Sometimes poems were maimed by simple accident — for instance, the omission of the final line of part II of The Hollow Men, which persisted through many reprintings of the Collected Poems, but which in this edition is now restored, so that the section ends not with the puzzling and unpunctuated lines:

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

But rather with the (still difficult, but at least grammatical) three lines which return us to the opening line of the section:

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom
With eyes I dare not meet in dreams.

At other times the poet himself might deface the text of his poem. We are all familiar with the evocation of lovelessness and listlessness from “A Game of Chess” in The Waste Land:

            The hot water at ten.
And if it rains, a closed car at four.
And we shall play a game of chess,
Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.

So it is startling to learn that Eliot deleted a parenthetic line at the request of his first wife, Vivien. The poem originally read, and now reads again in this edition:

            The hot water at ten.
And if it rains, a closed car at four.
And we shall play a game of chess,
(The ivory men make company between us)
Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.

To “make company” is a euphemism for coition. The ambiguity of the line (do the ivory men themselves make love, or do they encourage the players to do so?) may have pressed too hard on a neuralgic point in a marriage already frail.

Eliot said some fierce things about elucidatory notes, for instance telling the Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge in 1962 that “I will not allow any academic critic (and there are plenty of these in America only too willing) to provide notes of explanation to be published with any of my poems.” And he went on to explain the reason for this stance: “My objection . . . [is] that I should be allowing interpretation of the poem to be interposed between me and my readers . . . the commentator is providing information which stands between the reader and any immediate response . . . I want my readers to get their impressions from the words alone and from nothing else.” This stern warning has guided Ricks and McCue in their annotation, which is lavish in extent but austere in nature.