This October marks the centenary of the publication of arguably the most influential poem written in English in the 20th century. At its appearance, The Waste Land polarised critical opinion: ‘a grunt would serve equally well’, ‘a thing of bitterness and beauty’, ‘a pompous parade of erudition’, ‘one of the most moving and original poems of our time’. In the end, time would agree with this last assessment.

The anniversary was inevitably going to be the occasion of revisits, reappraisals and revisions, despite the already dense forest of Eliot scholarship. Is there more to be discovered? Robert Hyde, Matthew Hollis and Robert Crawford clearly think so, and these three books neatly cover virtually the full span of Eliot’s creative career.

The Gloucester Notebook is a facsimile edition of a manuscript notebook that the youthful Eliot entitled ‘Inventions of the March Hare’. It contains the earliest extant copies of poems he wrote at the moment of his formative encounter with the work of the French poet Jules Laforgue, and reveals how his style changed at that point. The notebook is also important because it contains the first version of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, the poem in which Eliot’s distinctive voice establishes itself over and against the writings of the Georgians, which were anathema to him and Ezra Pound. In this poem we hear for the first time whispers of The Waste Land.

Robert McCrum’s foreword rightly stresses the significance to Eliot of Gloucester, Massachusetts: his father owned a large holiday home right on the seashore at the edge of this fishing city, and here the family would escape the industrial pollution of St Louis each summer. Eliot’s boyhood experiences of the sea, sailing and the tales of the local fishermen haunted his imagination far into his mature work, most memorably in ‘Marina’ and ‘The Dry Salvages’.

So there is no doubt of the importance of this text in understanding Eliot’s development. But in other respects it is difficult to know whom the volume is for. It does not comprise all the poems found in the original (some were too scatological and removed by Eliot),