted. Physically modelled on 1932, being the same size, with untrimmed pages, 1936 had much better typography, and more lines per page (which meant that for the first time since AraVP, the eleven stanzas of A Cooking Egg did not run on to a third page, so avoiding a two-page spread with no title). A paperback was first issued in 1958 (1958 pbk) between the 16th and 17th hardback impressions (1957 and 1959), but this was omitted from the list of impressions. The physical format of the book was slightly reduced beginning with its 13th impression (1949). Faber catalogue Spring 1936:
