<target target-type="anchor" id="page_xxxix" /> <sc>editorial procedures and principles</sc> Editorial Procedures and Principles Editorial Procedures and Principles <sc>i. published prose</sc> <italic>Criteria for Inclusion</italic> Eliot’s uncollected prose makes up the vast majority of the writings published in his lifetime and spans the period from his stories in the Smith Academy Recordin 1905 to his final autobiographical note for the Harvard College Class of 1910: Fifty-fifth Anniversary Report, contributed in late December 1964, shortly before his death on 4 January 1965. These writings include hundreds of reviews and essays contributed to periodicals; commentaries in the Criterion; letters to the press (printed here and in the Letters; in each place they appear in different contexts of personal letters and public prose, thereby inviting separate readings and annotation); lectures and addresses published separately in wrappers or in boards; introductions, prefaces, and forewords to books and to translations of his works in foreign languages; testimonials and other contributions to domestic and foreign newspapers; and public broadcasts published or excerpted in the Listener. Beginning with volume 5, the increasing numbers of published items unrecorded in the Gallup bibliography are identified in the Contents with a diamond ( ♦).
By the mid-1930s, Eliot began to receive numerous invitations to give Prize Day speeches to secondary schools and addresses to and in support of various societies, charities, and churches. He often gave the only copy of his typescript to his hosts, who published or summarized the texts in their school magazines, newsletters, or local newspapers, most of which remained bibliographically unrecorded. Some of these typescripts and printed texts have been recovered; other typescripts have been lost, or the addresses were made from notes and outlines afterward discarded. But, in many instances, a staff member, or a reporter from a local paper, was present to write a report, often with substantial quotations, at times seemingly with Eliot’s text in hand. These firsthand reports of addresses and lectures have been included in Part II, “Transcripts and Summary Reports of Lectures,” as valuable records of Eliot’s little-known secondary intellectual life in his cultural domain.
Among his own letters to the press are those of which he was a signatory with one or more others. His role in the authorship is often uncertain, but his growing support of public appeals, causes, and concerns is of permanent interest. Such signed letters, which appear in significant numbers in volume 6, are collected and chronologically included in Part III, “Signed Letters and Documents with Multiple Authorship.”
<italic>Chronology</italic> With a few exceptions, the editors have arranged the majority of Eliot’s unpublished and published prose writings in the original order of composition or publication to allow the reader to follow closely his developing patterns of thought as he immersed himself in intellectual journalism and literary criticism from year to year, decade to decade. The primary volumes of collected essays, together with their prefaces and introductions, have been disassembled and their contents returned to chronological order alongside the uncollected and unpublished prose.
Less than 10 percent of Eliot’s prose writings underwent textual changes when they were reprinted or collected; most pieces were never revisited after their first publication in periodical and other forms. Some reviews and essays, however, particularly those included in The Sacred Wood, were combined and revised by Eliot as new essays: successively published reviews of books on Ben Jonson in November 1919, on Philip Massinger in May-June 1920, and on Swinburne and others in the two-part “The Perfect Critic” in July 1920. The original reviews were redacted as such and included in the volume under the first title of each pair. He collapsed three other reviews published between September and December 1919 under the title “Imperfect Critics” for the volume. Moreover, “Eeldrop and Appleplex” and “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” both originally published in two separate parts months apart, have been combined into single pieces. In such uncharacteristic cases, we have sacrificed adherence to chronology in order to present the complete texts, but not without indicating the separate chronological positions and titles and recording significant textual changes.
A few other considerations have led us to relax the chronological order of publication in specific instances, including Eliot’s doctoral dissertation on F...
