Anyone who liked this article and like (or are curious about) the poem should check out the great Fiona Shaw's reading of it [1].

You can find recordings by many fine actor such as John Gielgud, Alec Guinness, and many others, and they tend to be dull, monotonous affairs. Shaw is very different. She's is an incredible actress, and since the 1990s she's been perfecting the poem as a kind of one-woman show where she reads it as the voices of many characters, which is what the poem (as I understand it) is.

[1] https://youtu.be/lPB_17rbNXk

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wk_end 3 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

The Waste Land has been one of my favourite pieces of writing for decades now; hearing it brought to life like this is incredible. Thank you.

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tptacek 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Have you ever listened to Eliot reading it? Just the worst. "Apreel is the crewellest month..."

My thing here though is: this is awesome, Shaw's reading, but is it right? I feel like she's trying to make a coherent character reading at times out of passages deliberately written not to have a clear narrator.

(I write this in the spirit of every thread needing a certain titration of not knowing what the hell they're talking about, as an invitation to those who do, and that inviting cluelessness is the purpose I serve here.)

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bandrami 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

One of the most annoying things I ever learned about T S Eliot is that he was born in Missouri and didn't move to the UK until his late 20s and just entirely made up that accent.

	▲	gsf_emergency_6 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Some ai assisted takes here https://www.quora.com/Did-T-S-Eliot-retain-his-American-acce... He's from a Boston Brahmin family so I doubt he had a real missouri accent to begin with Edit These are apparently from 1930s https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Eliot.php Where some Midwestern features are still present ? Especially here, after the 2m32s mark https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Eliot/Eliot-TS...

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wk_end 12 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'd say, though it's certainly a debatable point, that it's precisely because the passages are deliberately written not to have a clear narrator that there is no "right" reading, but rather a multitude of interpretations of which Shaw's is as valid as many others. That's the attitude I'd bring to it, anyway.

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gsf_emergency_6 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't know what I'm talking about either, but I'll also point to some scholars approaching TSE from the Econs angle https://www.econlib.org/library/columns/y2024/gundermantseli...