Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1996 - 428 pages 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London) of many of Eliot's best-known poems, among them "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (with a previously unpublished fragment), "Portrait of a Lady" (signally and subtly different from the published text), many versions of "Whispers of Immortality," and "Ode" (not reprinted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). |
Contents
Convictions Curtain Raiser II | 11 |
Opera | 17 |
Sensations of April | 23 |
The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock lines 169 | 39 |
The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock resumed | 45 |
in a Bar | 51 |
From An Agony in the Garret | 57 |
First Debate between the Body and Soul | 64 |
The Love Song of St Sebastian | 78 |
Airs of Palestine No 2 | 84 |
The Engine III | 90 |
APPENDIX | 323 |
APPENDIX C | 347 |
Influence and influences | 385 |
415 | |
427 | |
Other editions - View all
Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917 Thomas Stearns Eliot,Christopher Ricks No preview available - 1996 |
Common terms and phrases
1st reading 2nd reading added in pencil Aiken Alfred Prufrock Appendix Bergson black ink blue ink Body and Soul Bolo Caprice in North Columbo compare Paradise Lost compare Portrait compare Shelley compare Tennyson compare The Love compare The Waste compare TSE Corbière dance Dante Debate deleted edition epigraph eyes Ezra Pound F. H. Bradley Faber and Faber feel French given Harvard Harvard Advocate Houghton Library Lady Laforgue Laforgue's leaf Letters line-end lines London Love Song Mandarins March Hare Miscellaneous leaves morning Movement in Literature North Cambridge Notebook Oh little voices Paradise Lost perhaps philosophy poet poetry Preludes prose Prufrock's Pervigilium published revision rhyming Sebastian sensations Sept smile stanza street Suite Clownesque Sweeney Symbolist Movement Symons T. S. Eliot Tristan Corbière TSE wrote TSE's poem typescript Valerie Eliot variant verse W. S. Gilbert Waste Land window Windy Night word written ΙΟ