The Poems of T. S. Eliot: Volume II

The Poems of T. S. Eliot is the authoritative edition of one of our greatest poets, scrupulously edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue. To accompany Eliot's poems, Ricks and McCue have provided a commentary that illuminates the creative activity that came to constitute each poem, calling upon drafts, correspondence and other original materials to provide a vivid account of the poet's working processes, his reading, his influences and his revisions.

This second volume opens with two books of verse: the children's verse of Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats and his translation of St. John Perse's Anabase. This volume then gathers the verses Eliot contributed to the learnedly lighthearted exchanges of Noctes Binanianæ and others for intimate friends or written off the cuff. Each of these sections is accompanied by its own commentary. Finally, there is a comprehensive textual history that contains not only variants from all known drafts and the many printings but also extended passages amounting to hundreds of lines of compelling verse.

The Poems of T. S. Eliot is a work of enlightening scholarship that will delight and inform all those who read it.