callmemadam | Entries tagged with t s eliot

The Waste Land was first published in 1922, so to mark the centenary, there’s a flurry of programmes about Eliot. Last week, BBC 2 showed a programme devoted entirely to The Waste Land. It wasn’t bad. The most surprising thing about it for me was to find how much of the poem I knew, although I haven’t read it that often.

Yesterday evening, on BBC 4, there was a repeat of a programme I’ve seen before: A N Wilson talking about Eliot’s life and work. He was trying to square the great poet (he considers The Waste Land the greatest poem of the twentieth century) with Eliot’s ‘abhorrent’ views. He failed in this attempt and confessed himself ‘baffled’. It’s good. Both these programmes used Eliot’s own recordings of his poems; an eerie voice from the past.

This was followed by possibly the most challenging and exhausting one-hour film I’ve ever seen. Apparently, when lockdown began, Ralph Fiennes set himself the task of learning The Four Quartets. Phew! He turned his recitation into a one-man stage performance and then this film (directed by his sister). To hold an audience with poetry for an hour non-stop and never a dull moment is an amazing achievement. (Weakly, I did get the occasional mental flash of Fiennes with no nose.) It must surely become compulsory viewing for anyone unlucky enough to be studying the poems. I say unlucky not because the poetry is bad (far from it) but because you could spend a lifetime studying the Quartets and still not get to the bottom of them. Luckily for me, I can accept mysteries. I felt tired afterwards so Fiennes must have been prostrated. When does he get a knighthood?

Even people who don’t read much poetry know some lines from Kipling.

‘You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din’
‘If you can keep your head when all about you’
‘Watch the wall my darling, while the gentlemen go by’
‘The Colonel’s Lady an’ Judy O’Grady Are sisters under their skins’
‘They shut the road through the woods Seventy years ago.’
If you’re my age, you may have sung Non Nobis Domine at school and know the chorus of The Road to Mandalay because it was so familiar to your parents. If memorability is one of the criteria for great poetry, Kipling is up there.

This new selection, published by Cambridge University Press, is taken from the same editor’s massive work containing the complete poems. Thomas Pinney has chosen 100 of these, twenty five of which must be old, that is, well known, and seventy five new; poems never reprinted by Kipling. He writes:

“The idea of this selection from Rudyard Kipling’s many poems is to contrast the familiar with the unfamiliar: the list includes 25 of the first kind, and 75 of the second. Any collection will have those first 25; no other collection will have all 75 of the other kind – probably not more than one or two, if any. They come from many different sources, a few of them unpublished, none of them ever reprinted by Kipling himself. They have rested, unvisited, in inaccessible Indian newspapers, in manuscript, in the files of long-dead magazines.”

We are never told which are the familiar ones, a possible problem for someone coming to Kipling for the first time. What I wanted from the good professor was a little explanation as to why he chose just those twenty five familiar poems and those seventy five unfamiliar ones? This is the kind of book it’s very frustrating to read on a Kindle. You keep wanting to flip back and forth, checking this and that, and it’s a tedious business. I have two collections with which to compare this one: Songs for Youth, 1924 and A Choice of Kipling’s Verse made by T S Eliot with an Essay on Rudyard Kipling , 1941. I decided to read every one of the 100 poems and compare the choices made in the other books.
( lots more )

Cornflower’s post today was so interesting that I felt I had more to say on the subject than would fit into a comment on her blog. She writes about comfort reading, not the ‘equivalent of the cosy sweater, or the mug of hot chocolate, but … this much deeper more literal form of comfort’. She gives a link to an interview with Alexander McCall Smith in which the interviewer, Elizabeth Grice, says of him, ‘He has become more of a movement, a worldwide club for the dissemination of gentle wisdom and good cheer. Letters pour in from people to say they have found his books inspiring, enlightening, amusing, comforting. They are read to the sick and the dying.’

McCall Smith’s books are light fiction but they nevertheless engage with the eternal verities and isn’t this the ‘deeper comfort’ Cornflower refers to? The greatest writers, especially Shakespeare, seem able to explain our own emotions to us. One might come out of a performance of Anthony and Cleopatra in tears, but not depressed and having shared the emotion with our fellow theatre-goers. Great writing reminds us of our common humanity, whether it’s John Donne asking ‘for whom the bell tolls’ or T S Eliot writing, in The Dry Salvages

‘Where is the end of them, the fishermen sailing
Into the wind's tail, where the fog cowers? …
…We have to think of them as forever bailing,
Setting and hauling,’

The comfort being that we are all in the same boat. What McCall Smith shares with greater writers is the moral compass and, I think, compassion, and this is why he appeals so strongly to people looking for a good deed in a naughty world.

(Word of life supplying Comfort to the dying, from the hymn by Henry Baker.)

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
				1	2	3
4	5	6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17
18	19	20	21	22	23	24
25	26	27	28	29	30	31

Life must be filled up

Entries tagged with t s eliot

T S Eliot on television

Rudyard Kipling 100 Poems Old and New, edited by Thomas Pinney

Word of Life

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