 | |  |
Notes
I would like to express appreciation to Mr. Eliot for his kind permission to quote so extensively. Also I would like to thank Harcourt, Brace Co. for permission to quote from works on which they hold copyrights. Quotations, unless otherwise specified, are from Faber & Faber, Ltd. editions of Mr. Eliot's work.
The first quotation is from the Faber Fourth edition of Murder in The Cathedral while the second quotation is from the Faber Second edition.
"East Coker" appeared first in the New English Weekly, XVI, 22 (March 21, 1940), [325]-328. "Little Gidding" appeared in the same journal in Vol. XXI, 26 (Oct. 15, 1942), 213-217.
As an example we might note the line "Not in this or guise, for my present purpose" from one of the later impressions of Murder in the Cathedral, where the 'or' had dropped out and been replaced in the wrong position in the line. Faber & Faber, Ltd. has informed me that type for Eliot's books is set by Monotype which is then kept standing (not recast).
Mr. Eliot had called attention, however, to this alteration in the text in a letter to the New English Weekly, XXVI, 15 (January 25, 1945), 112, prior to the change in the printed text.
Mr. Eliot informed me in a personal letter that "it was the author this time". However, I leave the point in the text, since the general problem of proofreading seems to have greater relevance for the study of modern authors than we generally realize.
William Marshall, "The Text of T. S. Eliot's 'Gerontion'", Studies in Bibliography, IV (1951-52), 213-217.
Donald Gallup, T. S. Eliot A Bibliography, (London: Faber & Faber Ltd., 1952). I owe much to Professor Gallup for making material available to me which was not in my own collection.
As with Poems 1919, so also for The Waste Land the textual variants must alone determine the state, since the flexible binding associated with the first issue can be found also in copies without the 'a' in 'mountain'.
This feeling may also be strengthened by the deposit of the Faber edition of Collected Poems 1909-1935 to secure ad interim copyright pending completion of the Harcourt, Brace edition.
This is, of course, a guess, but based upon the frequency with which copies containing the error have been seen in relation to other books by Eliot together with several booksellers' estimates of copies sold.
Both the first impression and the revised impression collate A-L8 with paging differing from I6v.
The balance of the speech is almost identical with the text of B2 and so is omitted. The whole passage in B2 is on pp. 83-84.
The manuscript fragments of the first draft of Murder in the Cathedral are in the possession of the Houghton Library of Harvard University.
The collation of B1 is [A-B8C6]. The first three Faber editions collate A-F8 with differences in paging, while B5 collates A-E8F4 with differences in paging from the earlier editions.
Kristian Smidt, Poetry and Belief in the Works of T. S. Eliot, (Oslo: Kommission Hos Jacob Dybwad, 1949.), p. 198. This seems to be the most sensible of the books to date on Eliot.
| | |