In the introduction to their commentary, Ricks and McCue rightly state that their intent is to limit themselves to 'notes which constitute or proceed from a point of information', eschewing 'critical elucidation' [original emphasis]. However, as they freely acknowledge, 'the frontiers are uncertain'. The commentary tends to move forward and backward in time, taking in material from before and after the composition of the poem in question. To take an example nearly at random: in annotating the lines 'The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea, / Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter' from 'Gerontion', the editors adduce not only a quotation from a letter by Edward FitzGerald (reproduced in A.C. Benson's 1905 biography of him, which was known to Eliot), but also a letter from Eliot to John Hayward dated 16 April 1937, in which Eliot, his hot water cut off, refers to 'odd unknown parochial females who poked cups of bovril and tea at me'. 'Gerontion' was first published in 1920; what it profits us to know that Eliot found himself in a roughly analogous position to his poem's narrator seventeen years later and borrowed the verb 'poke' in order to describe it is not immediately clear. Parts of the commentary seem only to exhibit the editors' immense familiarity with the Eliot archive. The commentary is made up in large part of quotations from Eliot and, to a lesser extent, his contemporaries. This approach, while it prevents the editors' voices from obtruding, cannot efface them entirely; quotations still need to be selected. Moreover, the cumulative effect of reading Eliot on Eliot at such length is to lend his pronouncements a stentorian tone. This is quite at odds with the way that quotation usually functions in Eliot's poetry, where it frequently serves to undermine rather than to reinforce the idea of a coherent authorial persona. And coherence is singularly at issue in Eliot's life and work: his remaking of himself as an Englishman after 1914, his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism in 1927, and the apparent disjunction between his radical poetics and his conservative politics have all prompted readers and critics to wonder whether these moments marked real transformations in the course of Eliot's life, or whether they were rather the realisation of tendencies long implicit. Was there one Eliot, or were there several?

T.S. Eliot

While acknowledging that this is a crude way to describe a personality as complex as Eliot's, it would be fair to say that Ricks and McCue take the view that Eliot's career is characterised more by development than by divagation. At the end of the editors' commentary comes an odd collage of Eliot quotations entitled 'The End of All Our Exploring', beginning with an epigraph from Eliot's essay 'John Ford' (1932): 'The whole of Shakespeare's work is one poem ... A man might, hypothetically, compose any number of fine passages or even of whole poems which would each give satisfaction, and yet not be a great poet, unless we felt them to be united by one significant, consistent, and developing personality.' This might as well be the editors' manifesto, and the question it raises is far from an idle one for scholars to bandy about: how do we deal with what Ricks calls, with considerable understatement, Eliot's 'ugly touches'?

Ricks is no stranger to these; his T.S. Eliot and Prejudice (1988) argues that Eliot's specific anti-Semitism cannot be disentangled from the question of prejudice in its most general sense, in which we are all implicated. Despite the extraordinary subtlety of its arguments, it will read to some today like a guilty plea offered in the hope of a lighter sentence. But anti-Semitism is far from the only specific prejudice that Eliot manifested: this new edition invites readers to reckon with Eliot's contempt for non-Europeans because it joins Eliot's 'Bolo poems' with his official oeuvre between the same covers for the first time. These obscene accounts of the sexual and scatological antics of King Bolo, his 'big black kween', and their atavistic court have been in print since 1996, in Ricks's Inventions of the March Hare, where, set alongside the poet's juvenilia, they were somewhat in a state of quarantine. That remains the case to a lesser extent in the new edition, where they are tucked away in Volume Two under the oddly euphemistic section heading 'Improper Rhymes'. We continue to be encouraged to regard these poems – mere 'rhymes,' really – as utterly ancillary to the Eliot canon.

Edward Mendelson has recently dismissed those who raise objections to Eliot's prejudices as being in thrall to the 'moral urgency of scolding dead people', an attitude that amounts to little more than a waspish reassertion that Eliot was, as the cliché goes, a man of his times. Well, yes, but while a Wallace Stevens or a Robert Frost might well have privately entertained racist fantasies of unlimited black sexual potency, they did not take the time to set them down in doggerel which they then circulated amongst their friends. Moreover, when Eliot has made sexual failure one of the leitmotifs of 'The Waste Land', his magnum opus, can we really hive off the 'improper rhymes' from the proper oeuvre so easily? Ricks, too, argues that it is to Eliot's credit that the Bolo poems fail qua poems, as though most racist discourse is characterised by articulate expression. Attempting to wave away debate on this topic will only marginalise Eliot within our increasingly diverse literary culture. Where modern poetry is concerned, a good deal of that culture is transmitted through the universities. Recent waves of renewed campus activism in the United States and the United Kingdom directed toward decolonisation and racial justice will not leave the literary syllabus untouched. If we are to do Eliot the favour of insisting that his words matter, and they do, then we cannot choose to engage only with those we find congenial. This is why the question of coherence in Eliot is so vital: if there is only one Eliot, then his whole oeuvre is implicated in those 'ugly touches'. But if there are many Eliots, then very significant portions of that work can speak to us still.

And they should: at a moment when our own literary culture is increasingly tyrannised by that familiar compound ghost, the self, Eliot's insistence that poetry 'is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality' has never seemed more urgent. Eliot believed deeply in the necessity for an artist to submit to a tradition (witness the extraordinary dissolution of the poet's voice in the final strophe of 'The Waste Land', where only one line out of six is Eliot's own), and the validity of that idea does not depend on the tradition in question being as exclusionary as the Western canon, as it used to be conceived. In any case, the centrality traditionally afforded Eliot in the twentieth-century literary landscape is unlikely to be vouchsafed even by so monumental an achievement as this edition. Ultimately, The Poems of T. S. Eliot will do what any such edition should do, which is to prompt new questions. But Eliot's acolytes are unlikely to agree with many of the answers offered.