Very few people will read through all these thousands of pages, and their publication risks making Eliot seem more daunting than ever. While this vast hoard offers scholars all sorts of opportunities, the problem for most common readers is to work out what that word ‘Eliot’ now means. Is ‘Eliot’ still the slim volume of poetry that can be slipped inside a coat pocket? Or does the name now unavoidably bring with it this vast body of letters, plays, poems and prose that can be transported only by fork-lift truck and accessed in full only via a computer in addition to a printed library?
Saturday, April 20, 2019
Mr. Eliot …
… Robert Crawford reviews ‘The Letters of T.S. Eliot, Volume VIII’ edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden — LRB 18 April 2019.
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I have complained of the bulk of American editions compared to British; but I have no coat pocket that my copy of Eliot's poems will slide into, and I have a hard time supposing that a British edition would fit better.
ReplyDeleteI do understand the perplexity, but don't think it unusual. Many of us thought of Henry Adams as the author of The Education of Henry Adams and left it at that. But the Library of America brought two volumes of his history and one of his novels back into print; I have three volumes of his letters, and suppose there are a couple more out there.
Of Yeats I have the Collected Poems and the Autobiographies, call it six inches of shelf space; but a full collection of his books and letters seems more likely beyond six feet.