'Play Time'

I can't remember how old i was when I discovered 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', though I know I had precisely that feeling – of discovery, of breathtaking encounter, of having found something that perhaps no one else had had the good fortune to find. The thing I do remember is the edition in which I read it. It was the slim Faber & Faber selection, The Waste Land and Other Poems, known to readers for many years on both sides of the Atlantic, and lately dressed – according to the bold designs of Pentagram – in a cover of oranges and cerulean blue. Though I wasn't aware of it at the time, the volume from which this selection had first been compiled in 1940, Eliot's Collected Poems (1936), had presented a subtly different Prufrock to the one I was now encountering: not different in textual detail, exactly, but different on account of the company he'd once been wont to keep. In the Collected Poems, Prufrock's love song is the first of several smoky cameos to descend upon the reader, most of them caught in a sort of urban half-light – 'Whispering lunar incantations' – and troubled by a host of passing shades.¹ In my starkly coloured edition, by contrast, Prufrock appeared to be a more than usually lonely figure, and his poem a rather isolated instance of lyric rumination, followed as it was by a few smelly 'Preludes' and nothing more to suggest the breadth of Eliot's 'Other Observations'. But I loved that love song, as lots of readers have, and perhaps the reason I did had something to do with its seeming to unfold in unmediated fashion. No notes, no apparatus to speak of, no trace of the tell-tale editorial hand – just a poem of 131 lines to conjure with, and an unattributed epigraph in medieval Italian.

I realise now that no text is ever truly unmediated. I know that wherever editors have elected to keep their distance, it is not because they've chosen to lay off the scholarly procedure, but rather because they understand that some editorial actions speak louder than words, and that to choose not to do something connotes a rare kind of scholarly integrity. Light, in other words, doesn't always mean lite. Even so, it can be instructive to return to the scenes and circumstances of early reading, to notice with slightly beadier eyes the way in which a particular book was put together – and the way one missed it first time round – and also to see whether the thrill of that first impression still pertains having learnt something, subsequently, of the business that went on behind the scenes of its initial production. In the case of The Waste Land and Other Poems, I know now that its table of contents was determined in large part by Anne Ridler ('with the poet's consent') – which hasn't done all that much to alter my relation to the volume, or to my former reading self, but does prompt me to wonder whether Eliot might have snickered to think of an editor by that name preparing a selection of his poems for a press called Sesame Books.² To open Sesame, and to trust a Ridler – it's just too good to be true.

An abundance of this kind of information has now been made available to us in The Poems of T. S. Eliot, a two-volume edition masterfully curated by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue. The first volume commences with the Collected Poems 1909–1962, thereby reproducing the sequence Eliot himself established shortly before his death, and concludes with a long string of 'Uncollected Poems', which includes the many drafts, ditties, squibs, and interludes that were first brought to light in Ricks's earlier edition, Inventions of the March Hare (1996). To the casual observer, the distinction between these new volumes could not be more conspicuous. Where the first is weighty in...