Poems

Even as English literature was waking up to Prufrock, Eliot was despairing of a dead end, complaining to Vivien that he had ‘dried up’. Once more it was Pound who intervened, prescribing the quatrains of Théophile Gautier and ‘a rest from vers libre’. Eliot took up again in French, but soon returned to English, bringing with him a mordant, formally stricter kind of verse, rhymed and regular in its strophes. The resulting collection was titled Poems, ‘some in English, some in the most astonishingly erudite French’, as Aldous Huxley reported. Its first publishers were Virginia and Leonard Woolf, whose Hogarth Press edition appeared in 1919.

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This is a copy of T S Eliot’s second book of poetry, Poems (1919). It was published by the Hogarth Press, which had been established in 1917 by the writers Leonard and Virginia Woolf.
How did it come about?

Eliot was part of the ‘Bloomsbury’ circle of writers, artists and thinkers which took its name from the area of London in which it largely met. On 19 October 1918, Leonard Woolf wrote to Eliot to explain:

My wife and I have started a small private Printing Press, and we print and publish privately short works which would not otherwise find a publisher easily. We have been told by Roger Fry that you have some poems which you wish to find a publisher for. We both very much liked your book Prufrock; and I wonder whether you would care to look at the poems with a view to printing them.

The Woolfs printed 250 copies of the book in March. As the title page of the book shows, they did so at Hogarth House, Richmond. By November, 140 had sold, and Eliot received a cheque for £1.13s.10d.
What does the book contain?

It contains seven poems: ‘Sweeney among the Nightingales’, ‘The Hippopotamus’, ‘Mr Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service’, ‘Whispers of Immortality’, ‘Le Spectateur’, ‘Mélange Adultère de Tour’, and ‘Lune de Miel’.

The four French-titled poems are also written entirely in French. Later, Eliot explained that he had lived in Paris from October 1910 to July 1911 because ‘for many years, France had represented above all, to my eyes, poetry’. Yet the subject-matter is drawn from many other cultures including the English. ‘Whispers of Immortality’ draws partly on Eliot’s interest in the poetry of Elizabethan England. The Webster described as being ‘much possessed by death, / And saw the skull beneath the skin’ is the playwright John Webster (1578/80–1638?). The lectures Eliot gave on Elizabethan literature in 1918 praised ‘his skill in dealing with horror; the beauty of his verse’.

‘The Hippopotamus’, Eliot once recorded, was ‘the only poem of mine which I’ve any reason to suppose James Joyce ever read’.

Other than Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, this was the last book which Eliot published which consisted of separate new poems. The seven poems were subsequently republished as part of Ara Vos Prec (1920) and Poems (1920), which was Eliot’s first publication in America, the country of his birth.

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“In 1918 we printed two small books: Poems by T.S. Eliot and Kew Gardens by Virginia. Of Tom’s Poems we printed rather fewer than 250 copies. We published it in May 1919 price 2s. 6d. and it went out of print in the middle of 1920.

We took a good deal of trouble to find some rather unusual, gay Japanese paper for the covers. For many years we gave much time and care to find beautiful, uncommon, and sometimes cheerful paper for binding our books, and, as the first publishers to do this, I think we started a fashion which many of the regular, old established publishers followed. We got papers from all over the place, including some brilliantly patterned from Czechoslovakia, and we also had some marbled covers made for us by Roger Fry’s daughter in Paris. I bought a small quantity of Caslon Old Face Titling type and used it for printing the covers.

The publication of T.S.Eliot’s Poems must be marked as a red letter day for the Press and for us … Tom showed us some of the poems which he had just written and we printed seven of them and published them in the slim paper covered book. It included three remarkable poems which are still, I think, vintage Eliot: ‘Sweeney among the Nightingales’, ‘Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service’. and ”Whispers of immortality’.” [Leonard Woolf, An Autobiography]

Poemas, poesias