The publication of this definitive, annotated edition of all of T. S. Eliot’s poems in December 2015 coincided with the 50th anniversary of Eliot’s death and must surely be one of the scholarly monuments of humane letters of this decade, a contention widely confirmed already by reviews in the scholarly press. Many years in preparation and over 2,000 pages in length, it is monastic in its scrupulous fidelity to the texts, including details of their publishing history and textual variants.

Its editors are Professor Sir Christopher Ricks, co-director of the Editorial Institute at Boston University, and his former Cambridge student Jim …