Jeremy Irons reads TS Eliot

January 1, 2017 4:24 AM

On BBC Radio 4 throughout the day today, Jeremy Irons reads (almost) all the poetry of TS Eliot. A new year's day treat. From the BBC website: "At the end of a year in which so much that had been taken for granted seemed to fragment, our guests explain why Eliot, himself a poet of fragments, can steady us for a journey into the unknown, and for transformation ... There may be no better preparation for the coming year."

Not for the first time: Jeremy has already produced some superb readings of Eliot on Radio 4, scaling the heights of The Wasteland and Four Quartets, both of which remain available on his own website. (I guess it's possible performances later today are repeats of these - I hope not, but we'll see.)

posted by genesta (17 comments total)

Thanks for sharing this! Recordings of Eliot reading his own poetry are available on Spotify and other places.
posted by Erberus at 5:12 AM on January 1, 2017

This is how the year ends
Not with a bang
But with a pole sliding ball
posted by I-baLL at 5:12 AM on January 1, 2017 [1 favorite]

Irons is reading right now ... they just had Jeannette Winterson on as one of the commentators. And the BBC iPlayer app for Android is not too shabby.

2017 is rather great so far.
posted by Sheydem-tants at 5:44 AM on January 1, 2017

BBC Four's In Our Time just had an episode on Four Quartets. It's worth the listen.
posted by Kattullus at 6:27 AM on January 1, 2017 [6 favorites]

Recordings of Eliot reading his own poetry are available on Spotify and other places.

They are indeed, and my excitement when I discovered this some time ago knew no bounds ... until I listened to the first of them.

I expected his readings of his own works to shed new light on his poetry and open new layers of meaning for me, but what a disappointment. The man makes to concessions whatsoever to the listener. If you did not know it was Eliot himself reading, you would think he had not done his homework or gained much understanding of his material.

There is a moral here, which may be as simple as "leave reading to the readers and writing to the writers". Because Irons, in contrast, is a superb reader of Eliot's works in every respect. His recital of the Wasteland a few years ago (linked above) opened, for me at least, all sorts of fresh insights.
posted by genesta at 7:08 AM on January 1, 2017 [3 favorites]

Excellent!
posted by mixedmetaphors at 7:38 AM on January 1, 2017

I expected his readings of his own works to shed new light on his poetry and open new layers of meaning for me, but what a disappointment. The man makes to concessions whatsoever to the listener.

If he had done that, he would have been injecting his own subjectivity into the language, which would have been antithetical both to his aims and to those of modernism as a whole.
posted by tully_monster at 8:24 AM on January 1, 2017 [2 favorites]

Virginia Woolf heard Eliot reading The Waste Land in 1922 and wrote afterwards: 'He sang it and chanted it and rhythmed it.' But most of the surviving recordings of Eliot reading his own poetry date from the 1940s and 1950s, when he had adopted a much less expressive (and arguably rather monotonous) style of reading.

On the other hand, Eliot's 1947 reading of 'Prufrock' does have its admirers:

His Vocarium “Prufrock” is characterized by a range of vocal techniques that enhance the poem’s textual contours: these include a series of passages sustained by a single extended breath. For example, the opening gambit “Let us go then, you and I” is supported by a single (almost anesthetizing) inhalation through “a patient etherized upon a table.” The same is true of “streets that follow like a tedious argument,” which Eliot uses a single, subtle breath to carry through to “an overwhelming question.” This vocal strategy unifies these particular passages into distinct emotional and textual microclimates.

I also quite like Christopher Ricks's readings of 'Prufrock' from 2015, with their tone of mild exasperation. Irons's version is good but just a shade too actorly for my taste.
posted by verstegan at 9:24 AM on January 1, 2017 [3 favorites]

I find most authors (of poetry or prose) aren't great readers/performers of their own work - it's two different skill sets.
posted by twsf at 9:30 AM on January 1, 2017 [1 favorite]

If only (cough) there were some way to download these as MP3 files I could listen to while on transit...
posted by twsf at 11:33 AM on January 1, 2017

I find most authors (of poetry or prose) aren't great readers/performers of their own work - it's two different skill sets.

I don't disagree with this, but I have always loved hearing Dylan Thomas reading his own poems. For example, Thomas reading "Fern Hill" and "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night." He definitely captures the lyricism of his own verses.
posted by litera scripta manet at 12:49 PM on January 1, 2017

Thank you, OP; I hope someone finds / uploads some MP3s.

On the topic of poets reading their own poems excellently, a friend recently sent me Frank O'Hara (prev) reading "Having a Coke with You", which blew my mind.
posted by Quagkapi at 1:10 PM on January 1, 2017 [3 favorites]

I was pulling out some old books to read to the kids at my parents' house, and found an illustrated kid's printing of a couple of poems from Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (which I loved as a kid). The first two were Growltiger's Last Stand, and the one about the Pekes and the Pollicles. Both are fun adventure poems, but man, Eliot was NOT a fan of Chinese people. Had to have a chat with the kid that I was going to be skipping over the ethnic slurs, and not to correct my reading in front of his sister. It's definitely weird as an adult to read some of my old favorites and see what's lurking in there. (See also: Dr. Seuss, If I ran the zoo)
posted by telepanda at 1:19 PM on January 1, 2017 [1 favorite]

Oh my goodness, I know this is petty but everyone on this recording including Jeremy Irons (who isn't the worst offender) has a serious case of dry mouth which, to my neurotic ears, makes this almost unlistenable. Do folks on the other side of the Atlantic not drink enough water?
posted by treepour at 1:26 PM on January 1, 2017

In that The Waste Land recording I found it interesting they decided to have different speakers for indirect quotes as in with the scene with the clairvoyant.
posted by Gymnopedist at 1:37 PM on January 1, 2017

The new year is off to a wonderful start. Thank you, OP!
posted by Paris Elk at 4:13 AM on January 2, 2017

I'm not the biggest poetry person generally, I think I lack the focus or the insight or something to really dig into it the way some people seem to, but I've gotten into the habit of reading Four Quartets around New Years every year, and it seems like a totally new poem every time I come back to it. I always find something new in it, or find it speaks to something different in my life depending on the subtlety of where I'm at and what I'm thinking about, but it always speaks to something, and does so deeply. It's a work of rare genius.

So thanks! I'm looking forward to really sitting down with this one.
posted by Phobos the Space Potato at 11:21 AM on January 2, 2017 [1 favorite]