The first edition was published in 1979. In the 1980 paperback edition an essay on the drafts of Four Quartets was added as (Appendix D) and some errors and misprints were corrected. In this new edition a number of matters of fact have been revised in accordance with new information, and a few previously undetected misprints have been corrected. Appendix A, ‘About the text of the poems’, has been thoroughly revised, and has been expanded to take account of The Complete Poems and Plays 1909–1950 (New York, 1952), and the most recent editions – the American as well as the English – of Collected Poems 1909–1962. There is a new appendix, on Eliot's dramatic verse, to supplement chapters 7 and 10.

I have not attempted to revise the substance of the book whether in the light of my own further reflections or that of more recent work by others. When one finishes a sustained piece of writing such as this, one is no longer the person who began it – one has been changed by the writing – and I have moved on further from it since 1979. There is a time for revising, and a time for letting well alone. I have continued to think and to write about Eliot, but from other angles and for other occasions, and these later essays and lectures form part of a separate project.