Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917
- Book Review,
by T. S. Eliot
Amazon.com
Once regarded as the champion of internationalist culture, in recent years T. S. Eliot has been reclassified as a racist, a misogynist, and a fascist. His life has been the subject of numerous critical studies and even one mainstream film, Tom and Viv, which dissected the intimate details of Eliot's marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood. With the publication of Inventions of the March Hare, admirers and critics of Eliot will gain new insight into the poet as a young man. The 40 poems contained in this volume were all written between the years 1909 and 1917, a period during which Eliot graduated from Harvard, spent a year in France, studied Buddhism and Sanskrit at Cambridge University, met Ezra pound, and married Vivien. These poems reveal a great deal about T. S. Eliot, the man and the poet. His borrowings from other poets are often apparent (an older Eliot once declared: "immature poets imitate; mature poets steal"), as are the repressed scatological, sexual, and neurotic impulses that would have been offensive or shocking to readers of his time. The annotations by editor Christopher Ricks add to our understanding of the poems themselves and what they expose about their author's complicated psyche.
From Library Journal
Though available in manuscript to scholars since 1968, this is the first appearance?for all but five poems?of Eliot's "lost" notebook of drafts and fragments. Eliot never intended this unfinished work to see publication, but in page after page his autumnal sensibility, his signature aura of languid urban malaise?however tentative?surfaces unmistakably: "We hibernate among the bricks/ And live across the window panes/ With marmalade and tea at six/ Indifferent to what the wind does." With more than 300 pages of crepuscular notes to accompany barely 100 pages of poetry, this edition is very much an academic enterprise, but it reveals fascinating dimensions of a young poetic imagination poised at the threshold of maturity. Among stuttering overtures for "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and politically incorrect, ribald lyrics lurk intriguing attempts like "Suite Clownesque," which hints at a postmodernism ("In trying to construe this text: 'Where shall we go to next?'") decades away. For scholars and devotees, Eliot's rehearsals for immortality will yield a cornucopia of delights.-?Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, N.Y.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The New York Times Book Review, Nicholas Jenkins
Here, then, is the latest Eliot, the Eliot of nerves and neurosis--an Eliot for our time, perhaps, who is also deeply the Eliot of his own time. In its expressions of extremity and contempt, Inventions of the March Hare restores for contemporary readers some sense of modernism's original edge of vital instability, of that aura of aggressive strangeness and experimentalism . . . This Eliot, the Eliot of nervous disease and sexual terror, is a hypercultivated sufferer, a poet whose writing articulates with dreamlike clarity not the perfections of European and American culture but its chronic anguish, a medium who transmits through his trembling fingertips not the music of personal evil but of fantasies and sicknesses widely shared.
Book Description
This extraordinary trove of previously unpublished early works includes drafts of poems such as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” as well as ribald verse and other youthful curios. “Perhaps the most significant event in Eliot scholarship in the past twenty-five years” (New York Times Book Review). Edited by Christopher Ricks.
Card catalog description
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 1968, 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).
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