REEL TIME: Christopher Ricks on Eliot’s Auditory Imagination | Woodberry Poetry Room

good evening by the time TS Eliot made what is believed to be his first published recording here at Harvard eighty years ago in 1933 the two poems that he chose to record the hollow man and Juran chin were already nine and thirteen years old respectively and incidentally by the time he recorded the wasteland the sequence was well over a decade old at one of his Harvard readings Eliot described the experience of reading his own older poems in this way it's not as if it was written by someone else that would be comparatively easy but it seems to have been written by a young person with whom one is intimately and rather embarrassingly associated and one isn't enough the same person to have the right to tamper with it Elliot's career took place at a particularly audibly attuned moment in our culture one in which voices had begun to be recorded preserved and broadcast over a heretofore unimaginable span of space through radio and time through archives such as ours when Elliot returned to Harvard in 1947 he was curious to compare the two recordings of the Hollow Men and encouraged the group of undergrads who had gathered here to try to perceive the differences the work he had published in more recent years for quartets was immersed in the sonic realm of resonances and echoes not visions and revisions but quote our concern was speech and words after speech in wartime London he had had the peculiar experience of recording and re-recording portions of the quartets as power outages wreaked havoc with the studio sessions he later told audiences I did learn a lot and by the most painful means through hearing my records back about enunciation and I think I read at any rate a little more clearly now than I did before I had to learn as much as I had to about my own speech here to further this exploration of Eliot's enunciation especially as it intersects with his own recent research toward a critical edition of Eliot's work is none other than professor or Sir Christopher Rick's Rick's is the Warren professor of humanities at Boston University and the author of such essential and pivotal texts as inventions of the March Hare TS Eliot and prejudice and decisions and revisions in TS Eliot it is a great privilege to welcome Christopher Rick's I want to start by reminding myself of some of the rudiments of these of these matters the first of course is the ambiguity in the word read as to whether we mean utter it or not it's lovely that the language wishes it not to be clear if I ask a student to read something do I mean that he or she is to utter it or to take it in into the theater of their head in the same way I think the language likes very much the fact that the present tense in the past tense of the same read and read very beautifully used by hardly and one of his poems it's excruciating ly beautifully used by Jeffrey Hill who has to go into the phonetics of the different gives you the phonetic symbol which will make it clear whether it's I read or I read this matter the key question always for any uttering of a poem is whether the arturro is putting something in that was not really there or drawing something out that was really there so that again and again I think our relationship has to be is this supplying something that was I'm afraid lacking in the poem or the work of literature or is it reducing something which it was empty of me not to have registered so that in the case for instance of Tennyson reading the charge of the Light Brigade when you hear him say not those a soldier knew someone that emphasis on you is clearly right is thrillingly dramatic its indignation rising to something much better than your usual indignation and it is wrong of us not have registered that that is what the rhythm is I don't at all feel that he is supplying something which to the rhythm if his lines had failed to events I feel that he is vindicating the line and it's a pity I missed it that's the first rudiment for me the second one would have to do with the difference between a critic and a scholar because I want to talk about how listening to these recordings might affect the work of an editor the editor being the scholar side of that as it were complementarity the critic I take it to somebody who says that you tells you that you he or she may have noticed something that you may not have noticed it's a relatively modest enterprise it depends on tact because you may already have noticed it and it depends on tack because you may not believe it's really there for the noticing but in some way it has to do not with the point of information but with noticing something the scholar and I'm going to turn to editing the scholar is somebody who puts it to you that he or she may know something that perhaps you didn't know now these two concerns clearly overlap but they are they can be differentiated there is a difference between a critical point and the supplying of information where the texture or contextual of a kind of the scholar in this case the editor might wish to put before you in other words I am committed in my practice as an editor though there are important and valuable disagreements between editors about these matters I'm committed to the idea that the note should never say I have noticed things about this poem which you have not noticed the format of an Edition does not permit of any argument of a yes but kind or this is so isn't in the format doesn't permit to that it has necessarily from the seat of an editor an ex cathedra side so when Danny Carlin in The Times which we supplement very very recently indeed this month Danny has a very fine be about the editing of browning and he quotes the higher baler browning they say this we have attempted to hold interpretation to a minimum although we realized that the act of selection itself is to some extent interpretive and Carlin says the awful pitfalls that lie beneath these bland statements probably won't need pointing out to most readers who use scholarly editions now there are pitfalls but there are even graver pitfalls if you do not accept some such distinction that is a distinction during supplying a point of information for instance telling us that Lord Harvey didn't have any teeth and was famous for not having teeth and therefore eternal smiles his emptiness betray has a dimension which would not be there if you if you didn't it's not just Tony Blair grinning away with more teeth and he knows what to do with it's Lord Harvey a similar figure of course in in Pope's world now that is a point of information and it's not the same as having noticed something about the relationship between that line and as well-bred spaniels civilly delight in mumbling of the game they dare not bite at that point you need the point of information to see why that and half froth half venom spits himself abroad the thing is held together by a piece of information the poem has a coherence so the question do you need to know that Lord harvest toothless the answer has to be no because you never need to know any one thing about any work of art that is works of art have a way of supplying of a great deal even in the absence of kinds of knowledge which are then a super bonus they're not the price of admission but I think the distinction between an editorial enterprise which supplies information that seems to me right of it and the one which moves over into telling you there's something here which I think you have perhaps insufficiently appreciated I want to remind you of some of the classic Damon's hereabouts here's Eliot to the master of morning College Cambridge three years before he died with the publication of my own verse I've always been firm on three points first I will not allow any artist to illustrate my poems second I will not allow any academic critic and there are plenty of these in America only too willing to provide notes of explanation to be published with my poems third I will not allow any of my posts be set to music and s they seemed to me lytx and the proper sense of being suitable for singing my objection to all three of these methods of employing my works is the same that I should be allowing interpretation of the poem to be interposed between me and my readers an artist providing the illustrations which would be left to the imagination of the reader the commentator is providing information which stands between the reader and any immediate response of his Sensibility and the music also is a particular interpretation which is interposed between the reader and the author I want my readers to get their impressions from the words alone and from nothing else now as we all know he did not actually act upon those principles so I want to relate this to the kind of generosity which every now and then people have which makes them override their own wise decisions and allow for exceptions not to be trapped by their own rules for instance he does allow McKnight Cofer to illustrate the aerial poems he does allow poems other than Lewis to be set to music Johnny Denker for example and he what is of the third yes the third is the allowing of notes he does allow no it's not only the spy he allows John Heywood to publish notes to the poems it's true that they're published sort of in the world of Nordic noir so they don't seem quite the same as if they were published in England but that's how it works and of course he utters the poems now even you would say that's not something standing between me and the reader but it's clearly something which is interpreting the words of the poem as of putting a particular pressure on us as to how we will in turn interpret them so he is moved and this again is well-known as a statement of his he's moved to say on the gramophone record in 1947 he's moved to say this excuse me it was a leaflet that came with the record that then went onto the sleeve of the record when it was reissued ten years later a recording of a poem read by its author is no more definitive and interpretation than a recording of a symphony conducted by the composer the poem if it is of any depth and complexity will have meanings in it concealed from the author and should be capable of being read in many ways some of the variety of emotional emphases a good poem indeed is one which even the most accomplished reading cannot exhaust what the recording of a poem by its author can and should preserve is the way that poem sounded to the author when he had finished it the disposition of lines on the page and the punctuation which includes the absence of punctuation marks when there are misted where the reader would expect them can never give an exact notation of the author's a metric the chief value of the author's record then is as a guide to the rhythms another reader reciting the poem need not for you're bound to reproduce these rhythms but if he has studied the author's version he can assure himself that he's departing from it deliberately and not from ignorance it is having a wonderful statement including one of his finest parenthetical remarks which includes the absence of punctuation marks when they're emitted where the reader would expect them it's a great thing tapped up within there is characteristic of him always to use parentheses as simultaneously an aside and a crux and it does itself of course depend upon the particular punctuation mark which is the lunula or round bracket so it's very very powerfully used as it is used by him in the poems so there there are these excuse me acts of generosity when people override their principles Samuel Beckett it because of his friendship for Jack McGowan allowed the transposition of work from one medium to another though in general he thought you shouldn't do Bob Dylan clearly knows that it doesn't make sense to print the lyrics of his songs because they are a multimedia art but he also knows that we are grateful for them and it's a generous thing to do Philip Larkin on one occasion very beautifully overrode his own rules in order to welcome a friend of mine he wrote this dear Christopher thanks for your letter its crew I generally declined and this was a friend of mine who hoped to meet Larkin in 1982 its crew I generally declined with such gentleness as I can master self proposed visits by chaps like yours but I suppose I can break my own rules on condition that one you name your man and he isn't someone I detest too it understood that it isn't a precedent but a single exception three this is a private meeting and not an interview very important this for he realizes I'm seriously deaf and hard to talk to five the meeting doesn't last more than an hour or two then I should be willing to oblige you my friend duly receives the great generosity familiar but again it's where you have your own set of rules but the right thing to do is on occasion to override them a few last things these are for me as I say rudiments that this is clearly related to the age-old argument about intention because one of the reasons why we listen to somebody reading his or her work is if we are in dispute about what the intention at a certain point is all the arguments about intention are real arguments for whims out and Beardsley statements by authors of their intentions are inadmissible evidence I think that's a wrong position for them to take though it isn't of course the stupid position since they're highly intelligent Tennyson you may remember has a note on the opening of the Lotus Eaters courage he said and pointed toward the land this mounting wave will roll us Shorewood soon in the afternoon they came unto a land in which it seemed it always afternoon so the first rhyme in this poem Spencerian stanza is not a rhyme at all it's land rhyming or rather not rhyming with land which is both foolish rhyme you couldn't have in the emptiest rhyme that you can have Tennyson has a note not originally published with the poem I grant but in a note which says strand was the original reading but the no rhyme of land and land seemed lazier now it seems to me absurd to think that that's inadmissible evidence you can you can say as you can of any evidence that it is not as strong as the evidence to be found on the other side or it is actually false as evidence but anybody who said that Tennyson who uses the Spencerian stanza really only on this occasion was not any good at it and didn't manage to come up with the rhyme that does have to explain Tennyson's own note saying the no rhyme of land and land in the afternoon they came unto a land and which should seem it always afternoon the afternoon was doing the same kind of thing exceptionally beautiful and I think perverse to say that as it were a comment by a friend of Tennyson's would be a miserable but Tennyson's own comment not but these are important questions about intention clearly I'm not today going to say anything about the evidence which is one important kind of evidence as to Eliot's text that is I think the editions have been sufficiently incorporated the evidence of readings given by poets or by indeed by prose writers as to exactly what the text should be at certain points and Eliot does not always after the very words that he printed for us and the last point is simply about recorded sound itself which I take to be in its way even more revolutionary than they mentioned a moveable tide that is that you could record sound was unprecedent that is you could transmit words there were dozens of ways of transmitting words including as it were in a fixed form you simply could not hear again that symphony you simply could not hear how that was said so Edison's recordings of Tennyson for instance seem to me an absolutely extraordinary moment of a kind that even Marshall and can't sufficiently imagine the force of now I'm going to start with the matters of pronunciation because they're there where an editor might give you a point of information simply about how the poet chooses to pronounce a word so if we could hear the opening of the love song of jail for prufrock I take it that it is at least a serious candidate for the most astonishing first poem ever in any first book of poems I would if we have time for questions I would love to hear rival candidates the first poem in the first book of poems by a great poet so assuredly and totally the master of his art really extraordinary much the love song of joy alfred Prufrock let us go then you and I when the evening is spread out against the sky like patient etherized upon a table let us go through certain half-deserted streets the muttering retreats of restless nights in one night cheap hotels and sawdust restaurants with oyster shells streets that follow like a tedious argument of insidious intent delete you to an overwhelming question oh do not ask what is it let us go and make our visit the pronunciation I want to draw your attention to is the sounded T at the end of restaurants the Oxford English Dictionary in its first edition gave you two permissible pronunciations the not only the correct decor second addition gives you three the key question is whether to sound the T at the end or not Eliot sounds the T in a way which sets the poem is more American than European when that is from the beginning a real question really I don't mean that Eliot is simply slavish about declining to be American or insisting on being European the complex it is an old matter rival Henry James's when it comes to the American and the Europeans and if you if you think of what the sound is in these opening lines the very first word has the terminal t let that terminal T is strongly marked against the opening at the end of the line which is you and I when the evening is spread out against the sky two words which declined to terminate I declines to terminate it goes out to do everything the sky goes out into everything we can't imagine it continuing forever or it's not doing so so the first two lines have this very very open ending to them and then the sound throughout let against patient let streets retreats and night one night sawdust restaurants and you have to take care to sound the T if you don't if you don't take care it will be swallowed up streets that argument intent what is it let us go and make our visit that rhyme which he picks up from an emerson poem which figures in the commentary now for the critically critical edition so why does it matter how he pronounces it and does it matter sufficiently to be worth noting as his pronunciation well it matters because at first America wanted to pronounce it in the French manner I think I probably still say restaurants and when I asked my students this afternoon though two-thirds of them sound the T a third of them don't and it didn't seem to turn on whether or not they were from another country that is the pronunciation is the Oxford English Dictionary pronunciation restaurant gives as its phonetic sign nasal and then gives you the French word for fr a and C to indicate to you what the sound is at the end of restaurant the first instance in the Oxford English Dictionary is Fenimore Cooper a colleague of mine Joe Rezac pointed out to me this morning that that was published simultaneously in New York France and London that the Paris edition was aware the particular deal were seal for the publication of the prairie are the most renowned of the Parisian restaurants spelt without a tea ans so that clearly tells you that you hear it as a French word that the French wouldn't spelt it so it's a relatively recent word for Cooper the dictionary points out to you let me see if I've got this right that the use of the French restaurant in this sense is Paris in 1765 it doesn't go back very far into French history but it's a tiny point of enunciation I don't think a great deal will be lost if there's no no note telling you but it is part of the tissue of the sound effects throughout that passage everything that turns upon discretes everything turns on sawdust restaurants and so on throughout the passage so I am inclined all of these things are up for negotiation because we have two editors and my courage has spends his time deploring my suggestions and I spend my time deploring is they take different forms mine is a fancy and lexicographical and his are usually biographical and come from his belief that anything about Vivian Eliot that he can possibly find should figure within it within apropos of any Eliot poem when to which it connects so some of these things are obvious enough I take it that a critical Edition needn't tell a reader that the word Clark is pronounced Clark not clerk so we move on from that there are a real class questions though it's important that daily it pronounces the word often as though it did not have a T in it and that's a very important class indicator within England to sound the T is already to show that you are not altogether proper he pronounces the word Shawn as Shawn not as shown as his one American custom he knows about the nautical terms he knows though it's lowered not Leawood he hesitates as to whether wind would would be wind word or wind 'red so he's not quite sure we have two readings and in one of them he will do my on the other he helps us with names of course it's important to know that for him whether correctly or not it's Arjuna the stress on the first syllable there fleebus not Flay bass for instance fleebus and Phoenician Phoenician not Phoenician these and these are when you look when you set these back into the passage you will see the tissue of sounds the auditory imagination which is everywhere the condition of his heart it's a condition laid upon him and the teal aids upon lays upon his listeners readers so that it's important I think to hear fleebus the Phoenician that sound continued as against volscian Commission version Commission continues that sound fleebus the Phoenician continues a different sound so it has to do with the whole web and tissue that is the order to imagination about which he writes very beautifully and famously at the end of one of the essays in one of the lectures in the use of poetry in the use of criticism similarly of course it matters that he spells Michelangelo differently from how he pronounces it he says Michelangelo but he does not spell it as Michelangelo but something of the tension as to whether you do or don't anglicize these names my students think it affected an improper of me to say don quicksearch though they have none of them any intention of pronouncing the word quixotic other than his quixotic they apparently believe that the Spanish Empire was a mob was a better thing than I believed it to be and in any case they in any case they don't take any note of the fact that in in Cervantes time it would not have been pronounced as though you were in range of a spittoon it would have been much much closer to the French key chart so that the release questions of pronunciation have a lot to do with tribute or slight play towards things of a foreign is it a slight to Michelangelo to turn him into michael or is it a tribute as when we decided to pronounce it paris rather than pari or to say florence rather than to say or indeed to come up with some recall Titian which is not that we are supposed to say these things as would be wished by the natives of the land except that both in cities and in names we don't do it we say Titian and I think we're right to do so because he has become an international property and accomplishment and astonishment in the way in which to insist upon an Italian form would be forced elias pronunciations i'd just say he prefers always not quiet i got to qualify it he prefers instinctively a strong pronunciation porcelaine not porcelain porcelain in the immediate vicinity of marmalade a strong sense of those words going together he says very very clearly prelude not Prelude Prelude despite the fact that in Great Britain as the dictionary says Prelude prevails prevails or prevails perhaps we could hear preludes one I'm I can't bring myself to say Prelude but I know it's what he said please now I thought that for this particular occasion I should like to begin by reading in Cambridge the winter evening settles down with smell of stakes in passageways six o'clock the burnt-out ends of smoky days and now Augusta shower wraps the grimy scraps of withered leaves about your feet and newspapers from vacant lots the showers beat on broken blinds and chimney pots and at the corner of the street an only cat boss steams and stamps and then the lighting of the lamps I'm inclined to have a note in in addition saying the for Elliott the word is pronounced Prelude again because of the tissue that that then leads into in the poem itself that is if it were preludes it would go differently into settle in the first line and smell in the second line and ends a couple of lines later but the sound that comes to predominate is a rhyme or assonance upon the strong pre withered leaves about your feet the showers beat at the corner of the street the cab house steams that's the sound which increasingly becomes the sound of the poem and it seems to me therefore the question of course isn't whether or not Elliott has the right pronounce it in one way rather than the other though sometimes you can say of people that they are making a mistake in doing something even a genius that can be helped that can be maintained provided you argue irrationally but the question is is the sound of the poem different and you go back of course to the to the preludes or preludes in portrait of a lady that is Prelude there makes a difference to the whole tissue there abouts and I think it's affected by the acute accent in Prelude that is so many of these early poems of themselves so influenced by French or romance moments as to give you and that lovely isn't that good thank you so it matters to me and go again how many of these can you find room it matters for me that he says st. Mary walled us not as I wouldn't marry Saint Mary that is there's a feeling that something is strongly pronounced candelabra not candelabra which is what the spelling would ordinarily suggest to you so that again and again I think he's fascinated by all will choose the stronger the stronger sound he's almost entirely and again man not an again man though he there is it when he want so keep the dog far hence a friend a man or with his nails he'll dig it up again so at that point he rightly once again but ordinarily it's again paces about her room again alone it's quite different from faces about a room again again alone there's a knob curacy in the strength of those of owls he comes through Ash Wednesday I suppose is the most again poem of his but journey the majorly forgiving beautiful moment in East Coker again and again going into gain nor loss so what comes back again is the word again in a different form which you will not have if what you hear is again and again which in some ways is the more idiomatic form of it so this again will be part of the providing information which has a critical purpose but is not simply information 'less one recurrent thing in him is how to pronounce a te that is do you say the parched eviscerate soil as in inanimate or do and or do you say the past eviscerate and again he again he carefully judges these and sometimes he keeps open the possibility that something is grammatically different from what you might have supposed terminate torment not terminate as in indeterminate but terminate torment which is a permissible pronunciation of that form but holds open the vowel and an urging as terminate does not so all of those stamina to pistol at end of it macula as against vertebrate and those are in the immediate vicinity of one another you couldn't I think deduce from the poem how you should say it but it was seemed to me foolish to spurn the information that says this is how the poet heard it and said it even if you decide that it was wrong with him insufficiently to make it clear within the poem itself and then you get into a perfectly principled critical argument about whether poems are the worse for withholding certain kinds of responsibility the responsibility for the response is yours and Eliot is not going to settle that for you though it is then mildly perverse of him to read it for you to utter it for you even if he's then going to say this is no more definitive than a work of music conducted by the composer so that but that's part of the world.there other instances the spirit Peregrine I would have said Peregrine not Peregrine but it's absolutely clear that certain insistence has come with that form of the word as it it's easy for instance to be a name Peregrine as a name has to be a shorter high Peregrine is no such name so you're helped in certain ways to understand it and I have more of these than I need I care about testimony not testimony testimony has a particular force in the wasteland as matrimony as a particular force in east coca there's something about what happens when you lengthen the Oh in matrimony you move it away from from a certain kind of leniency I think he knew perfectly well that it should be called a Dahlia as in Roald Dahl but at the same time he wanted daihlia partly because it had become the pronunciation and partly because what it does with nightfall in the particular lines in which he speaks of the Dahlia and night falling and the owl so he wants the day to be there kind of just limps below the media surface of the line every now and then a fact will rebuke a speculation I wish that he said alas in the Hollow Men because I had committed myself to the believing that the the lassitude is absolutely horribly the mood of the opening lines of the Hollow Men but he does say alas and I will have to rescind the speculation that lassitude is part of the terrible downward feeling in those opening lines We Are The Hollow Men the other staff command leaning together headpiece filled with straw us it's a different sound and so on is very important to him that he says cannot he doesn't say cannot he says cannot cannot on several occasions again it would be a critical reservation would say might it not have been better if his rhythmical command had insisted upon that being the only pronunciation except that he does not wish to insist and there's a side of him that is very close to Keats and negative capability that is the ability to be in doubts uncertainties mysteries without any irritable reaching after fact and reason plenitude is very strong but as it abolish is the possibility of plenty Keats needed to spell plenitude with two T's for Keats it was plenitude with every wonderful joy sing of what at what plenitude is it is plenty and it is plenitude Elias pronunciation plenitude I think this country has not decided whether it's a plenary session or a plenary session I think it depends on the particular snob yzma of the University what does Harvard say and then some of Eliot's pronunciations for instance I say désolée but when I hear Elliott say the empty desolations there is something about desolation that does seem to me to be very very powerful and worth recording even if you have to enter a caveat about whether it is audible from the lines themselves and I'd like now to listen please to the beginning of Garant Ian and I'm going to say something about hard jeez I remind you that he prefers he prefers him Ganga to Ganges later he's clear about the pronunciation of journey of the mage I when there are many ways of pronouncing ma ji I all of them acceptable John but let's hear peace the beginning of gurantee on thank you gironjin now has nor you Snorri but as it were and after dinner sleep screaming us both Here I am an old man in a dry month being read to by a boy waiting for a I was neither at the hot gates nor thought in the warm rain nor need deep in the salt marsh eating a cutlass bitten by flies for my house is a decayed house and the Jews squats on the windowsill leona swarmed in some a stamina event blistered in brussels patched and filled in london the goat cops at night in the field overhead rocks smash stonecrop bird the woman keeps the kitchen makes tea sneezes it evening poking the peevish gutter I an old man a dull hit among windy spaces signs are taken for wonders we would see aside the word within a word unable to speak a word swaddled with dark energy obeisance to the year came right the tiger much of it is a play of the soft G against the hard G he picks out from Tennyson a fascination with that I'll quote Tennyson in a moment guarantee on it's very important there's a hard G it's important that it is not the sound that we are used to within the only such word that is much used that is geriatric there's we have softened the G into geriatric Elliott Elliott does not do that his notes there are many things that he said about the poem and some of these most of them were of course figure in in addition for instance he replies to request from a young woman for help with her university entrance paper I don't know what the university was I still need to find that out this is in 1945 the only thing I can say is that it is an attempt to build up an impression of our age but the whole date of a particular man about whom nothing further is known looking back on his past if the examiners think that is not enough you can tell them that that is all I can say so I don't see why you should say any more it doesn't evoke a very world school true there's a very good letter to somebody called Alice Quinn who was not I'm afraid her Alice Quinn but a school child in England where he does some similar explaining critics assume he writes to Sean Lavelle in 1944 any attempt to explain a poem is inevitably in his ex post facto rationalization it may certainly be what the poem means so long as that is not what the author is supposed to have consciously meant when he wrote it as far as that goes it can only be said to have been the expression of a mood variations and associated or evoke memories and so on he wants of course little old man he wants the hard G as is recommended by Fowler he reviewed Fowler modern English usage he reviewed that 1926 and Fowler recommends a hard G in gerontocracy he wants the Roman general gurantee us well gurantee and shares with his prototype the knowledge of past inaction that's from Grover Smith and he wants guarantee us and he wants Newman's dream of guarantees so all that is holding to the hard hard G the draft title for the poem was gerousia at's part of the Council of Elders composed of the two kings and 28 other members over 60 years of age elected for life as a judicial body they heard cases involving death exile or disenfranchisement and could even put the Kings on trial the hard G is I think doing a lot and if you again I would want to suggest that the tissue of these opening lines is is gates goat gutter tiger the soft G is not present except strangely in jus which is not a soft you and enjoy vessels which picks up is not soft G picks up picked up in Java sense later but the something he's doing there which I suggest remembered what Tennyson was very beautifully able to do in the Lotus Eaters the receipt music here's a softer falls than petals from blown roses on the grass or night dues on still waters between walls of shadowy granite in a gleaming pass music that gently ax on the spirit lies than tired eyelids from Tejada hires music that brings sweet sleep down from the blissful skies part of the move is the move from grass granite and gleaming in to gently ax and like Elliot Tennyson loves the way in which something looks as if it should sound the same and then doesn't Brown and blown in the same line look as though they should have the same sound and then they don't so this curious interplay of the eye and the ear when you when you read it and then hear it in your head the most important soft G I think or hard G is the more della Kurt Algy and the sea anemone there are so many ways of pronouncing Al GAE it matters and I think it matters sufficiently for note that for Elliot it is algae the pools where it offers to our curiosity the more delicate algae and the sea anemone its simultaneously a couplet in a triplet curiosity is rhyming with anemone but curiosity is also rhyming with algae so that if you if you turn it into al guy or al joy you've lost this way in which it's Trinitarian it's one thing was it's a couplet it's two things because it's two lines is three things because it has thrice the sound curiosity analogy anemone third-favorite it wonder and it's the first moment in the dry of Ages when you got a little lion couplet that's like a pool the pools were at office chair to our curiosity where he's remembering the sea anemone which accepts or rejects a proffered morsel is thereby relating an idea to the CNM in his world its acceptance the most beautiful moment in his harvard dissertation and it's the moment when you have to decide you're not going to be a philosopher you're going to be a poet to write that well in that mode means that you're now going to move away from writing doctor or philosophy into something else so that's part of what is for me an issue in the perfectly simple question of whether we say gironjin or durante on whether we accommodated to our sense of old age which is the geriatric or the one which I think Eliot is putting forward the revenge effects of syllabication his enunciation depends repeatedly on spelling out into the full number of syllables words which conversationally I think we elide so secretory needs to have that many syllables councils is that expanded promontory transitory they're all they're all given their full syllabication and anything else I think would be a kind of compacting into the conversational it's like Dylan singing hanging in the balance of the reality of man where reality has all its er all spread out for you as if it's got an expanse which any kind of slurring or allusion will will abolish I'd like us to listen now please to the end of the Hollow Men and with our quote one of the things I one of the reasons why I think it might it might profit from a no and this is Eliot giving advice to Michael Redgrave who'd asked advice for a BBC reading of The Hollow Men in 1930 and this is what Eliot says referring to part 5 of The Hollow Men the first and the last quatrain should be spoken very rapidly without punctuation in a flat monotonous voice rather like children chanting a counting out game the intermediate part on the other hand should be spoken slowly also without too much expression more like the recitation of a litany now again there are questions of the rights of an author to speak so to an actor and Redgrave is a great actor so the advice is not going to be wasted on him but the thing I think it's particularly moving to me is like rather like children chanting a counting out game now the end of the Hollow Men is that is the huge counting out game that has to do with what how the world will or might end thank you very much yeah we go round the prickly pear prickly pear prickly pear here we go round the prickly pear five o'clock in the morning between their idea and the reality between the motion and the act Falls the shadow or thine is the kingdom between the conception and creation between the emotion and the response of the shadow life is very long between the desire and the spasm between the potency and the existence between the essence and the descent Falls the shadow for thine is the kingdom for thine is like this for the I honestly this is the way the world ends this is the way the world ends this is the way the world in not with a bang but a whimper I can't I don't think Editora notes can describe how he says whimper at the end there the extraordinary perfunctory nasur that just said over the shoulder at the end there is its object a mental and so on the notes that Jim McHugh and I have are of a many kinds they include a famously noticed thing that is the presence of Kipling and Kipling's extraordinary use of the word whimper in Danny Deever a whole series of things one of the questions that I would have and I will wish to make time please to hear from people it has to do with the I think ambiguity of what not with the bang means that is not whether I had not realized until getting to work on this but among the senses of not with a bang is the performance one which is him the programmes carefully prepared and went off with a bang okay American speech show business slang at earnest had to click when it was to be successful or in the vernacular gets across with a bang so at the end you have this horrible feeling is with a bang an explosion and destruction I think the word bomb has a similar ambiguity in our in our two countries that is if something bombs it fails but a bomb is apparently something verily an explosive and everybody's very pleased about it German so there's some discrepancy of the kind that lies behind was like sanction William Safire whenever in doubt as to what to write about would write about words with have an antithetical sense like sanction permits it or refuses said oversight which means takers not neglected or neglected all these words which are in Freud's world the antithetical sense of primal words but I think there was something is strongly antithetical in not with a bang that is is that a vision of a certain kind of destruction I wonder our notes to have far fewer references to atomic bombs Eliot says things about atomic bombs and he has an anxiety about the fate of the poem once the bomb has happened one reason what he still writes his famous prophecy he has asked mr. Eliot admits he would not one reason is that while the association of the h-bomb is irrelevant to it it would did they come into everyone's mind and others is not sure the world will end with either your son isn't either neither think nor whimper you know just hold on there and find out what it will be it'll be withering on the vine some terrible thing of that kind but I want I need to relist to these in order to see whether the reading gives one any help in whether or not once I had do some of these ambiguities of phrasing that is there is a real ambiguity it seems to me and the next one which is the end of Sweeney aganist ease I wonder half and I'll now come clean about it I believe that this remembers the knocking at the gate in Macbeth I don't give you as it were all the bits of evidence to make me think that this is a great knocking scene and so on and it's related to Eliot earlier version of this which was called the superior landlord and so but if we could hear the end of Sweeney aganist ease and I'll just say something about my belief that Macbeth needs to be heard in some strange way off stage but wondering whether or not Eliot's way of uttering it either makes that less or more plausible or is completely irrelevant to the suggestion thank you very much when you're alone in the middle of the night and you wake in a sweat the hell of a fright when you're alone in the middle of the bed then you wake like someone hit you on the head had a cream of a nightmare dream you got the who powers coming to you who dream you wake up seven o'clock mr. Fogg in his stamp Tony stop you wait for a knock and the turning of a lock you know the hangman's waiting for you and perhaps you're alive perhaps you're dead no no not not not not not not I'll give you some reasons why I think that the knocking at the gate is there you'll remember here's a knockin indeed if a man were Porter of Hellgate he sure to have old turning the key knock knock knock knock Eliot in a shakespeare lecture 1932 three I have attempted a Crocky a rough draft of a play Sweeney agony seized to indicate that our tragic feelings are best expressed not to a tragedy but through farce so that's a very important from very early on that is his account of Marlow some of the things is about Ben Jonson that it's savage farce it's tragic fast this is what he's trying to catch and what he's trying to catch in Sweeney aganist ease then in Knight further for a volume published in 1934 four to those who have experienced the full horror of life tragedy is still inadequate in the end horror and laughter may be one only when horror and laughter have become as horrible and laughable as they can be there's potential comedy and Sophocles and potential tragedy in house dolphinese and otherwise they will not be such good traditions or comedians as they are two quinces knocking on the gate in Macbeth is perhaps the best-known single piece of criticism of Shakespeare that has been written so it's not just them it's not just Macbeth it is to Quincey on the locking in the gate it's a pivotal moment in in romantic criticism of Shakespeare an understanding of Shakespeare I can't I I would like advice as to whether anything in Eliot's way of reading goes to that the reading is resolutely non Shakespearean but that's because Eliot believed that you could only really write successful plays if he broke entirely away from Shakespeare's way of writing Sweeney aganist ease is one direction to go as Corey Olin is similarly that direction and Geoffrey Hill like fr leavis has lamented the fact that Eliot was not able to take either Corey Olin a complete Corey Allen or complete Sweeney when those would have been the right ways to go instead of into a certain kind of metaphysical and spiritual romantic comedy as it were like the place the confidential clerk and so on or into Four Quartets there's what happens it is true that that road was not continuing to be taken by Eliot if it's not Shakespearean it's because there isn't any room for writing Shakespearean Lee if you wish to get your play to mean anything and I think Sweeney Sweeney is the most performer ball of the place I mean the family reunion is for me the most performer Belov the formal place the completed plays but Sweeney is the one and even in Eliot's own as it were amateur not amateurish but an amateur rendering of it that there's a dramatic energy in it which i think is unmistakable so we part of that story to DeQuincy the De Quincey essay is absolutely wonderful wonderful essay if we remembered that in the first of these murders it's based on a real murder and he says you read about this murder and you know that Shakespeare got it all completely right centuries before the same incident of a knocking at the door soon after the work of extermination was complete did actually occur which the genius of Shakespeare has invented the world of ordinary life has suddenly arrested late asleep tranced the latest leap goes into everything about dreams and nightmares in sweeney Anestis the world of darkness passes away the knocking at the gate is heard and it makes no nor durably that the reaction has commenced the human has made its reflux upon the fiendish the pulses of a life are beginning to beat again and the reestablishment of the goings-on of the world in which we live first makes us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that has suspended them now that is a clearly mad Australian I think it is I think it's necessary editorial comment on Sweeney echinus teas but I'm not sure whether Eliot's own reading of it helps me now I want to end please with our hearing it's four minutes a bit more informal as long the whole of triumph or March Corey Allen triumphal march and I'll be very brief on it taking one or two things about it thank you very much No I want to read triumphal march but it's it's one of the most difficult to have my poems for me or anyone else to read aloud but for that reason if for that reason only I think one of those best worth trying to read it is of course complete in itself but it was to have been part of a much longer poem in which the character persisting throughout was a certain serial talker triumphal stone steel stone oak leaves horses heels over the paving and the flags and trumpets and so many eagle how many count them and such oppressive people we hardly knew ourselves that day on you the city this is the way to the temple and we so many crowding away so many waiting how many waiting what did it matter on such a day are they coming no not yet you can see some Eagles and hear the trumpet here they come is he coming the natural wakeful life of our ego is a perceiving we can wait with our stools and our sausages what comes first can you see tell us it is five million eight hundred thousand rifles and carbines 100 mm machine guns twenty-eight thousand French mortars 53,000 filled and heavy guns I cannot tell how many projectiles mines and closes thirteen thousand airplanes twenty four thousand plane engine 50,000 ammunition wagons now 55,000 army wagons 11,000 feel kitchen 2050 PU bakery's what a time captain he is the scope and now the circulation SP clip rusty and now come to Maryland delivery men look there he is now there is no interrogation in his eyes or in the hands quiet over the horse's neck and the eyes watchful waiting perceiving indifferent Oh hidden under that I was weighing hidden in the turtles breast under the palm tree at noon under the running water at the still point to the turning world then the sacrifice now come the religions containing dust dust dust dust and that is all but how many Eagles and how many trumpets and Easter Day we didn't get to the country so we took Jerusalem to church when they rang a barrel and eat it right out now front it don't throw away that salty it'll come in handy these are for me will you give us a light light light it is tool Delta today it's a poem that almost everybody knows needs notes it's wonderfully vigorously read I think by him the key thing of course is to know that it's ludendorff with all those armaments complaining at what the Treaty of Versailles had required Germany to throw away so gate Mussolini his Samar is the Rome marches many many things of that kind and there's that so it's it's Eliot's engagement with fascism much more satisfactorily than any of his prose engagements I think with it not that he was a fascist he was soft on Salazar which it was a bad idea he was soft on child Morehouse from whom the last lines come and the soldiers form a row they former a son that's the end of it the move into French at the end as a reminder of the Great War and the great Wars present all through but then the great war is not especially as the site for Italy and so on so it's an extraordinary it is actually sort of post modernist I'm afraid but that's just to say that the really good post modernist things were done before post modernism that was not necessary to suppose that hitherto things had been such and such had been unvexed by these matters now the note I care about has to do with sausages I could do a whole lecture on Eliot and sausages they are very important they're not important solely to him they are for instance very important to Shelley in his account of a swell foot the tyrant or either person or swell foot the tyrant Freeborn pigs regard with jealous eyes the failure of a foreign market for sausages bristles and blood puddings state necessity irreverent mockery of the genu flexions inculcated by the arts priests so there's a lot of shelli's swell thought the tyrant is coming in through the sausages and aliens at the time has a veil has a rather striking letter where he rise to somebody about a huge public which is indifferent you will have noticed the word is different within a triumphal march a much smaller public which is hostile and another public which is rejoiced when the anglo-catholic Congress takes place and he describes the anglo-catholic Congress talks about what it was and there ends the letter by saying I hope that I may take advantage of your hospitable sausages at four pence a pound before very long there's a strange letter it's mostly about this public occasion in which religious and other kinds of conflicts and hostilities are coming together and suddenly the move into sausages but my main point about sausages isn't here's where you perhaps wonder whether I'm all together central in the things I'm talking about the moment that says quite wonderfully twenty-eight thousand trench mortars this is what the German army gave up needlessly and wrongly and of course Keynes is behind all of this of is Elliot had the very very greatest regret for economic consequences of the peace he not only read it years his mother to read it they soon after it came out and he wrote an absolutely wonderful a bit chewier of cadence when Keynes died which is repeatedly about Haman would not have known that Keynes had ever become the statesman that he became and statesman of course to the other half of the Coryell and story and so on there's no question that's important what was a trench mortar a trench mortar is a sausage gun it is called that throughout the Great War the letters are repeatedly about the sausages being lobbed into our changes it's a sausage run soperhaps the line don't throw away that sausage it'll come in handy is horribly on route to the Second World War which as a Keynes as a believer in Keynes's terrible prophecy Eliot knew in the thirties was was like with incipient that is you're ready you already had a book on called I think the first World War not long after the Great War a tiger which was much deployed as prophesied that there would be a second one now I would listen again and again to this hoping that I can pick up something which links the later sausage moment but it is very very striking tone it's the oddest moment in Elliott isn't it don't throw away that sausage it'll come in handy now of all the things that a sausage can come in handy is not the one that occurs to you but don't throw away those trench mortars they'll come in handy le sol de vers la from the fascist or all but fascist child Maura's two lines later so that's part of my thinking in this but let let me hear from people please thank you please sorry it didn't but that's because I don't have the tongueless I mean that is I have a little French but my father became the gala foe what was - immediately after marrying my French mother so that I said that I didn't I don't have I have read I think Kenna is among the best people on on the ways in which languages other than English work work there I take it you don't mean American well I mean nothing about I mean those two those two do you have thoughts on it please just curious to know because I don't know much about the history of sort of pronunciation of critically dead languages Latin and Greek in terms of the significance yes literally so I was curious to know if there had been any insights in that area he spoke all the time as if he were much more ignorant than he had somehow conveyed to people I mean that is a the surveying of self-depreciation and deprecation in in which i think is very unfortunate and it leads him to say it's a fairly subjective this and that it's a it's an insignificant grouse against the universe these descriptions of the wasteland are they are wrong of him they're kind of cadging and it was very wrong of Valerie Elliot to use to give a whole page to that remark reported I think truthfully first of all Theodor Spencer they had Henry Elliot Elliot's brother that it's purely his personal subject you insignificant grouse against universe if the wasteland were that it's not clear why we would need an edition of it with Ezra Pound sis and that so the so I think on the one hand I think he wasn't as learned it sometimes suited him to make out because there was a side of him the light to impress the fellows of all souls with whom with whom he was good friends but Charles Monteith but also Jeffrey Faber at that college but I don't know I mean I'm very dependent on what other people have noticed I have a son who is a classicist who helps me with some things and Jim McHugh knows many people who helped us with Italian for instance I take it that dente is the most important I can find my way around laughs org and lotta hard and Tristan Corby hair and so on I think I can do a sufficient justice I mean not not a fool just but it's a sufficient justice to their presence especially in the early earlier and the move from laughs all to Colbert is very very important the only I mean I'm taking the excuse rather of your question the the only quarrel the only thing that looked like a conversation becoming a quarrel with Valerie earlier was when she told me that she would not have the obscene poems the bolo poems printed in and benches of the March Hare and I had decided that if they couldn't be printed I wouldn't allow the addition to be published because there was so much accusation of whitewashing against the Eliot erste and moreover the move from laughs org decor Pierre how that is the move from James II and veliotis to very very coarse Breton explicitness --is is a very important move from 1917 to 1920 when poems are not about drawing rooms but about brothels and determine so and and the wasteland of course so that I I was going to have to dig my little heels in and then suddenly at dinner Valerie Eliot had this wonderful moment when she came up with a formula which would help us both she said it is true and I knew I was all right then as soon as somebody says it is true you're going to be all right it is true that I did choose you to edit it and so I should now accept that and what that meant was that I I would have been in error in choosing you were you and I now to disagree vase absentia Lee I didn't say I wasn't going to put but I would not have proceeded with publication of it I think in a terrible mistake they were part of the notebook they were no longer in the notebook because they went to pound but they're an integral part of the notebook and of alias development and if R event doing two drafts of the 1920 poems which Valerie Eliot wanted me to do I think rightly although the volume is basically through 2:17 then you've really got to include the bolo poems it's greatly to his credit that they're completely contemptible rubbish I mean he had no gift for these things at all you know he couldn't bring himself to write a good obscene Limerick I'm that are quite they're quite terrible so that's in the way it's like Milton are being to imagine the war in heaven good for you John is not imaginable huge thank you other question set loose in house a question thank you so much for being here do we have a sense of what Elliot sounded like when he wasn't reading poetry I'm curious because did the people he spoke to and lived with did they recognize sort of explicit attempts to change the way he spoke or to speak differently depending on where he was living and is there is that voice then in turn different than his poetry yes reading voice that's very good I mean I I never met him I can come back to that in a moment in the attempt to be just tell you some anecdotes before I leave but I've heard him give a lecture of amazing slowness and tedium the subjects are very very good but the feeling that every word is going to be uttered with kind of limpid exorbitant gravity absolutely everywhere being is we want to keep we get off get on with it and so on especially that rigmarole we tales about know it's in the Christmas poem you know there are several ways of form at Christmas and then you take all the ones I'm not going to talk about there's this way there's that way so he had a habit of beginning lectures in that way I don't know what his conversation was like well Virginia Woolf is a witness to that but he's so spiteful that I don't know whether one should take any doses of what she says really I mean she doesn't limit her spite to Elliott of course author and moral receives a lot of it I think she was more spiteful probably about women and about men on the ha by and large but I don't know what recordings we brought of him at all conversationally the BBC as you know did not keep an amazing body of work that they should have kept I mean that we don't have George Orwell's voice is simply astonishing that we don't have Lawrence's voice is extraordinary and so on so there are those gaps I don't really know he the anecdote is that he wanted to sue me and there was a severe letter from Malaya when I published something in the New Statesman mr. Elliott estate in the greatest exception to this which clearly implies that he is a fascist and so on and I didn't think he was a fascist to my joke which wasn't a bad joke was an inaccurate joke it was therefore a bad joke it went like this I was reviewing the book about Windham Lewis or both had something about Windham Lewis and it said that the accusation it referred to Windham Lewis is apparently favorable book favorable book on Hitler which angered me because that book was not apparently favorable it was unequivocally favorable there's a later book which has reservations and in some ways hostile Hitler but the original but not apparently favorable that's we saw it said the question of whether Windham Lewis was a fascist had been dealt with by T as pretty as earlier I said that Eliot could I said this is a case of the pot calling the kettle white it wasn't a bad joke but it's not strictly true because I don't actually think Eliot was a fascist I simply think he's not in the position to clear Windom Louis and that is there's enough of Eliot's association with fascism with Morris and his support for Salazar and so on and various other things that means he can't he can't come as a character witness for win but it was a severe letter in the New Statesman and I had to choose between penury and honor as so often in this life and so so the New Statesman said we have got a verbatim it having printed words mr. Eliot as red as to getting this a fascist we'd have Bolivia's a fascist and I don't believe he has or ever was a fascist but not it would be a little bit like I don't know hold him and clearing Ehrlichman of some accusation in in Nixon's world I mean no not as efficient cordon sanitaire but I don't know I don't know what he sounded like conversationally there's a book which ought to be published which is the jerk the Journal of and I hope I mean get this right Mary's Trevelyan which Valerie Elliot was terrifically opposed to the publication of and did a deal basically with Mary's Trevelyan about not publishing it it's not altogether dependable but she was in love Mary Ellen was in love with Elliott and clearly supposed that Elliott would marry her Elliott was disconcerted by his new secretary at Faber and Faber Valerie Fletcher who gives me the creeps now he moves on across to Mary Valerie Fletcher and when he tells Mary Trevelyan about it it is totally the end of their relationship as it was totally the end of his relationship with John Heywood that the marriage broke about that aisle said there were two vais but her her diary or journal is full of very good anecdotal things where you hear his tone of voice in a sense but not it isn't an oral record you hear him say things like saw Bertrand Russell the other day one of those successful failures so that it's full of things of that kind and so on and she she likes setting these down and Tom but that's the best I can do please thank you dude I was embarrassingly enlightened about so many so many things in Eliot that I thought I knew about the thing that probably threw me most was the business about sausages which is good man utterly unlikely now I was wondering whether or not with a bang but a whimper might be a real old very good now if I made that sort of a pun I would feel ashamed I'm very grateful to you Christopher and I'm just blown away and by the sensitivity of the acoustic the acoustics that you're charting through this when we had the TS Eliot centennial we took out some of these tapes and played them at Sanders Theatre I don't know if you were there there yeah yeah and many of us who were on the stage and doing the centennial celebration actually had we're hearing I was among them his voice for the first time and it struck us as extraordinarily pretentious and pompous and no trace of a st. Louis accent or anything that would be like mid the Midwest or his Americanism was completely obliterated or very much so but like anyone who acquires an accent and he acquired an accent in your field of acoustics which is rather exquisite to listen to every time and so your sensitivities to the Britishness that he acquired strikes me as could he not have been mispronouncing things as an American pretending to have this transplant EIN accent frequently he seems to just not know where his vows supposed to go in that big pompous way of his at least that's why he's truck many of us so there's a kind of American piece but potentially to be put in you may well be right and it would I think what we want is a film in which he is played by Meryl Streep fresh from her success as mrs. Thatcher's deciding to have a different voice and not to be from Grantham but to be in the strange sort of world which is sort of nowhere the opposite of Ian Richardson in house of cards who is always somewhere in particular and so on I think what you call pompous pretentious and snobbish and zone is probably what I think I was English I remember my friend Phyllis Rose was writing your life of Virginia Woolf some fifteen or twenty years ago and I remember saying they differ how to write about wolf because brewery they were all terrible snobs and of course there isn't any snobbery in United States of America and I thought well where's Lee and actually isn't come do it but she can she not here the pairing from the greatest university in the world I mean London Connecticut is not all that far away from here I mean the idea one could look at Harvard and say there's no such thing it's not going to come now but but you know the accusation as it were that he's more English than the English there is a I mean there's a there's a benign side to that you remember Malcolm Muggeridge saying that the only place you'll find really correct English now is in India the now was forty years ago but the legacy of the Raj was the people spoke and wrote impeccably good English it might have been stiff in certain respects but they really knew the difference between like and has then you and I we go through all these things they knew the different story mitigate and militate which the deed of my university does not know they knew the difference in fronting and so on or that whole world of the world of a kind of correctness which went with social men but I think you may have ever I don't I I do hear him as there's a studied withdraw from things which will clearly invite a certain sort of response the reason if I go back to the idea of a cordon sanitaire earlier that he keeps some sort of distance around him which makes him not at all immediately accessible it's the opposite of Frost's pretends to be immediately accessible I mean frost was immediately a good friend of yours and talking I mean I remember the delight with which I met him and he rose from his chair as if we were actually pleased to see him and I'm but this great this sort of great rubber reef is all spend spent upon making you feel that you were one with him and so on so it was a so there is something it's more like Houseman it's it York there was a very clear reserve which he parodies in how unpleasant to know mr. Eliot I'm to me mr. Eliot but but I think you're right I can't help to think about his contemporary Americans who made a point of sounding American I mean of really picking up an idiom and a colloquialism and a broad accent yes it's actually American yeah whereas he clearly was changing himself yes and I've heard this said about Beckett in Paris by the way that his French is not impeccable she can't pick that up yeah but people like me who also learned French the way Beckett did latent or he's a foreign language yeah don't notice yeah we tend to buy it in a certain way that they're buying his Englishness without spotting glaring faults of a person making himself up to be other than he is when his contemporaries are actually broadening what he's leaving behind I think there has to be some acoustic echo left I think that's very good invade true I mean but what's behind oh possum after all you you pretend you're dead what more convenient way to pretend you're dead than to pretend you're English no and and and and and he and pound keep saying everybody you know I don't like to be in it but he says I don't like to be Nasser because I'd rather not be dead I'd rather not be around people who are dead the time I mean that is I mean the you know crowd flowed over London Bridge I thought death another than so many it would have been different if it had been not London Bridge but the car Sun that's our I mean that is so there's a whole feeling about there's a feeling about what has happened to England which he and pound have in common what you've got in America is a kind of empty galvanism you know it you've got the Americans R all plugged into the electricity that's in psycho so that that's a quite different feeling I think about what's wrong the mayor frenetic live the opening section of the wasteland which is often wrongly said to have been deleted by pound as deleted by Elia but it is of course the brothels and the bars of Boston and if he had preserve that it would have been a poem which began in the West and moved through the Mediterranean to the east what happens as it begins as it were in Europe begins in England and moves into more of Europe and moves to the east but it did start with this very very outspoken and it began of course by referring to Tom and his wife at the time when the parents did not wish to speak to him because of who it was that Tom had married so that they so there that was a huge change when he count that out and he had no precedent for a convincing voice it's not well written that you all know it I think it's a page and a half it's a pub crawl a brothel crawl its its urinating in the street committing a nuisance the police come here wonder and arrest you you're then Kahoot in cahoots with with the police so the officer doesn't do anything and then you walk home so that's that story but he it doesn't have an ear because there isn't anybody whose voice he trusts there it's not it's got this general it's not there's there's nobody who can help him do that it would have changed the whole poem because the most important thing to the young Eliot is prohibition because his grandfather had been the huge advocate of prohibition the waste the key thing about the wasteland is that there couldn't be a pub scene in an American wasteland that is it's crucial that this is European poem because allowed to drink and of course it runs right through from whatever it is nice at 1918-1919 it runs right through to the year I'm born it lasts for a very long time it's given us a crop of pretty bad films in every now and then a good film and there's a curious the curious lack of memory of what it must have mean for it to be illegal to drink Elias grandfather was terrifically in favor of prohibition and campaign for it and terrifically against any licensing of brothels that is any acknowledgement by the authorities that brothels existed or venereal disease and that is what Eliot wants to write about houses a nice house ours is and so on go through into Sweeney erect and of course he has to he he deletes the page that is when the bridegroom smoothes his hair there was blood upon the bed he deletes that page or he sends to his mother the American edition from which he's dropped that poem he's very frightened of his mother a wise move always he he is frightened of his father but may very differently and his father is is his father you know the letters by his father say that it'll be terrible if an area disease if it has ever found a cure because it is it is God's judgment and Punishment on people who behave badly so that's something like the what I don't know why I've gone so much into that but it is part of what you say the Americanists for him as it was in the original opening section of the wasteland was very very far violently criminal and diseased that that's what it is it's um thank you I don't know where did that come from don't cloning

Channel: Harvard University

Views: 8,655

Rating: 4.7723579 out of 5

Keywords: Harvard University (College/University), Poetry (Literary Genre), t.s. eliot, christopher ricks, Poem

Id: zhkcrQ09YdU

Length: 87min 42sec (5262 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 02 2014