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 to J. C. Marler, a specialist in classical studies at St. Louis University. Eliot's references, entangled in memories of lectures, books, and conversations, had to be traced. “I remember a statement of Eucken's to this effect: es gibt keine Privatwahrheiten.” This tidbit (“there are no private truths”), repeated three times in Eliot's papers, does not appear in Rudolf Eucken's works, but was probably uttered in one of several lectures that Eliot heard him give at Harvard in 1912 and 1913. In a discussion of the degrees of reality, he often contrasts his position with that of one “Mr. Givler,” eventually identified as Robert Chenault Givler, a classmate in one or possibly two seminars.

But rather than emphasizing the challenge of editing these essays, I prefer to reflect on the pleasure of reading them. In reading the papers written between 1913 and 1915, I discovered that Eliot frequently uses the image of “melting”—eleven times in this two-year period compared to a mere half-dozen over the next two decades. My curiosity was piqued not only by the frequency of the occurrence, but also by the fact that the image is used at key points in the poetry. It appears in the Tiresias note to line 218 of The Waste Land, the longest and most discussed note in the poem. The image reappears in “Journey of the Magi,” a poem reflecting the difficulty of a journey through snowy mountains to “melting snow” to a “temperate valley.” “Melting” shows up again in Murder in the Cathedral and The Elder Statesman, but more significantly it occurs in Little Gidding, where “melting” is associated both with midwinter spring and with spiritual states.