Points of Principle

Eliot daunts. The great poet-critic of the twentieth century, he occasionally twisted his critical knife into matters of scholarly convention. 'I will not allow', he wrote in 1962, 'any academic critic (and there are plenty of these in America only too willing) to provide notes of explanation to be published with [any of deleted] my poems.'¹ Eliot's remark is pointed and his parenthesis sharp: scholarship ought to know its place, or risk being put in it.

Yet Eliot reviewed, and not without admiration, numerous scholarly and annotated editions, including Grierson's Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century, F. L. Lucas's edition of Webster, and Herford and Simpson's first three volumes of the Oxford Ben Jonson. His essays on Cyril Tourneur and John Marston, too, initially appeared in the Times Literary Supplement as reviews of scholarly editions.

Eliot, himself a formidable scholar who completed a doctoral dissertation on F. H. Bradley in 1916 that Josiah Royce called 'the work of an expert', may have had his reservations about scholarship's place, but he was, all the same, willing to yield it.² In 'The Function of Criticism', he remarked:

we know that the discovery of Shakespeare's laundry bills would not be of much use to us; but we must always reserve final judgment as to the futility of the research which has discovered them, in the possibility that some genius will appear who will know of a use to which to put them.³

'But' turns, and much turns on 'but'. Eliot, seemingly so unyielding in 1962 – 'I will not allow' – was throughout his lifetime of two minds on such matters. And so he would be, having the mind both of the critic and the creator.

Any editor of Eliot would do well to put himself in mind of this and these, especially when approaching the one poem, The Waste Land, that Eliot himself annotated, supplying in 1922 the notes that, as he grudgingly acknowledged in 1956, 'can never be unstuck'.⁴ More, The Waste Land is one the very few published poems of Eliot's whose development is on display, the drafts having been published and edited by Mrs Eliot in 1971 as The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts, Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound.

One thing, then, is certain: an editor of The Waste Land owes it to the poem as well as to its readers to know his own mind, particularly on matters – none too small – of principle. And on such matters, this edition seems decidedly undecided.

Abbreviations provide a case in point. Unlike both The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry and Inventions of the March Hare, or most scholarly editions in general, The Annotated Waste Land contains no list of abbreviations. A bristling annoyance at this absence is rubbed by the way in which Rainey chooses to ignore what conventions do exist, so that instead of L1 or Letters i, for instance, for The Letters of T. S. Eliot, volume i: 1898–1922, one encounters on page 5 of his introduction the bizarre LOTSE, an explanation for which cannot be found until page 40, in endnote 11, a note, paradoxically, attached to a comment on page 4 which neither quotes nor mentions Eliot's letters: 'Then he set off for Paris, much to his mother's consternation.' One can sympathise with such consternation at setting off all alone: consider, for instance, the novel abbreviation TWL:AF, first encountered on page 17. At least, however, unlike the mysterious LOTSE, TWL:AF is defined up front after its first use as 'The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcription of the Original Drafts', though in fact the title of the book is The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts. One might be disinclined to trust an editor who slips up on a transcript, especially when this error (repeated on page...