PRUFROCK’S REPRISE

Next month marks the centenary of T. S. Eliot’s first volume of poetry, Prufrock and Other Observations, published by the Egoist Press in an edition of 500. It was this collection of twelve poems that first introduced Eliot to Leonard and Virginia Woolf. At the Hogarth Press in 1919, the Woolfs printed Eliot’s second volume of poems (on the same day that they published the first edition of Kew Gardens). Virginia considered it ‘our best work so far by a long way, owing to the quality of the ink’.

You may recall that Eliot and his then wife Vivienne Haigh-Wood lived for a time in Compayne Gardens, West Hampstead. It seems an appropriate moment to reprise our film about Eliot’s NW6 interlude: