T. S. Eliot

Inventions of the March Hare

Poems 1909 - 1917

Featuring previously unpublished works

Edited and anotated by Christopher Ricks

First U.S. Edition

Harcourt Brace & Company
15 East 26th Street
New York, NY 10010



The blurb for the book:

A few months before The Waste Land was published in 1922, T. S. Eliot gave the manuscript to his benefactor in New York, John Quinn. At the same time, he sold to Quinn a notebook containing about fifty poems that he had written during his twenties. It was not until 1868, three years after the poet's death, that the double cache was unveiled within the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.

The early poems, from the notebook and the accompanying leaves, are now at last published, all but a few of them for the first time. Of great interest, both technical and human, they reveal the young Eliot in the process of creating himself and his art: ruminating on the blind alleys and vacant lots of the city, exploring the perplexities of the modern age (doubt, ennui, indifference, dismay affectation), and experimenting with a variety of poetic forms (urban pastoral, lyric, satire, the prose poem).

Complementing the new poems, which include several bawdy verses, are "richly informative drafts"(The Observer, London) of many of Eliot's best-known poems, among them "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (with a previously unpublished fragment), "Portrait of a Lady" (signally and subtly different from the published text), many versions of "Whispers of Immortality," and "Ode" (not reprinted since 1920).

With extensive notes by Christopher Ricks -- "more valuable as literary history than any guided tour of 'modernism' could be" (The Guardian) -- and Eliot's own remarks about his early development as a poet (from letters, interviews, and criticism), Inventions of the March Hare is certain to "inaugurate a new era in Eliot criticism" (The Sunday Times, London).


Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888-1965
Inventions of the March Hare: poems 1909 - 1917 / by T. S. Eliot
edited by Christopher Ricks
p.     cm.
Includes index
ISBN 0-15-100274-6
I. Ricks, Chistopher B. II. Title
PS3509.L43158     1997
821'.912 -- dc21     96-45399

First U.S. Edition



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