Writhing and Crawling and Leaping and Darting and Flattening and Stretching

Helen Vendler

• Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-17 by T.S. Eliot, edited by Christopher Ricks
  Faber, 428 pp, £30.00, September 1996, ISBN 0 571 17895 2

When Emerson wrote to Whitman that there must have been ‘a long foreground’ preceding the composition of Leaves of Grass, he expressed the curiosity every reader feels when coming upon a fully accomplished poem. ‘How did this art develop?’ – this question accounts for the fascination exerted on us by juvenilia and by manuscript drafts such as the 1971 facsimile of the manuscript of The Waste Land, edited by Valerie Eliot. Though some of Eliot’s verses not included in the 1963 Collected Poems were published in 1967 under the title Poems of Early Youth, it has long been known that a notebook containing other early poems, written between 1910 and 1917, languished in the Berg Collection of the New York Library, and that in the notebook there had once been some ‘obscene’ comic verses (these, excised from the notebook and given by Eliot to Ezra Pound, were later discovered among the Pound papers). Valerie Eliot has now allowed the entire notebook to be published, superbly edited by Christopher Ricks, whose T.S. Eliot and Prejudice is still the most acute and fine-grained investigation of the vexed question of the place of prejudice in Eliot’s writing.