Becoming T. S. Eliot

The Rhetoric of Voice and Audience in Inventions of the March Hare

Jayme Stayer

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Year: 2021
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781421441054
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

How did an ordinary, if intelligent, boy who wrote unremarkable poems become—with no help, and in record time—the author of one of the most significant and beloved poems of the twentieth century?

T. S. Eliot's juvenilia show little inclination to question the social, cultural, religious, or domestic values he had inherited. How did a young man who wrote uninspired doggerel about wilting flowers transform himself—in a mere twenty months—into the author of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"? In Becoming T. S. Eliot, Jayme Stayer—praised by Christopher Ricks as a scholar who is "scrupulous in acknowledging the contingencies that will always preclude perfection"—explains this staggering accomplishment by tracing Eliot's artistic and intellectual development. Relying on archival research and original analysis, this is the first book dedicated entirely to Inventions of the March Hare, Eliot's youthful notebook, which was once thought lost but was rediscovered after Eliot's death. Stayer places Eliot's verses in the chronological order of their composition, teasing out the narratives of their making. Focusing on the period from 1909 to 1915, this incisive portrait of Eliot as a budding writer is as much a study of Eliot himself as it is a study of how a writer hones his voice.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction The Apprentice Alone in His Workshop: The Inventions Notebook
• 1 Indebted and Well Bred: Literary Models and Authority in the Juvenilia
• 2 The Notebook, Begun: The Clash of Laforgue and Baudelaire in the Poems of November 1909
• 3 Clearing the Throat: The Poems of Early 1910
• 4 Raising the Voice: The Sequence Poems of Fall 1910
• 5 Trembling with Pathos: The Paris Poems of Late 1910 and Early 1911
• 6 The Short and Surprisingly Private Life of King Bolo: The Bawdy Poems and Their Audiences
• 7 “Prufrock,” Abandoned: How the Poem Was Written, How It Was Received, and How It Works
• 8 Mumbling the Denouement: The Last and Undated Poems of the Notebook, Late 1911–1915
• Appendix: Chronology of Eliot’s Work, 1899–1915
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index