THE GOLDEN TREASURY OF*°VERSE SERIES
CON CEFVED,. PLANNED AND: DIRECTED
MATURAL BALANCE
Poems of 4. >. ELIOT
Ye The Waste Land — The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock — The Hollow Men a Ash Wednesday
HI-FI
GONG PLAY RECORDS
Read by ROBERT SPEAIGHT
HOMAS S. ELIOT was born in 1888 in St. Louis,
Missouri, a large industrial city in the U.S.A. Both
sides of his family descended from New England settlers.
An ancestor on his father’s side, by name Andrew Eliot,
went to Massachusetts in 1670, and his mother was descend-
ed from Isaac Stearns who also settled in Massachusetts in
1630. Family tradition led to his being educated at Har-
vard, a period broken by a course at the Sorbonne and
terminated with post graduate study in Germany and Ox-
ford. During the first world war Eliot remained in England,
and in 1927 became a naturalized British subject.
His poetic work appeared in various magazines during
the war years, and then in volume form. In 1922 The
Waste Land, the poem with which Eliot was to assume his
commanding position in English poetry, appeared. In 1948
this position was deservedly confirmed by the awards of
the rarely bestowed Order of Merit, and the Nobel Prize
for Literature.
Although he is now accepted as the major poet of the
Twentieth Century, readers who are as yet familiar only
with ‘“‘romantic” or “‘traditional’’ poets should not expect
to be able to come to grips with Eliot straight away. For
in common with the great musicians of his time—Stravin-
sky, Sibelius, Vaughan Williams—Eliot had to create his
own idiom, with its ironic content and themes of chaos,
despair, frustration and redemption, in which to portray
the contemporary scene.
The form in which he works, a sort of poetic shorthand,
using various layers of meaning and imagery, almost
cinematically (The Waste Land was written at the same
time as the great Russian and German documentary films
were being made) and placing moments of great beauty
in sharp juxtaposition with the sordid or irrelevant, does
not allow of any casual approach to the reading of, or listen-
ing to, his work. The audience cannot expect to be led
gently through hosts of golden daffodils, by means of tra-
ditional metre or rhyme. For the theme is disillusionment
with contemporary civilization, expounded, sometimes with
racy colloquialisms, by one fully in tune with his own
age and time.
The three short poems on one side of this record repre-
sent three distinct periods in Eliot’s development; while
YOU
The Golden Treasury of CONTEMPORARY CATHOLIC VERSE: Poems of Chesterton,
Belloc and*Thompson, read by Leo Brady, and Josephine Callan, with introductions by
Rev, “Gilbert .V Hiaitke. 5 ge a a ee ee eee Se Carers
© 1956 SPOKEN ARTS, INC., 275'\Seventh Avenue, New York 1, N. Y.
The Waste Land, considered by many writers and critics
to be the most significant single poem of the Century, is
without doubt the most influential of his poetry.
During the 1914-18 war Eliot’s early poetry, of which
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is an example, chose
to attack the vacuity of polite society, its boredom and
futility, the fear of social misdemeanor—‘Do I dare to eat
a peach?”’ And yet in this very poem we meet with echoes
of Keats,, Mathew Arnold, and Baudelaire, echoes which
allow us brief visions of the anguish and beauty which lie
beyond the facades of Bloomsbury or Boston society.
The prevailing intellectual fashions of the period, reli-
gious and political scepticism, were soon joined by the
cynicism, neurosis, and despair of the post war generation,
who found themselves suddenly in the grey, gloomy world
of The Hollow Men, a landscape quite unbroken by any
vision of beauty, a poem which ends with a despairing
attempt to remember The Lord’s Prayer.
In 1930 this mood of grim despair begins to give way
in Eliot to a re-emergence into the remote formal world of
Ash Wednesday, a poem written very much under the in-
fluence of Dante. Its theme is revealed in the moving
passage which contains the invocation ‘Teach us to care
and not to care.”” Frequent use is made of traditional litur-
gical symbols and church formula (Eliot is Anglo-Catholic)
combined with images from Dante; the result is a curious
mixture of worldly and personal themes.
The Waste Land is divided into five movements, The
Burial of the Dead, A Game of Chess, The Fire Sermon,
Death by Water, and What the Thunder Said, each virtually
complete in itself, like the movements of a symphony;
but the likeness to musical shape should not be too strongly
sought after. Here the contrasts are vivid, implication and
juxtaposition playing a major role in the construction of
the poem. Desolation and drought are mocked by echoes
from the past.
In the mounting tension and excitement of the last move-
ment, a world of flying fragments (Rutherford, incidental-
ly, was splitting the atom at the Cavendish Laboratory at
the time of writing), a society clinging desperately to the
pieces, the poem suddenly closes with the mystic and
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BY ARTHUR LUCE KLERY
734
impressive Sanscrit benediction tolling out like a bell.
Datta, Dayadhvam, Damyata,
Shantih, shantih, shantih.
(The peace which brings understanding.)
HARLEY J. USILL
OBERT SPEAIGHT was selected to read these long
poems of Eliot’s, no mean feat if the tension of the
performance is to be maintained, as an artist who has had a
long association with the works of Eliot. Speaight, who is
a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, was the Hon.
Sec. of the Oxford University Dramatic Society in 1925,
then after a period with the Liverpool Repertory, first ap-
peared in the West End in Journey's End at the Savoy.
Many Shakespeare parts followed including an Old Vic
season in 1931. Then in 1935 came the part which began
a long association with Eliot, that of Thomas a Becket
in Eliot’s verse drama, Murder in the Cathedral.
Since then Speaight has been continually in front of the
public eye through many leading roles on the London stage,
frequent broadcast and television appearances, and as author
of several books. With a fluent command of languages he
has toured the United States, Europe, the Near East and
Australasia on behalf of The British Council, lecturing on
the work of T. S. Eliot.
The intimate and natural-sounding quality of this recording
was achieved through the same advanced techniques that have
made WESTMINSTER musical recording a standard of excellence.
The complete range of sound frequencies has been reproduced;
the R.I.A.A. characteristic is used. Play this record with an un-
worn, microgroove stylus (.001 radius), preferably with a diamond
tip. Needles with sapphire or metal tips, which wear rapidly,
should be changed frequently.
AN ARGO PRODUCTION
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