“Now, what animal has a muzzle?” It was a few weeks into term, and we were already feeling a bit relaxed. “A horse, sir,” some wag suggested. “Right!” the desperate teacher exclaimed, clearly thinking that a broken straw was better to clutch at than no straw at all. “Fog equals horse!”
Or, perhaps, poetry equals fog. But even when Eliot’s poetry was a puzzle it was also a litmus test. It separated those who could recognise and respond to verbal beauty, even when its meaning was elusive, from those more utilitarian characters who were irritated by poetic difficulty rather than intrigued and drawn in by it, and who were deaf to Eliot’s strange and hypnotic music:
In his “Note of Introduction” to In Parenthesis (1961) Eliot observed that the condition in which I suspect most of my generation still find themselves — that is, the condition of loving Eliot’s poetry, having much of it by heart, and being saturated in its language and rhythms, but without claiming to have even remotely fathomed it — is in fact perfect preparation for this magnificent new edition of his poems:
Everyone who cares either about Eliot’s poetry in particular or about poetry in general will be surprised, delighted, and informed by what Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue have achieved in these volumes.
The first duty of an editor is to establish and print a correct text. Eliot himself was vigilant on this score. Consider, for example, his insistence — polite, but properly inflexible — about the title of The Waste Land. To Ezra Pound, he wrote in 1922: “Not ‘Waste Land’, please, but ‘The Waste Land’”. We find the same measured firmness courteously expressed in a letter to his Spanish translator, Angel Flores, six years later: “The title, by the way, is not ‘The Wasteland’ but ‘The Waste Land’.” As these quotations show, there are so many ways in which a text can become inaccurate, but only one way in which it can be faithful. Eliot occasionally sighed over the fecundity of textual error: “I have never succeeded in getting a first edition of one of my own books printed without some errors in it, and I sometimes find that when those are corrected new errors appear.”
Or, perhaps, poetry equals fog. But even when Eliot’s poetry was a puzzle it was also a litmus test. It separated those who could recognise and respond to verbal beauty, even when its meaning was elusive, from those more utilitarian characters who were irritated by poetic difficulty rather than intrigued and drawn in by it, and who were deaf to Eliot’s strange and hypnotic music:
The river sweats
Oil and tar
The barges drift
With the turning tide
Red sails
Wide
To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.
The barges wash
Drifting logs
Down Greenwich reach
Past the Isle of Dogs.
In his “Note of Introduction” to In Parenthesis (1961) Eliot observed that the condition in which I suspect most of my generation still find themselves — that is, the condition of loving Eliot’s poetry, having much of it by heart, and being saturated in its language and rhythms, but without claiming to have even remotely fathomed it — is in fact perfect preparation for this magnificent new edition of his poems:
Good commentaries can be very helpful but to study even the best commentary on a work of literary art is likely to be a waste of time unless we have first read and been excited by the text commented upon even without understanding it.
Everyone who cares either about Eliot’s poetry in particular or about poetry in general will be surprised, delighted, and informed by what Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue have achieved in these volumes.
The first duty of an editor is to establish and print a correct text. Eliot himself was vigilant on this score. Consider, for example, his insistence — polite, but properly inflexible — about the title of The Waste Land. To Ezra Pound, he wrote in 1922: “Not ‘Waste Land’, please, but ‘The Waste Land’”. We find the same measured firmness courteously expressed in a letter to his Spanish translator, Angel Flores, six years later: “The title, by the way, is not ‘The Wasteland’ but ‘The Waste Land’.” As these quotations show, there are so many ways in which a text can become inaccurate, but only one way in which it can be faithful. Eliot occasionally sighed over the fecundity of textual error: “I have never succeeded in getting a first edition of one of my own books printed without some errors in it, and I sometimes find that when those are corrected new errors appear.”
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