The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I

T. S. Eliot

Authoritative edition of one of our greatest poets – now in paperback.

14 in stock

£25.00
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780571349128
Date Published
18.10.2018
Delivery
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Summary

Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year
Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism, Poetry Foundation, Chicago
Richard J. Finneran Award, Society for Textual Scholarship
Best Scholarly Edition Award, Modernist Studies Association

The Poems of T. S. Eliot
is the authoritative edition of one of our greatest poets, scrupulously edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue. It provides, for the first time, a fully scrutinized text of Eliot’s poems, carefully restoring accidental omissions and removing textual errors that have crept in over the full century in which Eliot has been so frequently printed and reprinted. The edition also presents many poems from Eliot’s youth which were published only decades later, as well as others that saw only private circulation in his lifetime, of which dozens are collected for the first time.

To accompany Eliot’s poems, Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue have provided a commentary that illuminates the creative activity that came to constitute each poem, calling upon drafts, correspondence and other original materials to provide a vivid account of the poet’s working processes, his reading, his influences and his revisions.

The first volume respects Eliot’s decisions by opening with his Collected Poems 1909-1962 in the form in which he issued it, shortly before his death fifty years ago. There follow in this first volume the uncollected poems from his youth that he had chosen to publish, along with such other poems as could be considered suitable for publication. The second volume opens with the two books of poems of other kinds that he issued, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Catsand his translation of Perse’s Anabase, moving then to verses privately circulated as informal or improper or clubmanlike. Each of these sections is accompanied by its respective commentary, and then, pertaining to the entire edition, there is a comprehensive textual history recording variants both manuscript and published.

The Poems of T. S. Eliot is a work of enlightening scholarship that will delight and inform all those who read Eliot for pleasure, as well as all those who read with pleasure and for study. Here are a new accuracy and an unparalleled insight into the marvels and landmarks from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land through to Four Quartets.

Critic Reviews

This is why books will never disappear.

Philip Collins, The Times
Critic Reviews

Not only will these books take many days to absorb initially but they will repay a lifetime's reading . . . Does this edition matter? Of course. I am so pleased to have lived to see it.

David Sexton, Evening Standard
Critic Reviews

A magnificent work of literary scholarship and dedication.

Michael Dirda, Washington Post
Critic Reviews

Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue, in their astonishingly rich notes on Eliot's sources in English and French poetry and much else, honor the Eliot who, as they implicitly portray him, perceived the whole of European literature in a simultaneous order

Edward Mendelson, New York Review of Books
Critic Reviews

A life’s work, to last its readers a lifetime

Andrew Motion
Critic Reviews

one of the great labours of modern scholarship. For an Eliot enthusiast, opening these books is like popping the locks on a suitcase packed with banknotes . . . judicious and generous selection of Eliot’s incisive views makes this edition a treasure chest

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Sunday Times
T. S.Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot, poet, critic, publisher, was born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1888. He settled in England in 1915, where for a few years he worked in the foreign section of Lloyds Bank. His first book of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published in 1917. In 1922, he became editor of the literary journal, The Criterion, publishing The Waste Land in its first…

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