T.
S. Eliot Comes Home to Boston
The Editorial
Institute at Boston University is
pleased to announce that one of its Directors,
Professor Christopher Ricks, has been
invited to prepare a full critical edition
of the poems of T. S. Eliot. The undertaking
will complement publication of Eliot’s
very extensive critical writings and
of his letters, which are being edited
elsewhere.
Although Eliot was perhaps
the foremost English language poet of the
twentieth century
and died more than forty years ago, his
writings have never been collected before,
and
many manuscripts have been in restricted
archives. The Complete Poems,
to be published
by Faber & Faber in Britain, will contain
not only Eliot’s masterpieces, such
as The Waste Land and Four
Quartets but also his Practical
Cats, his translation of St.-John
Perse’s Anabase, and a number
of unpublished or neglected verses.
T. S. Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri,
in 1888. He was educated at Harvard, and
as a
young man moved to Europe, where he studied
in Paris and Oxford. His first volume of
poems, the tantalizingly titled Prufrock
and Other Observations, was published
in 1917
in London, and he soon made his name as
an influential reviewer and critic. The
Waste
Land was a publishing sensation in 1922-3 (the British edition was
published by Virginia
Woolf), and Eliot was awarded the Nobel
Prize in 1948.
Christopher Ricks’s
transatlantic career began on the other
side: he taught at both Oxford
and Cambridge before coming to Boston University
in 1986. He is in the middle of a
five-year term as Professor of Poetry at
Oxford, and is a leading Eliot scholar
and critic.
In 1963 he reviewed the last edition of
the poems published in Eliot’s lifetime,
in 1988 he
published a critical study of T. S.
Eliot and Prejudice, and in 2002 he
gave the Panizzi
Lectures in Bibliography at the British
Library on revisions in Eliot’s critical
prose.
Ten years ago, his edition of the early
poems, Inventions of the March Hare,
led Helen
Vendler to write “I wish Ricks would
annotate the Complete Poems so
that we could
know them as well as we now know the unpublished
verse.” In The New Yorker,
Anthony Lane recognized that the edition
was itself a work of criticism, calling
it “the best book ever written on
Eliot,” and now Ricks jokes that
it is exciting to be working on “the
best book ever written by Eliot.”
The enterprise is the latest of a number
of important literary editions to be undertaken
at
the Editorial Institute, including the
recently published Letters of A. E.
Housman, edited
by Institute co-director Archie Burnett,
and an edition in eleven volumes of the
writings
of the Victorian lawyer and controversialist
James Fitzjames Stephen, of which
Christopher Ricks and Frances Whistler
of the Editorial Institute are General
Editors.
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