An interesting item to appear recently on the official T. S. Eliot website (tseliot.com) is the online publication of Noctes Binanianae (1939), a rare collection of light verse that has until now been available only in a tiny edition of 25 copies.
The book brings together Eliot, Frank Morley, Geoffrey Faber and John Hayward in a sequence of humorous poems, mock insults and literary banter. Writing many years later, Eliot described it as a collection in which the four friends "exercised our gifts of reciprocal insult in humorous verse". The title comes from Bina Gardens in Kensington, where they regularly met.
What makes this publication valuable is that it allows the collection to be read as it was intended: not as a handful of isolated Eliot poems, but as an ongoing conversation between friends. As editor John Haffenden notes, each poem answers the last and is then outdone by the next.
Eliot contributed eight of the twenty pieces, including the well-known "How to Pick a Possum", but the real interest lies in seeing the whole sequence unfold. It offers a glimpse of a side of Eliot that can easily be forgotten: witty, playful, sociable, and enjoying himself among close literary companions.
Of course, like most I think, I associate Eliot with The Waste Land or Four Quartets, and all those other collected poems, this collection is a refreshing reminder that even the most serious poets sometimes wrote simply for amusement.
The publication has been prepared under the auspices of the official Eliot website and features an introduction by John Haffenden, who is closely associated with Eliot scholarship and also has longstanding links with the UK Society. Useful therefore, not to conflate the two organisations.
The online edition may be found at T S Eliot.com/Noctes
The website of the T S Eliot Society UK is here >>