
Poems (1920)
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.
Further Reading
‘Whispers of Immortality’
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© The Estate of T. S. Eliot
Eliot reading ‘Whispers of Immortality’
Other sources
The Letters of T. S. Eliot: Volume 1, 1898–1922, ed. Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton (London, 2011), p. 296