T.S. Eliot reads The Waste Land.

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February 6th, 2008 3 comments link to (permalink) posted by david

On the one hand I hesitate to post The Waste Land since it is clearly self indulgent nonsense. However:

1. This is/was self indulgence week.

2. It’s really good self indulgent nonsense.

3. Eliot himself inoculated the poem by saying it was nonsense.

I do feel uncomfortable with the bits that sound pretty anti-semitic to me. Perhaps someone could elucidate?

tags: important dead people self indulgence week

3 responses so far »

Michelle B : Feb 6, 2008 at 8:46 am

Elliot was taken to task regarding his supposed anti-semitism. Here is an excerpt from the Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ts_elliot) on Elliot:

Leonard Woolf, husband of Virginia Woolf, who was himself Jewish and a friend of Eliot’s, judged that Eliot was probably “slightly anti-Semitic in the sort of vague way which is not uncommon. He would have denied it quite genuinely.”[34] Jewish friends such as Stephen Spender, Isaiah Berlin, Sidney Schiff, and Norbert Weiner claimed that they had no basis on which to believe that Eliot was anti-semitic.

In 2003, Professor Ronald Schuchard of Emory University published details of a previously unknown cache of letters from Eliot to Horace Kallen, which reveal that in the early 1940s Eliot was actively helping Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria to re-settle in Britain and America. In letters written after the war, Eliot also voiced support for modern Israel.[35]
Wilson : Feb 13, 2008 at 10:19 pm

The Wasteland is amazing. I’d recommend reading it- the footnotes and the history of the footnotes (which he wrote as necessary to the reading of the poem) make it among the most powerful pieces I’ve ever read.

The end of the poem is radtacular.

Thanks for the video post, though!

Cheers!
John : Feb 20, 2008 at 3:53 pm

In fact, if you really look into it, many of Europes best and brightest harboured some bad feeling towards Jewishness at some stage, Heidigger, Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Orwell to name but a few.

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T.S. Eliot reads The Waste Land.

February 6th, 2008 3 comments link to (permalink) posted by david