One of the most interesting points of principle in scholarly editing is the pitch and angle of annotation. To what should the editor append a note, what should the note contain, and — more importantly, perhaps — what should it not contain? If the point of editorial annotation is to serve, assist, and guide (but never to determine) the understanding of the reader, then any trace of interpretative tendentiousness in annotation will be a poisonous contamination. Editors must be able to step aside from the interpretations they personally favour when they are approaching the text as critics, and must supply relevant information with even-handed impartiality. Ricks and McCue put the matter well:

An effort has been made not to use the Commentary for critical elucidation. The frontiers are uncertain, but the principle has been to provide only notes which constitute or proceed from a point of information. Parallels with other writers will sometimes not only suggest a source but amount to an allusion. Conversely, it may not be a source but an analogue that brings back what was in the air. Notes of this kind try to put down only the parallels themselves (though in the awareness that annotation is inseparable from interpretation, selection and judgement), leaving the reader to decide what to make of what the poet may have made of this.

Inseparable from interpretation; but not therefore identical with it. The frontier between interpretation and annotation will always be policed by judgment and tact, never by theory (whatever the theoreticians may claim); and in this edition Ricks and McCue have shown exemplary tact and judgment times out of mind. The critic must be banished from the editorial workshop. But the critic’s passions and energy still inform, albeit mutely, the apparently dispassionate notations of the editor. Only a critic as engaged and passionate as Ricks could have written annotations as tense and chaste as these.

In a review of this length, one can do no more than point to particularly successful examples. It is difficult to imagine that anyone would not be impelled to useful thought by, for instance, the annotations to the lines “Smells of chestnuts in the streets/And female smells in shuttered rooms” from Rhapsody on a Windy Night. Similarly impressive is the lengthy but also compressed headnote to Hysteria, which assembles a series of Eliot’s thoughts about the relations between prose and poetry, and (a different but related subject) the prospects for and problems of prose poems. These thoughts culminate in 1942 with the rueful verdict that “this form of writing always seems to me a mistake.  Years ago I did a little of the sort myself but was never able to persuade myself that the result was more than just a note for a poem to be written.” The earlier part of the note hints at just how extensive and repeated those attempts at self-persuasion were. In a lesser edition, we would have been given just the adverse final judgment. Ricks and McCue, by contrast, have displayed the development of Eliot’s thought concerning a whole realm of literature.