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.)

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.

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.

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...