Giles Foden
TS ELIOT’S youthful poems collected as Inventions of the March Hare appear at a time when the reputation of this notoriously difficult — and massively influential — modernist poet faces reassessment.
Though American-born, Eliot was known to be politically and religiously conservative. Accusations of anti-Semitism have recently been made, sparking debate in literary journals.
George Steiner, whose 1973 volume of criticism, Bluebeard’s Castle, first raised some of these issues, said this week: “Whereas in a poet such as Ezra Pound the anti-Semitic passages are stuck on like graffiti, in Eliot they are integral to important poetry. This is where the puzzle and the worry really lie.”
Pound, Eliot’s close friend, took Italian fascist Benito Mussolini’s side in World War II, broadcasting propaganda in his support. He was later charged with treason and committed to an insane asylum.
Eliot suppoters cite his articles he wrote for the Church Times and The Criterion, the literary magazine he edited, attacking Mussolini and the British fascists led by Oswald Moseley.
But the publication of the early notebook poems will show an often neglected side of Eliot — a lighthearted and somewhat risque side. Included in the jokey pieces is a scatological version of Columbus’s voyage, which refers to “King Bolo”, a black version of Alfred Jarry’s King Ubu, which will probably fuel accusations of racism on Eliot’s part.
But the author of the humorous verses in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, which became the basis for the musical Cats, also had a lewd streak, as this youthful verse shows:
There was a jolly tinker came across the sea
With his four and twenty inches hanging to his knee … With his whanger in his hand he walked through the hall “By God” said the cook “he’s a gonna fuck us all …”