Written some 90 years ago, a group of ‘not quite right’ poems by the young TS Eliot has been rediscovered. ERIC GRIFFITHS examines the verses
IN 1927, TS Eliot politely turned down a batch of manuscript poems which the young WH Auden had sent to Faber & Faber, where the senior poet was an editor: “I do not feel any of the enclosed is quite right.”
Eliot didn’t often receive such letters from publishers himself, because he simply wrote the rejection-slips for his own work. He did this for the youthful poems now to be published as Inventions of the March Hare — “not worth publishing”, he said a year before his death in 1965.
But these “sets of verse which … never ought to be printed” have now been matchlessly edited by Christopher Ricks in a volume eminently worth publishing. Brought to light again, these poems glitter startlingly: there be dragons here, as also comedians, a strangler fond of his victims’ ears, useless professors and worse-than-useless journalists — plus a version of Columbus’s voyage so packed with sexual incident that it’s remarkable he ever survived to discover America.
Those with quieter tastes may be interested, too, in the book’s meticulous record of the development of the writer WB Yeats called “the most revolutionary man in poetry during my lifetime”.
As a young man, Eliot had bought for 25 cents a leather-bound notebook while he was holidaying on the New England coast. He carried this notebook with him on his travels, between 1909 and 1917, passing from Boston through Paris and Munich to Oxford and London, and wrote in it drafts of most of his published poems up to The Waste Land, along with over 40 pieces he never released.
Late in the summer of 1922, the year The Waste Land changed Anglophone poetry forever, Eliot offered a supporter and friend, New York lawyer John Quinn, the working-papers of The Waste Land. Quinn accepted, on condition he might buy a second manuscript Eliot had mentioned, Inventions of the March Hare, for which he paid $140.
Quinn died two years later, and Eliot never knew what had happened to the parcel. The documents were eventually purchased by the New York Public Library in 1958, but this was not announced until 1968, three years after the poet’s death. His widow Valerie Eliot, who has kept a tight rein on her husband’s poetic estate, brought out The Waste Land materials in 1971. This is the sibling collection to that book of revelations.
We can see why Eliot might have thought none of the poems first published here “quite right”. Inventions of the March Hare prints some 20 poems or sequences of poems written between November 1909 and November 1911, the years in which Eliot also composed The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, Portrait of a Lady and those four, great little poems, Preludes.
What, then, is the difference between the “new” pieces and the well-known published works? They share many turns of cadence, phrase and thought — “the corner of the street”, “withered leaves”, “vacant lots” are examples. The iron-filings of Eliot’s imagination lie all around in heaps but without the magnet needed to spring them into a pattern. Nothing in the notebook quite manages to become “the worlds revolve like ancient women/ Gathering fuel in vacant lots” of Preludes IV.
It is the thought of “ancient women” which does the trick, those orbiting derelicts on the rummage through a chilly universe. When it glances at what growing old might do to women, the notebook never rises above such pained simpers as “two ladies of uncertain age” or “A lady of almost any age”.
Men, on the other hand, and Eliot himself in particular, age at a great rate in these poems: “I feel,” he writes about a month after his 21st birthday, “like the ghost of youth/ At the undertakers’ ball” (Opera). It may be one of youth’s solemnities to think that life has passed them by when in fact it’s barely started, but there is more to Eliot’s wry comments. A writer is as old as his language feels.
Inventions of the March Hare repeatedly looks for something new to do in verse. Eliot wrote during World War I that “while the mind of man has altered, verse has stood still”; these poems show him trying to jog the lyrical needle out of the groove it was stuck in — but only producing, time after time, “a new assertion of the ancient pain”.
He remembered in 1961 that “the stirrings of desire to write verse were becoming insistent” at the time of the March Hare poems, and they tingle with a frustration that is philosophical and sexual at once.
For example, in Embarquement pour Cythere, named after Watteau’s painting of an idyllic jaunt, the poem turns from imagining a mildly erotic spree to dreams of sweet, conceptual solutions. If the poem were asked, “What’s your problem?” it might answer either “the relation of the One to the Many” or “my relationship with the blonde in the corner”, depending how the mood took it.
Eliot gives the poem a French title in the tradition of the poesie des departs, the wistful celebration of impossible journeys to brighter lands, used by poets such as Jules Laforgue and Charles Baudelaire.
Yet as Eliot recognised, there is nothing more cliched than the desire for fresh starts. The poetry of departures is also a poetry of department stores, those glassy embodiments of the fool’s paradise invented in the 19th century. As Eliot put it in an essay on Baudelaire, there is this “sadness … due to the exploitation of the fact that no human relations are adequate to human desires”.
The notebook poems are full of this sadness. Take In the Department Store itself: a probing glance is exchanged over the counter; hopes start up, but suddenly the speaker remembers, with parched hilarity, not only strolling hand in hand but some words of Bertrand Russell: “Brief and powerless is Man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark.”
His astounding powers of memory made the early Eliot feel old; he remembered what previous writers had written and, because he responded so vividly, their words recalled for him things that other people had desired. Hence the odd spectacle in these poems of a distinctly new poetic voice worrying that it sounds hackneyed.
In Ricks, Eliot has an editor whose verbal attentiveness and imagination approach, as nearly as a critic’s can, the poet’s own. The edition’s notes record, with fabulous wealth of detail, how Eliot grew into himself through making ever deeper his debts to those who wrote before him; they are more valuable as literary history than any guided tour of modernism could be.