Decisions and Revisions in T.S. Eliot

by Christopher Ricks

Decisions and Revisions in T.S. Eliot attends to one specific embodiment of Eliot's changes that he made after publication. Such revisions have a different standing from any made prior to publication, and they raise questions about reception, audience, and (pre-eminently) self-criticism. In Eliot, the revisions are often substantial and always acutely of interest, for they incarnate a movement of mind even after he had given the work to the world. Such changes in Eliot's poems and elsewhere have not much been pondered as evidence of his art and thought. Moreover there has been an unthinking assumption that revisions to discursive prose, in the nature of the case, do not much matter – yet to look at the cases is to see how much each may contain.

100 pages, Paperback

First published July 22, 2004

About the author

Sir Christopher Bruce Ricks, FBA, is a British literary critic and scholar. He is the William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities at Boston University (U.S.) and Co-Director of the Editorial Institute at Boston University, and was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford (England) from 2004 to 2009. He is the immediate past-president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. He is known as a champion of Victorian poetry; an enthusiast of Bob Dylan, whose lyrics he has analysed at book-length; a trenchant reviewer of writers he considers pretentious (Marshall McLuhan, Christopher Norris, Geoffrey Hartman, Stanley Fish); and a warm reviewer of those he thinks humane or humorous (F. R. Leavis, W. K. Wimsatt, Christina Stead). Hugh Kenner has praised his 'intent eloquence', and Geoffrey Hill his 'unrivalled critical intelligence'. W. H. Auden described Ricks as 'exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding'.