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Article: Inventions of the March Hare: Poems, 1909-1917.
- Article from:
- American Scholar
- Article date:
- January 1, 1998
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1998 Phi Beta Kappa Society. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Reviewed by CHRISTOPHER CLAUSEN
In his verse autobiography Summoned by Bells, the late poet laureate Sir John Betjeman recounted an incident from his school days circa 1915:
And so I bound my verse into a book The Best of Betjeman, and handed it To one who, I was told, liked poetry - The American master, Mr. Eliot.
The manuscript book was returned to its young author without comment. Little did the pupil suspect what the master, soon to become a clerk at Lloyd's Bank, was up to in his own notebook.
All the poems that T. S. Eliot published in his lifetime are easily contained in a single volume of moderate length, much shorter in fact than the ...