Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917
Once regarded as the champion of internationalist culture, in recent years T. S.  Eliot has been reclassified as a racist, a misogynist, and a fascist. His life has been the  subject of numerous critical studies and even one mainstream film,Tom and Viv,  which dissected the intimate details of Eliot's marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood. With the  publication ofInventions of the March Hare,admirers and critics of Eliot will  gain new insight into the poet as a young man. The 40 poems contained in this volume  were all written between the years 1909 and 1917, a period during which Eliot graduated  from Harvard, spent a year in France, studied Buddhism and Sanskrit at Cambridge  University, met Ezra pound, and married Vivien.These poems reveal a great deal about T. S. Eliot, the man and the poet. His borrowings  from other poets are often apparent (an older Eliot once declared: "immature poets  imitate; mature poets steal"), as are the repressed scatological, sexual, and neurotic  impulses that would have been offensive or shocking to readers of his time. The  annotations by editor Christopher Ricks add to our understanding of the poems  themselves and what they expose about their author's complicated psyche.