Hear actual recordings of T.S. Eliot narrating his 1922 masterpiece “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “The Waste Land.” Thomas Stearns Eliot (September 26, 1888 - January 4, 1965) was a US-born British poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, literary critic and editor. Considered one of the 20th century's major literary figures, he is a central figure in English-language Modernist poetry. Through his trials in language, writing style, and verse structure, he reinvigorated English poetry and, in 1948, was honored with the Nobel Prize in Literature.
'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', commonly known as 'Prufrock', is the first professionally published poem by American-born, British poet T. S. Eliot (1888–1965). Eliot began writing 'Prufrock' in February 1910, and it was first published in the June 1915 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse at the instigation of Ezra Pound (1885–1972). It was later printed as part of a twelve-poem pamphlet (or chapbook) titled Prufrock and Other Observations in 1917. At the time of its publication, Prufrock was considered outlandish,[3] but is now seen as heralding a paradigmatic cultural shift from late 19th-century Romantic verse and Georgian lyrics to Modernism.
The most famous, beautiful and spiritually moving poems of the twentieth-century, read by the most famous poet. Historic recordings of the cream of Eliot's poetry.
It is always something of a revelation to listen to a poet reading his own words, and these recordings are no exception. Eliot clearly and evenly characterises and reveals the voices of some of his most important works in this excellent reading.
The Waste Land caught the imagination of the age with its powerful emotional impact. Eliot felt that the modern Western
city had become a sterile desert waste land, and in it life had become a sham pretence, with no content but stale conventionality.
The Four Quartets express the poet's whole-hearted acceptance of the Christian faith. Each poem describes a meditation which leads to a reconciliation with the burden of the past.
