“Well a book of poems is a damned serious affair,” Wallace Stevens once declared, to William Carlos Williams. Serious in its overall size as well as the handsomeness of its production, the two-volume “Annotated Text” of Eliot's poems is also striking in the proportions of its contents, with Eliot's poetry and translations making up roughly a quarter of the total and editorial content the rest. This latter offers a wealth of annotation and commentary, displaying extraordinarily extensive scholarship that enhances and enables our own study of the work. But in doing so it also provokes some questions that I want to pursue, and that I can best express by adapting those famously posed by Madame Merle, in Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady: “What shall we call our [‘text’]? Where does it begin? Where does it end? It overflows into everything that belongs to us—and then it flows back again.” For there is an evident paradox in stabilizing a text as a set of authorized words on a page constituting a precise lexical field, but then extending it by reference to a welter of pre-compositional and ultra-textual circumstance, which in their turn exert gravitational influence upon the poem (“There is no end, but addition”). On one hand, as the dustjacket declares, the editors set out to rectify the “accidental omissions and errors” that have infiltrated Eliot's published poems, but on the other, for example, they offer an “editorial composite” of The Waste Land that amounts to an imaginary text. The issues raised by this relate, I shall suggest, to questions of memory and questions of ownership: “Whose wo[r]ds these are I think I know,” as Robert Frost almost puts it.3 Frost, indeed, gave us a notable example of proprietorial demarcation, in that poem where neighborliness becomes a function of barriers maintained: “He will not go behind his father's saying, / And he likes having thought of it so well, / He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’” Repetition (“he says again”) that conceives itself as originality (“he likes having thought of it”), forgetful of its own derivativeness (“his father's saying”), undermines as surely as will the “frozen-ground-swell” (or Frost) that wall painstakingly rebuilt to divide “mine” from “thine.”