"The Waste Land - Part II - A Game of Chess" by T.S. Eliot (poetry reading)

[ValisX]

everything you said about Eliot is how I feel about Lovecraft, which is why I've never given Lovecraft a moment of my time.

I respect its prominence but the man behind the work I don't like very much

[SpokenVerse]

@SavannahG14 Okay but it seems a trivial matter to me.  Did you have any thoughts about the poem itself?

[Awesomeoo100]

Eliot wasn't the anti semite, his friend Ezra Pound who edited/influenced the poem was.

[TheBlindPig1]

The way of an unfaithful wife is this: she eats, then she wipes her mouth and says, "i have done no harm."

[wcjones451]

there IS at least debate as to whether Eliot was actually an anti-semite. Perhaps I just don't like to think of Eliot as a bad man...

[hyacinthegirl]

I love your description of the poem as a shipwreck and flotsam and jetsam, etc. Well said. Great reading, too--I just listened to Eliot's own reading, and although it doesn't seem right to say this, I infinitely prefer yours. It reminds me of my tutor's at Oxford, who would read excerpts aloud and whose voice I will always hear in my head as I read this poem. I like what you did with the "DA"s, etc. in Part V. (I couldn't find the end of Eliot's reading, so I don't know how it compares.)

[Allocator2008]

Eliot's problem was not that he despised the lower classes. Hell, I despise people who are uneducated on purpose, that is, ignorance is forgivable, but willful ignorance is not. Eliot's real problem is that later in life he got into the Catholic Church, surely mankind's worst enemy since before the Pyramids.

[MrPingyEars]

@Allocator2008

Actually he was an Anglican--not a Roman Catholic at all and as far as I know , he never converted.

[masterfeatherpen]

@MrPingyEars He was Anglo-Catholic (which means Roman Catholic in England, specified as an extreme traditionalist minority primarily among old old nobility and old obscure peasant families), and yes he did have a conversion experience, both explicitly in his memoirs and implicitly in his shift from early Wasteland-esque nihilism to his veritable hymns to tradition as he aged.

[MrPingyEars]

@masterfeatherpen

Eliot may have had a personal, spiritual 'conversion' in a Born-Again sense, but I meant 'conversion' in the sense of changing his religious allegiance formally and being received and confirmed in the Church. Eliot was actually received into the Anglican Church in 1927, I'm afraid--he was definately Anglican. That's what 'Anglo-Catholicism' is--the Church of England sees itself as part of the Holy Catholic Church but is NOT subject to or part of the Roman Catholic Church.

[masterfeatherpen]

@MrPingyEars I stand corrected. :)

[masterfeatherpen]

@MrPingyEars But I do completely disagree with the person below (Allocator2008). He did NOT despise the lower classes, he despised the lower classes' hatred of the upper classes (hence, tradition), because he was a conservative. NOT a Rightist (the anti-Semitism is a misportrayal of his traditionalism as Rightism), but a conservative, in attitude, in language, in all. This "hatred of the lower classes" gibberish is an effort to discredit him based on his hatred of collectivism and socialism.