by T. S. Eliot
I 15 ^ 16] ts1 1st reading:
Waters of tenderness
Sealed springs of devotion.
II
II 15 coat] skin 1936 proof (error, anticipating next word) corrected by TSE, US 1936
II 20, as also IV 14 twilight] twylight ts3, editorially changed to twilight
II 21] Criterion, Dial ‖ not 1925+.
In printings of the whole of The Hollow Men in TSE’s books since 1925, this part has ended with II 20:
In the twilight kingdom
making it the only part not to conclude with a full stop. (When I. M. Parsons included The Hollow Men in The Progress of Poetry, 1936, a full stop was supplied following “kingdom”.) The anomaly confirms that Part II should end as it had done in the Criterion and Dial:
With eyes I dare not meet in dreams.
This omission from 1925 was probably accidental (see McCue 2012, Proposal 6). The line does not fi gure in TSE’s recordings.
III
III 2 cactus] the cactus ms2, ts2 1st reading
III 3 images] images are raised ts2 1st reading
III 6 Under] Behind ms2 1st reading
III 6 ^ 7] I ts2 1st reading (mistyping) ‖ no line space Sel Poems 1954 (though III 7 is indented. Corrected long after)
III 9] not ms2 1st reading Waking] Walking 1936 proof (corrected by TSE)
IV
Numeral IV] V ts3, editorially changed to III ‖ III Dial
IV 5 kingdoms] Criterion, Dial, 1925, 1932+ ‖ kingdoms. 1925 2nd–4th imps. (1926–30), 1932 proof (allowed to stand by TSE). The whole standing line of Linotype in 1925 must have been reset to add the stop, but why this was done is unknown. Since TSE did not delete the stop in 1932 proof, his preference remains unknown. See McCue 2012 Proposal 13.
IV 5 ^ 6] new page so line spacing indeterminate 1969
[Poem I 81–83 · Commentary I 717–21]
IV 9 Gathered] Cathered 1963 (corrected 4th imp., 1968) river] Criterion, Dial, 1925, 1932+ ‖ river. 1925 2nd–4th imps. (1926–30), 1932 proof (allowed to stand by TSE). See IV 5.
IV 14 ^ 15] line space Criterion, Dial ‖ no line space 1925+ (apparently to fit IV onto the page in 1925)
V
V 10, 16, 24] equally indented 1925 ‖ ranged to right margin 1936, Penguin, US 1952, US 1963, 1969. 1963 ranges 16 and 24 but insufficiently indents 10
[Poem I 83–84 · Commentary I 721–26]
Ash-Wednesday
Chronology of publication:
Part II appeared as Salutation in Saturday Review of Literature (NY) 10 Dec 1927 and Criterion Jan 1928. Reprinted in Twentieth-Century Poetry ed. John Drinkwater, Henry Seidel Canby and William Rose Benét (Boston, 1929), with text as Criterion except where noted.
Part I appeared (entirely in italics) in Commerce (Paris) Spring 1928, with facing translation by Jean de Menasce. (Since TSE did not post the translation until 22 May, the journal probably appeared in midsummer or later.) Reprinted in Walter de la Mare’s Desert Islands (Apr 1930) 272–73, without title and as a note to words of de la Mare’s own (from 71): “The self within hovers over the envied ashes:”
Part III appeared (entirely in italics) in Commerce Autumn 1929, attributed to “T. S. Eliott”, with facing translation by Jean de Menasce.
Parts IV, V and VI were not separately published.
Parts I and II were included in The Faber Book of Modern Verse (1936) with text as in 1936.
A projected limited edition of the complete poem in quarto format, to be printed at the Curwen Press, reached second proof stage before being cancelled. Glenn Horowitz’s catalogue 22 (1990), to which Robert Giroux and Donald Gallup were advisers, notes: “It was initially planned to issue Ash-Wednesday in a large format on expensive paper and the publishers went so far as to have a handful of these proof copies printed before changing their plans. In the end, and in spite of the expense incurred, it was decided that the poem was too short to warrant such an elaborate presentation, so they had it reset in a small format. A number of the proof copies, in varying stages of production, were preserved by Richard de la Mare.” Curwen then printed the signed limited octavo edition published jointly by Faber and the Fountain Press, New York, in April 1930. Trade editions followed from Faber (later in April), and Putnam, New York (September), each with pagination different from the limited ed. In 1933 Faber reset the poem, with different pagination again, for a second trade edition (1933). TSE to Donald Brace, 17 Dec 1935, of the poems to be added to 1925 for the forthcoming Collected Poems 1909–1935: “I think that Ash Wednesday was copyrighted by Putnams in America. At any rate they set it up. But they took it over from a queer bird named Adams who had bought some limited edition press and found he could not make it a success.” In the collation below, 1930 ltd ed., US 1930 and 1933 are as 1930 except where noted.
msI (King’s): draft of Part I 1–39 (excluding 40–41), on four leaves torn from a pocketbook and headed “All Aboard for Natchez Cairo and St. Louis”, with “Perch’io non spero” ranged right beneath. Written with propelling pencil, occasionally causing a secondary impression in the paper.
[Poem I 85–97 · Commentary I 727–56]
tsIa (Houghton): carbon of Part I; apparently sent to TSE’s mother, with pencilled note at head: “to be published by Marguerite de Bassiano in Commerce”. (Both the angle and the position of a note at the head of A Song for Simeon ts1b show that the two notes were pencilled at the same time.) The groups of lines are separated by two-line spaces. (This Houghton folder also contains a carbon by an unknown typist, headed “printed in Commerce, Spring, 1928”. The carbon follows the printed text.)
tsIb (untraced): Part I, sent to Commerce 19 Mar 1928. On 4 Apr TSE wrote again to Marguerite Caetani about I 40–41: “At the beginning of each of the last two lines please alter the words ‘be with’ to ‘pray for’. One might as well stick to the exact quotation.”
tsIc (untraced): Bush (1983) and Schuchard (1999) mention a further typescript of Part I at Texas which is no longer to be found. Describing it as earlier than tsAW (below), Bush 260 specifies: “in the Ottoline Morrell Collection · · · now attached to an envelope Eliot addressed to Morrell that is postmarked 3(1?) May 1928, but appears to have been taken from a letter of 2 October 1928”. The typescript described by Schuchard 246–47 was later than tsIa and had been “temporarily retitled ‘BALLATA: ALL ABOARD FOR NATCHEZ, CAIRO AND S AINT LOUIS.’ with ‘Perch’io no spero’ as the epigraph. Eliot subsequently crossed out the title and epigraph of this typescript and printed the new title ‘PERCH’ IO NON SPERO …’ This draft, which was sent to Jean de Menasce for translation into French, bears the blue-pencil holograph of the editor or the printer, ‘Commerce 13 ital’ and is the English text as printed opposite the French translation in Commerce.” (No such typescript is mentioned in Sackton, the 1975 catalogue of the Texas TSE collection, or in online finding aids.)
tsId (untraced): Theresa Whistler’s The Imagination of the Heart: The Life of Walter de la Mare (1993) 401 claims that TSE sent a draft of Part I to de la Mare.
tsII (Beinecke): untitled, undated draft of Part II on two leaves sent to William Force Stead. With “Early version of poem sent me by T. S. Eliot WFS” at head.
[Poem I 85–97 · Commentary I 727–56]
tsAW (King’s): foolscap carbon (in blue) of a draft in five parts, but including much of VI (see below: Part title to VI), sent to Leonard and Virginia Woolf in Oct 1928. Each Part has numeral and title, and begins a new leaf. Leonard Woolf to A. N. L. Munby, Librarian of King’s, 10 Dec 1966, offering for sale the typescript and a copy of 1930: “he hoped that we and Mary Hutchinson would come one evening and criticise it · · · On the first of the five pages of typescript he has written in ink [actually pencil]: ‘No need to acknowledge this. We look forward to meeting you on the tenth. T.’ We went after dinner on the 17th (not the 10th) and Mrs Hutchinson and McKnight Kauffer were also there. We each in turn criticised the poem. When Ash Wednesday was published, Eliot sent us a copy w
ith the following inscription in it: ‘For Virginia & Leonard Woolf from T S Eliot. I hope this is better than the first version.’ There are considerable differences between the typescript and the published version.” William Plomer remembered Leonard Woolf telling this story, about TSE asking them to “assemble and make their opinions known to him. Whatever Mary Hutchinson and Kauffer said he dismissed as of no interest, but when it was Virginia’s turn she said she thought too many lines ended with a present participle. ‘That’s a good criticism, Virginia’, he said.” (Composition FQ 5 described this exchange as concerning East Coker, but in the library’s copy of Composition FQ at King’s, A. David Moody corrects this to “the occasion, in October 1928, when TSE had the Woolfs, Mary Hutchinson and McKnight Kauffer advise him on a draft of Ash-Wednesday”. Virginia Woolf to Roger Fry, 16 Oct 1928: “He has written some new poems, religious I am afraid, and is in doubt about his soul as a writer.” (Other correspondence with Leonard Woolf about this draft is at Sussex U.)
tsIIIa (Bonn U.): Part III (as Som de l’escalina), double-spaced, on two leaves, sent to E. R. Curtius on 2 Aug 1929, inscribed “If you like this I shall be happy, if not, I shall not be disappointed. It will appear in Commerce I believe in December. Most cordial wishes T. S. Eliot 2. 8. 29.”
tsIIIb (Balliol, Oxford): ribbon copy of Part III (as Som de l’escalina), sent to Commerce for publication, single-spaced, on a single leaf. With “Commerce” and “B.14” pencilled at head and “eu 13 ital.” pencilled at foot, probably in the hand of Jean de Menasce, whose translation appeared on the facing page in Commerce, and many of whose papers are now at Balliol.
Scripps (Scripps College): Part II on single printed leaf torn from Criterion Jan 1928, with title TAN M’ABELIS added by Vivien Eliot, and with three pairs of lines braced. Of these six lines, three were omitted from the final text.
4to trial page (Texas Christian U., Fort Worth): sheet folded to form four pages. The first page has I 1–20 and the page number 9. Apparently a preliminary trial for 4to 1st proof. It includes extra punctuation at the end of most lines, matching that of 4to 1st proof except that a full stop at the end of 15 became a comma in 4to proof. Also, a “ct” ligature in “actual” (18) was reset using separate letters in 4to proof. The punctuation is not recorded here.
4to 1st proof (Faber archive): author’s marked proof for quarto edition on four folded sheets of hand-made paper. No title, with printed pagination 1–13, followed by three blank pages. No dedication. First page with “To Printer: Note punctuation. Corrected T.S.E. 30/10/29” added at head. The printer has supplied stops, question marks and exclamation marks (and occasionally proposed them in the margin, with “qy”). The proof shows TSE deleting almost a hundred of these, mostly from the ends of lines. These are not individually recorded below, although changes from one punctuation mark, already present, to another are recorded. TSE also asked for more space between sentences, writing “to printer:—much more space” after “skull.” (II 4) and at each subsequent instance writing “more space” (not noted below). (The Saturday Review setting of II, which he may have had to hand, has particularly wide spaces between sentences.) Gallup’s uncorrected copy of this proof is at Beinecke and another uncorrected copy, at Texas Christian U., Fort Worth, is laid in a dummy binding. A typescript collation of 4to trial page and 4to 1st proof was compiled by Robert Beare and sent to TSE on 9 Apr 1955 (King’s).
[Poem I 85–97 · Commentary I 727–56]
4to 2nd proof (Princeton): corrected proof, on hand-made paper, with title-page title in black letter and imprints of Faber & Faber and The Fountain Press, NY. Colophon present, but no dedication. Printed at the Curwen Press. The author’s corrections in the previous proof were imperfectly followed. Another 4to 2nd proof, unbound and without title page, was sold in 1981 by Waterfields of Oxford and then by Gekoski of London, but is untraced. It was described by Gekoski as having “Ash-Wednesday | by | T. S. Eliot” in his hand at the head of the first page, and “eight corrections by him in the text, mostly of punctuation”.
1933 proof (untraced): proof of the second edition, “Corrected TSE 14. X. 33”, from the library of Richard de la Mare, sold in 1981 by Waterfields to a private US customer. “Corrections pencilled in the text in the author’s hand, mostly concerned with its spacing, demonstrating his care over the presentation of his poems on the page: e.g. he notes, pp.18–19, ‘I should prefer it if p.18 could be spaced so as to bring the first “Lord, I am not worthy” onto the top of p.19’.”
tsBBC (Texas): secretarial ts on nine leaves prepared for TSE’s broadcast of 29 Sept 1951. An additional title-leaf, signed by the producer, Terence Tiller, gives details of the rehearsal and recording times and dates. Corrections in red and a small number in black (these possibly by TSE) were probably made before recording, but other notes in red give timings of different passages. Not collated, but see textual note to III 6.
Each Part begins a new page in the quarto proofs, in 1930 and in subsequent book printings except Sesame and US 1952 Part titles were replaced by roman numerals in the quarto proofs and 1930, and since 1936 these have been italicised. Since 1936, the contents list in the Collected Poems has specified, beneath the title Ash-Wednesday, the number and first line of each: (“I. Because I do not hope to turn again”, etc.), whereas the Parts of The Hollow Men are not listed. The contents of Penguin / Sel Poems and US 1952 list only the main title, giving the poem the same weight as The Hollow Men.
In different editions, the line spacing of Ash-Wednesday, perhaps more than any other poem, has been repeatedly altered to accommodate the text to varying depths of page and to avoid isolating lines. In the spacious pages of the planned quarto edition, the poem would have been freed from such constraints in all but a single instance, so that TSE’s spacing instructions to the printer on 4to 1st proof are the best guide to what ideally he wanted—and the proliferation of his instructions demonstrates their importance. With the one exception, then, and despite some conflicting later instructions and practices, the spacing of those corrected proofs is followed in the present edition for the first time. The exception is Part V, which proved in the planned edition to be one line too long to fit on two quarto pages, and was therefore set without a line space before the last line. Visually, this was acceptable, since the penultimate line—“Of drouth, spitting from the mouth the withered apple-seed”—was slightly too long for the page width, so that “seed” had to be turned. The effect was to combine the turn with the line space, and leave the final line, the deeply indented “O my people”, isolated in the same way as the repeated “O my people, what have I done unto thee” (10, 28). The full line space was restored in 1930 and is retained here as in all other editions.
Section-title page] 1936+
[Poem I 85–87 · Commentary I 727–56]
Title] on leaf preceding poem and with only numeral above first line 1930 ‖ on section-title page (with date) and with only numeral above first line 1936+ ‖ above poem (with date) but separated from it by a long rule US 1952. (Only Ash-Wednesday and Choruses from “The Rock” begin with a numeral alone above the poem in 1936 and 1963+.) Ash-Wednesday] 1930+ ‖ ASH WEDNESDAY US 1952 Contents. (Although the title is hyphenated on the title page, spine of both the book and the jacket and the front flap in 1930, it appears as ASH | WEDNESDAY on the front board, and as ASH | WEDNES | DAY on the front panel of the jacket.)
Part numbers] large italic (matching The Waste Land but larger than The Hollow Men) 1936, 1963 ‖ text-size roman 4to proofs, 1930, Later Poems, Penguin (matching The Hollow Men but smaller than The Waste Land), Sel Poems (matching The Hollow Men but smaller than The Waste Land ‖ large roman 1933, 1969, some later printings of Sel Poems and 1963 ‖ roman small capitals Sesame, Faber Bk Mod V (neither of which contains The Hollow Men)
I
Part title I] 1930+ ‖ All Aboard for Cair Natchez Cairo and St. Louis msI (as Part I was probably the second to be composed, these words are unlikely ever to have been intended as a co
mprehensive title) ‖ Perch’io non spero msI ‖ PERCH’ IO NON SPERO tsIa ‖ PERCH’IO NON SPERO. tsAW ‖ PERCH’ IO NON SPERO … Commerce
Epigraph] not tsAW+‖ Perch’io non spero ms1 (ranged right) ‖ di tornar piu mai | ballatetta, in Toscana … tsIa (deeply inset)
I 5] (Why should I emulate these things msI strive to strive] wish to strive tsIa such] those tsIa
I 6 (Why] Why msI agèd] aged msI, tsIa, tsAW its wings?)] his wings) msI ‖ his wings?) tsAW
I 7 mourn] mourn or why rejoice in pain msI 2nd reading
I 8 vanished] ringed msI the usual] an alien msI
I 8 ^ 9] new leaf msI
I 10 infirm] shallow msI the] a msI
I 12, 14, 16] perhaps written first (flow of words, weight of pencil), leaving gaps for 13 and 15 msI
I 12 know I shall not] do not think to msI
I 13 The one] The only msI ‖ The tsIa veritable] real msI
I 15] That trees will flower, that wells will flow again msI again] again. 4to trial page ‖ again, 4to proof 1st reading
I 15 ^ 16] no line space Desert Islands
I 17 and only] not msI
I 18 actual is actual only] fixed is fixed msI ‖ actual only 4to trial page (with “ct” ligature) ‖ 4to 1st proof 1st reading
I 19 And only] And msI ‖ And actual only tsIa
I 20 and] not msI
I 21 I] And I msI blessèd] not msI ‖ blessed tsIa, Commerce, tsAW, Desert Islands. face] face, renounce the voice; msI
[Poem I 87 · Commentary I 732–37]
I 22] not msI
I 23 ^ 24] no line space tsIa, 4to 1st proof, 1930 ltd ed., US 1930, 1936+ ‖ line space Commerce, tsAW, Faber Bk Mod V ‖ new page so line spacing indeterminate 1930
