As a last example, consider the commentary to the opening lines of section II of Burnt Norton, lines over which in the sixth form we chewed many pencils and shed bitter tears:
How we would have been helped had we realised, in the first place, that when writing these lines Eliot was thinking of Mallarmé’s “Tonnerre et rubis aux moyeux”; but secondly, that these words formed a poetic image of a particular sort. Eliot had commented on just this point in one of his Turnbull lectures on metaphysical poetry, where he had quoted the relevant lines from Mallarmé in the course of mounting a larger argument about poetic metaphor: “It is a mistake to suppose that a simile or a metaphor is always something meant to be visible to the imagination; and even when it is meant to be visible, that all its parts are meant to be visible at once . . . The poet’s business is to know what effect he intends to produce, and then to get it by fair means or foul. There is the element of rationality, the element of precision, and there is also the element of vagueness which may be used; and we must remember that one distinction between poetry and prose is this, that in poetry the word, each word by itself, though only being fully itself in context, has absolute value. Poetry is incantation, as well as imagery. ‘Thunder and rubies’ cannot be seen, heard or thought together, but their collocation here brings out the connotation of each word.” Local explication widens into a larger reflection on poetry more generally. Examples of such generous, exactly-pitched, and stimulating annotation abound throughout this edition.
A scholarly edition must give us a correct text, and it must help us to understand that text for ourselves, rather than foisting an interpretation on us. Both accuracy and understanding are helped by the composition of a history of the text. In many editions the textual history is printed at the back in a smaller font, and is seldom read. And yet this section of a scholarly edition often contains some of the most thought-provoking material. Here scholars become detectives, and it is helpful when thinking about scholarly detective work to recall Eliot’s own discrimination of the English detective story from its American cousin in his essay on Wilkie Collins and Dickens: “The best English detective fiction has relied less on the beauty of the mathematical problem and much more on the intangible human element.” Scholarly detection, too, may turn on and reveal the “human element”.
In this edition an example occurs in relation to one of the typescripts of The Waste Land, “an amateurish fair copy typescript on foolscap . . . from the library of John Hayward” and now kept with the Hayward papers at King’s College, Cambridge. Much later Eliot endorsed the first leaf of this typescript and said that he had typed it. In fact, Ricks and McCue show that the typescript was made after the publication of The Waste Land, and it was copied from an unreliable source, the collection of Prize Poems from The Dial printed in 1930 by Albert Boni. But this raises a curious question: why would anyone type out an inaccurate text of the poem after it had been published?
Ricks’s and McCue’s solution to this riddle is ingenious, persuasive, and ultimately quite moving. They suggest that the typist was Vivien Eliot, and that the preparation of the typescript was part of the régime of care Eliot constructed around his fragile wife: “It appears, both from his interventions and from her descriptions of her own boredom and anxiety, that he was finding things to distract her when she was often not well enough to leave their flat. Asking her to type for him may have been another such activity.” The resulting manuscript thus has no textual authority. But it has a profound interest. Anyone who, following the vulgar error, believes that textual editing is a bloodless, dry-as-dust activity, and that the more technically accomplished it is, the more arid it becomes, should read and ponder these pages, where the application of meticulous scholarly art draws the curtain, however speculatively, on an intensely human scene of suffering and compassion. As with all great editions of poetry, these books will change your ideas of what poems are and of what they can do.
Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded axle-tree.
How we would have been helped had we realised, in the first place, that when writing these lines Eliot was thinking of Mallarmé’s “Tonnerre et rubis aux moyeux”; but secondly, that these words formed a poetic image of a particular sort. Eliot had commented on just this point in one of his Turnbull lectures on metaphysical poetry, where he had quoted the relevant lines from Mallarmé in the course of mounting a larger argument about poetic metaphor: “It is a mistake to suppose that a simile or a metaphor is always something meant to be visible to the imagination; and even when it is meant to be visible, that all its parts are meant to be visible at once . . . The poet’s business is to know what effect he intends to produce, and then to get it by fair means or foul. There is the element of rationality, the element of precision, and there is also the element of vagueness which may be used; and we must remember that one distinction between poetry and prose is this, that in poetry the word, each word by itself, though only being fully itself in context, has absolute value. Poetry is incantation, as well as imagery. ‘Thunder and rubies’ cannot be seen, heard or thought together, but their collocation here brings out the connotation of each word.” Local explication widens into a larger reflection on poetry more generally. Examples of such generous, exactly-pitched, and stimulating annotation abound throughout this edition.
A scholarly edition must give us a correct text, and it must help us to understand that text for ourselves, rather than foisting an interpretation on us. Both accuracy and understanding are helped by the composition of a history of the text. In many editions the textual history is printed at the back in a smaller font, and is seldom read. And yet this section of a scholarly edition often contains some of the most thought-provoking material. Here scholars become detectives, and it is helpful when thinking about scholarly detective work to recall Eliot’s own discrimination of the English detective story from its American cousin in his essay on Wilkie Collins and Dickens: “The best English detective fiction has relied less on the beauty of the mathematical problem and much more on the intangible human element.” Scholarly detection, too, may turn on and reveal the “human element”.
In this edition an example occurs in relation to one of the typescripts of The Waste Land, “an amateurish fair copy typescript on foolscap . . . from the library of John Hayward” and now kept with the Hayward papers at King’s College, Cambridge. Much later Eliot endorsed the first leaf of this typescript and said that he had typed it. In fact, Ricks and McCue show that the typescript was made after the publication of The Waste Land, and it was copied from an unreliable source, the collection of Prize Poems from The Dial printed in 1930 by Albert Boni. But this raises a curious question: why would anyone type out an inaccurate text of the poem after it had been published?
Ricks’s and McCue’s solution to this riddle is ingenious, persuasive, and ultimately quite moving. They suggest that the typist was Vivien Eliot, and that the preparation of the typescript was part of the régime of care Eliot constructed around his fragile wife: “It appears, both from his interventions and from her descriptions of her own boredom and anxiety, that he was finding things to distract her when she was often not well enough to leave their flat. Asking her to type for him may have been another such activity.” The resulting manuscript thus has no textual authority. But it has a profound interest. Anyone who, following the vulgar error, believes that textual editing is a bloodless, dry-as-dust activity, and that the more technically accomplished it is, the more arid it becomes, should read and ponder these pages, where the application of meticulous scholarly art draws the curtain, however speculatively, on an intensely human scene of suffering and compassion. As with all great editions of poetry, these books will change your ideas of what poems are and of what they can do.
Like this article? Share, save or print using the icons below:
