Time for an Eliot rethink? A new, two-volume, annotated collection says yes.

An unspoken backdrop to this edition is the need for a salvage job on Eliot’s reputation after the sustained assaults it has suffered in recent decades. To Cynthia Ozick, writing in 1989, the once sainted Eliot stood revealed as “an autocratic, inhibited, depressed, rather narrow-minded, and considerably bigoted fake Englishman”. Anthony Julius’s TS Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form (1995) indicted him for snide complicity in the most toxic of prejudices. Hailing Julius’s book, Tom Paulin found a “malignity” in Eliot, “because like a true politician, he never apologises and never explains”. Small aftershocks from the Eliot wars bob up here, as when the lower-case “jew” and “jews” of “Gerontion” and “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar” are awarded a face-saving majuscule, though the lower-case “jew” of “Dirge” remains (“Graves’ disease in a dead jew’s eyes!”). “Joyce uses ‘jew’ 66 times in Ulysses,” a note informs us, pursuing an exculpatory line of argument last seen in Craig Raine’s TS Eliot: Image, Text and Context. In interview, Ricks has argued that works of art “have to be accusable”: if Baudelaire’s poems could not be accused of blasphemy, they could not be religious. By unlucky accident, Eliot’s thoughts on blasphemy are contained inAfter Strange Gods, his single most irredeemable book. There is no getting round it: there is a darkness in Eliot, but one with a terrible, hypnotic power.