“The Hollow Men” at 100
prufrock.substack.comThe Hollow Men is from 1925. Try to read it like a beatnik poet, world-weary and confident, with finger snaps and bongo drums or a jazz orchestra in the background. Eliot was a fascinating fellow traveler person. My favorite site for his poems is here: https://mypoeticside.com/poets/t-s-eliot-poems
I recommend the same thing for the actual beatniks themselves like Kerouac. You have to read it like spoken poetry, not merely written. This song uses lines from one of his stories and when set to music it fits perfectly.
https://www.gilderlehrman.org/sites/default/files/inline-pdf...
I find conjuring my inner Maynard G. Krebs helps a lot.
Yes, a funny character and a spot-on parody of the genre, but I found it really insightful to watch some interviews with Jack Kerouac to get a feel for his personality. It's a bit different from our rosy-eyed view of that era. He was harder and harsher than we want to imagine.
Absolutely. I still enjoy his books.
Though their genres and styles were completely different, the timing of his work, its reflections on the trauma of WW1, and then his conversion to conservative Catholicism reminds me more of Tolkien.
He wasn’t actually Catholic-Catholic, but Anglo-Catholic, a faction within the Anglican church which revived a lot of Catholic liturgical practices without entering into communion with Rome.
There are recordings of TS Eliot reading this poem. So while we should imagine your desired reading for its own worth, a "beatnik" reading shouldn't be implied as the original reading
The beatniks were most active in the 50s, maybe as early as the mid 40s, but definitely not 1925.
He was also a virulent anti-semite
Like Wagner and lots of other artists around that time. Agatha Christie's most famous novel? - Ten Little Niggers. Jean Genet was a convicted criminal. I try to separate the work from the artist, even if it's difficult.
OP doesn’t even acknowledge it.
Eliot chose, in 1948, when the Holocaust was common knowledge, to reprint a poem that contains the line:
>On the Rialto once./The rats are underneath the piles. The jew is underneath the lot.
That isn’t a poet following a common zeitgeist, that is a deliberate, provocative act.
I think it's a valid and important observation, but it's not incumbent on someone bring up T.S. Eliot to offer a disclaimer about it, and you shouldn't write a comment that implies otherwise.
Why? Who are you to say what I can, and cannot, write?
I mean, you do you, but it's not a reasonable complaint.
Which was sadly not uncommon in those days. The Nazi party had a significant following in both the US and the UK at that time.
That doesn’t make it any better. They also had significant opposition.
Indeed, they had opposition. However, the way we have been taught history has been laundered to make us think that Nazi ideology never had a significant base of support outside of Germany, when the truth was that it was not only significant, but segregated American society under Jim Crow was in several ways a model for the Nazis.
US treatment of migrant workers under the Bracero program and US usage of Zyklon B on migrant workers as a delousing agent directly inspired Nazis. This came to a head at the so-called bath riots in 1917:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1917_Bath_riots
This has come up a couple times before on HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38552760
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40381708
TIL
Here's my favourite reading: https://youtube.com/watch?v=nwcP3NOCeiE.
I was going to respond saying how much I dislike the way the narrator reads the poem - like a vicar 45 minutes into an overlong Sunday sermon, as bored as the congregation - then I saw the OP article included a link to Eliot reading his own poem. And that one sounds like the vicar now entering the third hour of his overlong Sunday sermon. So I have to agree: your favourite reading is the better reading of the poem.
For those interested in Eliot, the BBC has a lot of stuff (criticism, recordings, etc.) in various places. Just search for "bbc ts eliot".
This is the poem I used for speech contests in high school...