Slip-slidin’ away: Metamorphosis and Loss in Eliot’s Philosophical Papers

The most substantial cache of papers in volume 1 of Eliot’s Complete Prose consists of the twenty-five philosophical essays that he wrote at Harvard and Oxford between 1911 and 1915, culminating in the first draft of his Ph. D. thesis. Although I had been absorbed in these papers for two decades, there were still challenges, which in collaboration with Ron Schuchard had to be worked through. My old transcriptions (and Schuchard’s) of Eliot’s drafts, some in pencil on yellow paper, had to be checked, word by word, jot by tittle. The Greek passages had to be translated, a task entrusted