TLDR – Eliot (and poetry in general) and modern music – discuss
I like the idea of T.S. Eliot. But I don’t like his poems much. They don’t ‘make sense’. I start off reading a phrase, a line with intent to draw meaning out, but frankly it’s a struggle. Thrown at school into Ash Wednesday, (what feels like the deep end of the pool of Eliot’s poetry), was almost enough to put me off completely. I mean:
Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?
A quote from Wikipedia “In the first section, Eliot introduces the idea of renunciation with a quote from Cavalcanti, in which the poet expresses his devotion to his lady as death approaches. Dante Gabriel Rossetti translated it under the title Ballata, Written in Exile at Sarzana, and rendered the first line as “Because I do not hope to return”
What the fuck?
What better way to signal – this poem is not for you? This is for the well-read elite to absorb and enjoy the plentiful allusions as a whisky connoisseur appreciates the scent, the nose, the flavour, the taste and the afterglow of a decades-old dram.
So, why do I like the idea of T.S. Eliot? Because I’m an old goth, and Andrew Eldritch used to throw quotes from Eliot into his song lyrics (Marian, Valentine, Amphetamine Logic, Floorshow) – I can show his workings in the comments, if you are interested. It’s kind of like a form of sampling – analogue html links to sources, to ideas, to a palette of meaning that acts as backdrop to glitterbeat Suicide motoric rock’n’roll clichés.
Is that’s what old backward Toilets was doing? He littered his poems with Latin and Greek quotes – there must have been a point to that. Apparently, he also quoted operas and folk songs, and all sorts of cultural references and shit that would have made those in the know nod sagely and say “I see what you are doing there, Tommy”. What larks! for the cognoscenti, like a secret society of Eco Foucaultists drawing unintended meanings from the juxtaposition of judderingly different poetic scenes?
I think Tee-Ess had better first lines than Ash Wednesday:
* April is the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.
* Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table;
* Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future, and time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present, all time is unredeemable.
Now that’s more the sort of Ramones kick off into a 2 minute epic I want. Punchy image or concept to reflect on before being hit by chats about Renaissance painters, birds going round lotus pools in a garden, or coffee in the Hofgarten. Tessie, you are taking the piss, but in a fun, fuck-you way.
So, the title. Did you know Mistah Eliot was the first person to put the word “bullshit” into recorded written form? Here’s his delightful piece of misogyny.
Lots of scrawl – what’s my call? I suppose I’m ATM for wiser words than mine on Eliot and rock’n’roll, and more generally on poetry and modern culture. The linked article gives a few breadcrumbs to other musicians who rode on Eliot’s coattails beyond the Sisters.
What’s your take on Eliot? Although it might whimper out with a couple of comments and a YT clip, I’m hoping for more bang for this ageing buck – and please, no Lloyd Weber…
https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2012/may/23/ts-eliot-poetry-pop-music
I’m a fan. Eliot’s fragmented scraps of seemingly disjointed images work for me in the same non-linear way as my favourite film, Terence Davies’ ‘Distant Voices, Still Lives’. I can recite the whole first section of The Waste Land, ‘The Burial of the Dead’, from memory. Fiona Shaw does a good job of it, but the daft apeth says “sled” instead of “sleigh”. Someone should write her a letter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPB_17rbNXk
I’ve grown to like the non-linear Scrappy doo he comes out with, I must admit. I hope I wasn’t too negative in how I flippantly described what were my first, young impessions.
Let me just stick in here the link to the poem that gave me the rude title to the post – for whatever reason, the link above just goes to the Guardian article. Here is T.S. Eliot : ‘The Triumph of Bullshit’
https://genius.com/Ts-eliot-the-triumph-of-bullshit-annotated
That’s a lovely reading by Fiona Shaw of the poem, by the way, @Gary. Thanks for posting!
M R Bellows. He’s baked exceedingly good.
What do either of your comments have to do with T.S. Eliot?
Exactly. ❤️
I am a fan the early stuff, as they say: ‘Prufrock’ to ‘The Wasteland’ is, I think, a sort of “adolescent sublime” of pissed off alienation which is why he remains so quotable in rock (for example, Peter Hamill’s “Unreal, unreal” in the fabulously pretentious A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers).
I hope this isn’t a missing-the-point sidebar, but when trying understand people like Joyce and Eliot, I wander off to the land of Mark E Smith – who was driven by his art and his need to write down his words and then read them out. It wasn’t his hobby, he did it all the time. He decided he needed a perfunctory band to get the attention his work demanded. This is attractive to many; someone so single-minded. I don’t know why that is.
I know exactly what you mean, but Mark E. Smith was treated as such and given a latitude that far exceeded his skill.
No. It’s absolutely the point I was trying to get to, but myself lost on the way, by describing what put me off Eliot, rather than what I find intriguing – the connection between his poetry and modern music, as the article linked to in the OP by Dorian Lynskey expresses more fully. The style in which Eldritch, E. Smith wrote – quoting and inserting multiple cultural references – seems to mimic Eliot.
While I suggested it was elitist in the OP, I do agree with @hedgepig‘s approach below, that “the wallop of Eliot isn’t found in literal meaning. It’s the music”. And when I have more time later today, I’ll try to develop my thoughts on that aspect to post below.
Perfunctory? Perfunctory! Steve Hanley was never perfunctory.
Pffft.
Not to mention Karl Burns, the Thor of the floor-toms!
Karl Burnsey Burns m.i a.
Conversely, I admire (some) of Eliot’s poetry but very much dislike the idea of him. He was, after all, even by the standards of his time, a raging anti-semite who didn’t try to hide it. Bit of a cnut really, if a clever one.
There has been a critical argument about this for the last 30-odd years, since the publication of an influential critique of his work by Anthony Julius, with Eliot’s modern academic fans defending him by denying he had any ‘genuine’ hatred for Jews. But a cursory
reading of his correspondence to his contemporary critics indicates he was very much of the “yebbut some of my best friends are Jewish” style of racist.
Talented, certainly, but no role model for any normal human being.
Agree with you that he was a horrible racist, and a massive snob. Don’t think admiring an artist’s work has much to do with seeing them as a role model, though. That’s not a poet’s job at all.
A Poet has a job? I suppose he or it does nowadays much like when they used to send out painters to battlefields.
On reflection, ‘role model’ is a poor choice of phrase, perhaps ‘literary hero’ would be more precise.
We are in no great position to judge him as a human being, to call him out for being “racist” – casual or otherwise, or having any other human failing. He is long gone and so are his times, and the people who knew him. We are in a position to judge his art, and we should confine ourselves to that. Taking the moral high ground of judgement is an unpleasant and common Afterword trait. Yes, the art is great, but oh dear! The man!
Artists are people, no more or less, and subject to human failings that the rest of us can share in different measures. What we cannot do is create art of the same worth – art that lives longer than the artist (there’s a phrase for that), longer than we will, when all our exemplary qualities as human beings are forgotten. So, to borrow a phrase from the title of this piece (which does limit itself to the art) – stuff your moral judgement up your normal human being’s ass.
I half agree and half don’t.
Agree that art needs to be judged on its own merits. Disagree that we can’t make moral judgements on the character of long-dead people. Eliot and Pound’s antisemitism was discussed and “called out” at the time, too. Virginia Woolf’s snobbery, similarly – not least by her, given she wrote an essay called “Am I A Snob” in which she essentially concluded “yes, but I’m ok with it”.
I deleted a post earlier because I do that a lot: get an opinion out of my system and then remember that internet opinions are the worst, but I’m now apparently rewriting it. So here goes: John Carey is worth a read (in The Intellectuals and the Masses) on the modernists’ snobbery, elitism, and horror of the newly and regrettably literate masses’ ability to access art. Eliot was explicit about his intention to exclude the casual reader, though we can argue about the motivation for that: for him, it was about making art “indirect, allusive, difficult… in order to dislocate…force…language to his meaning”. Carey would agree with Salwarpe that he just didn’t want the proles reading his stuff or engaging with any “high” art. That’s unattractive, as is his explicit antisemitism, and I don’t buy a purely relativist “autre temps, autre moeurs” approach when it comes to that stuff.
I tend to be somewhere in the middle with regard to the difficulty question. The wallop of Eliot isn’t found in literal meaning. It’s the music. Its literal meaning is about as relevant as the literal meaning of a Beethoven piano sonata (i.e. barely at all). He’s beautiful and challenging and a giant.
His moral failings I do think are fair game for comment, but not with reference to the poetry.
I like a lot off what you’re saying here, @Hedgepig, and I’ll try to come back to it later on, when I have more time to reflect and post.
Cool 👍
I don’t think there’s one answer to the relevance of context to art, by the way. I guess maybe where I come out is that I don’t think you can entirely separate art and artist, but where possible you should give it a go. If someone was a total shit (Picasso, John Martyn, pick one) but it doesn’t seem to have been a facet of their character which is detectable in their art, then separate away. You should. Martyn was both an abusive drunken bastard and a maker of lovely music, and the two don’t particularly seem to have touched. Solid Air isn’t less good because Martyn hit his wife, and he’s not less of a shit because he made Solid Air.
But sometimes that separation isn’t possible. It’s not a black and white issue, and I don’t think there’s one underlying principle to always stick to, unless you want to find yourself defending a daft position of one sort or another.
HPS -This is not like someone slagging off Morrissey for becoming a bit of a dick, and the fact that you or I could not create to Eliot’s standard is neither here nor there. Being ‘only human’ is not an automatic get-out clause for every character fault, however notable a creative artist one might be.
Small parts of Eliot’s art are unquestionably anti-Semitic. He couldn’t make it much plainer to the reader, they are amongst the least obscure lines he wrote and the least swamped in poetic allusion. As a Jew, am I supposed to think “well, you know, he might think I’m vermin, but, hey, nobody’s perfect…”
Besides, isn’t the appreciation of any art form in essence a moral judgement? You are suggesting that the creation of ‘respected’ art is done in a social vacuum, that all critical appreciations are worthless if they include comment on the artist themselves. That is absurd.
You may well be entirely comfortable with someone like Eliot, and probably don’t even care, but I’m not that keen on him because -surprise!- he wouldn’t have liked me or my family simply because of what we are.
Yes. Many people have tried to find a way to explain away “The rats are underneath the piles. The Jew is underneath the lot” or “ the Jew squats on the window sill [of “my… decayed house”], the owner / Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp”.
No explanation required, really. He was a racist, he said as much in lectures and essays. It’s not something that can be excused or contextualised, and I’m not sure we should try. Burbank and Gerontion are antisemitic poems. They just are.
The extent to which they need to be considered when reading the rest of his work is pretty arguable. He later repudiated the essay in which he said that Jews have no place in our society, and I think it’s fair enough to separate art from artist in the other work. Contextual / biographical stuff is surely relevant when it does appear explicitly in the work, though, and that’s also fair game.
Generally though, I’d say that art and artist can be separated when appreciating the latter, unless the two collide inseparably, as in those two poems. And as I say above, autre temps/moeurs only gets you so far. It’s a knotty business.
I remember long and difficult conversations discussing the relevance of knowledge of the artist when appreciating the artist’s work.
I was grappling with reaching a conclusion on the subject for myself, while talking with someone who was convinced that knowing at least something about the context within which the art had been created was important for the person trying to understand and appreciate the art.
The example they offered to prove that the context of the work’s creation (i.e. knowledge of the artist as a human being) was relevant to any judgement of the work of art was Van Gogh’s ‘Self Portrait With Bandage’. Unless one knows something of the mental turmoil within Vincent’s head at the time it was painted, one cannot fully appreciate the work, and therefore one cannot in any way make a sensible judgement of its worth.
I was not convinced, and ultimately I concluded that a work has to stand on its own or not at all. If the effects of passing time somehow reduce the essence of the work, then the work does not really have any quality as a separate entity, but only as a contextual comment at a past point in time.
If some art is to be judged, it is to be judged on its own merits alone, and it’s anyway not logical or rational to argue that any work can be compared, like-for-like, with any other work. All are unique, set adrift from time and place, and all are – or should be – appreciated as things also divorced from their creator.
We cross posted, but as I say above, I don’t think there is one 100% applicable principle to be had here. It’s one of the greyest and least “one right answer” areas I can think of.
Absolutely valid points, @Slug. I should have said “I like the idea of T.S. Eliot´s poetry. I know little of the man’s personal beliefs and prejudices, though I had heard that, like Ezra Pound, he had anti-semitic views. Thank you for making sure those are highlighted and recognized in this thread.
Here’s an article by Anthony Julius, articulating his thoughts on Eliot.
He concludes:
I have a very good source who reports that Ezra and Tom were last observed fighting in the captain’s tower, while calypso singers laughed at them and fishermen held flowers.
I hear that Eliot was also known to hang out with William Blake, smoking and enjoying summertime in England.
He chose England and joined the ministry, joined the ministry, joined the ministry.
A keen adherent of the Athanasian Creed, then?
Are they the lot that sang Ooo Gary Davies?
The point of poetry is to evoke emotion. If you lard your poems with Greek and Latin you are excluding the vast majority of your readers purely out of (let’s be honest) elitist snobbish intellectualism . I have read (or at least started to read) The Wasteland many times and never finished it, which is self-defeating surely for both the author and the reader.
Should all art be readily accessible to everyone, then?
Also, your idea of “the point of poetry” is at the very least arguable, isn’t it?
Yes. And no.
😉
To paraphrase that other great modernist poet, Luke Skywalker: “Amazing. Both of the things you just said were wrong.”
Yes, we don’t want the peasants looking at our stuff. Heaven forfend they actually understand it.
Where’s the line? What level of simplicity / sophistication is the right one, for you? Is art that requires a bit of learning to appreciate really worse art?
I said nothing about quality. Are you saying that you need education to appreciate art, then? Tell that to the Lascaux Neanderthals.
It depends on the art. You do need some education to appreciate poetry: you have to be able to read. That means it’s by definition not readily accessible to everyone. Once that’s established, we’re really just talking about where you draw your line.
You seemed to be saying that The Waste Land doesn’t evoke emotion because you have to have a certain level of education to appreciate it, and that “the point of poetry is to evoke emotion”. So aren’t you calling it bad? It’s an artwork which fails to meet “the point” of its art form. I can’t see how that’s not a quality judgement! 😊
(As for whether the Lascaux paintings are *art* in the usual sense, that’s a huge conversation. There was a great piece in a recent London Review of Books on that very subject, or that subject among others re. Lascaux.)
I was referring to art, as you were, in its wider sense. Clearly poetry requires the ability to read. Lascaux paintings are paintings and do not. I don’t understand the difiiculty here, perhaps we should agree to disagree and move on.
Ok! Sorry if any offence given.
Not at all. Enjoyed the discussion 🙂
I loved Eliot – The Wasteland, Prufrock, and the Quartets especially, when I was a student, but I can’t remember when I last read him. If I look to poetry of his contemporaries these days, W B Yeats, or even Louis MacNeice are where I go.
And of that early 20th century Modernist movement writers, the one who I have discovered most recently and now seems to have been far too underrated and patronised compared to her peers, is Virginia Woolf. Mrs Dalloway, and To The Lighthouse, of course, but Christ, Jacob’s Room is amazing on the longer term impact of war and what we now call PTSD.
I’m gonna be pedantic and point out that it’s The Waste Land (not The Wasteland, which is, I believe, from Mad Max 2). I know zilch all about Eliot the man or his politics. And have no inclination to learn until there’s a biopic.
Maybe in Eliot’s version…
Single word for The Jam too
The dirge that is Eliot’s ‘Shrove Tuesday in The Thunderdome’ never gets much mention.
I’ve never quite reconciled myself to the fact that two of my favourite poets – Eliot and Larkin -were apparently fairly unpleasant people. Bigots. I wish they hadn’t been. Then I wouldn’t feel guilty about loving their work.
As the years have gone by, I’ve become less keen on Eliot’s early stuff like Prufrock, Gerontion, the Journey of the Magi, Marina, Ash-Wednesday, etc. And my favourite parts of The Waste Land are when he doesn’t try to blind you with classical references and arcane bits of Greek,etc. The first three stanzas of “What the Thunder Said”, for example, are more approachable and generally very fine.
But Eliot’s masterpieces are the Four Quartets. I return to them often,and enjoy them more and more as I grow older. They’re simply magnificent…
“Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.”
Thanks, @duco01. Alongside the justified critique of Eliot the man, I hoped there would be appreciation of the poems, and I like what you say. Great art has layers upon layers of meaning within it, that can take years or decades to appreciate. Instant pop art is good, but so too is slow, contemplative, complex art that does take research, absorption and puzzling to draw out the richness created by the artist.
It’s uncomfortable and yet strangely reassuring when you conclude that a complete arsehole can still manage to produce things quite as magical, resonant and profound – something that will live well beyond the memory of its author’s flaws.
You people are so clever. Three Blind Mice is about my limit. Even then I don’t really get it. Thick bastard.
The mice shouldn’t be interpreted literally as visually impaired rodents. They are a metaphor for religious persecution.
I’ll just be here with me Lego, then…
Don’t lego!
(It’s just a step from heaven)
False modesty, @Moose-the-Mooche…
Your well-placed Profrockism led to a tidy little expression of AWers’ Eliot knowledge and erudition, nor least @Chiz‘s masterly parody/mash up.
Actually I like Eliot, and not just his greatest hits. His Elizabethan essays are great too, not as stuffy as you’d expect – closer to Orwell in tone.
My first experience of TSE was hearing some of his ill jams being kicked by my main homie MC Alec Guinness. Brother was wilin’ yo.
It’s too early in the morning to bring what’s left of my brain to bear on the general discussion, but at last, someone’s mentioned Alec Guinness! Love his readings of The Waste Land and Four Quartets – I had a cassette for years that I treasured. So much more pleasing than the rather priestly readings by the man himself. Something about an actor reading the poetry that makes it come alive, I find.
I think it’s quite waggish to illustrate that with a picture of him as Obi Wan.
George Lucas and TS Eliot – two very, er, different wordsmiths.
“Thomas, you can write this shit, but you sure can’t say it.”
I find your lack of peaches disturbing
I studied a lot of poetry at uni, and we read a lot of Eliot in detail. I don’t recall people enjoying it, as such; I appreciated the intertextuality and the deconstruction of traditional forms, and it felt important…but not emotionally engaging. It was always studied in tandem with literary theory (Structuralism, Cultural Materialism, etc.) It felt a bit mathematical.
An analogy might be some modernist architecture or sculpture. You look at at and appreciate it, but you wouldn’t necessarily want it in your living room.
Byron and Burns, for example, are poets of the senses, and they seemed to know and portray simple beauty better.
Ok, here comes the second part. The reason why I wanted to post in the first place. To connect poetry and music, particularly in the form of Eliot, because, whether or not I get all or even any of the cultural references he makes, I like the idea of him being an early example of sample culture –
Between the idea. And the reality. Between the motion. And the act. Falls the DJ Shadow.
High and low culture thrown into the mix, often overlapping – it’s the mood and the sound and the repetition of the words that works – like an impressionist painting – look too close and you see the paint strokes but not the picture. You take put of it what you find – maybe not the Greek quotes, but possibly the moon shining on Mrs. Porter and her daughter as they wash their …. in soda water. Words and phrases, like memes, chosen to connect out to other references – to draw them in as shade, as reference, as background colour.
A lineage down the ages – Dylan is quoted above and I’m going in deep on the Sisters of Mercy – “Eldritch has not just borrowed and re-arranged the odd line or image, but has also learnt much about structure and rhythm, the power and tension in an unresolved line” Lynskey.
“There’s hyperlinks in all of it, “ states Eldritch. “If you can stick three words of T S Eliot into a line you’ve automatically involved and enveloped the whole of The Wasteland and that just enriches what you do. ‘Floorshow’ is a very brazen example.”
Floorshow, an early track which sneers at and celebrates the mosh pit – its first lines almost quote Waste Land:
“The bodies on the naked on the low damp ground
In the violet hour to the violent sound
And the darkness the blinding the eyes that shine
And the voices singing line on line” Eldritch
“White bodies naked on the low damp ground”
“At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits” Eliot
Or Valentine, a slice of disaster reportage from the Reptile House ep, (possibly the greatest, most concentrated Sisters release), stealing from Sweeney Erect:
“The razor bites and the shriek subsides
He arches clutching at his sides
Across the floor across the tiles
The man is dead and the razor smiles” Eldritch
“Tests the razor on his leg
Waiting until the shriek subsides.
The epileptic on the bed
Curves backward, clutching at her sides” Eliot
Perhaps best of all, because posting comparable texts doesn’t say much, Marian (version). From the first album, the ‘version’ , like a cryptic clue, alludes to Marian being an anagram of Marina. Marian, a song written, in Eldritch’s lowest ebb of amphetamine dependency and permanent recording studio residency, about drowning and sung in his lowest tones – doesn’t quote the Eliot poem at all. But the link is there, the connection is made. “woodthrush calling through the fog. My daughter”.
Like Eliot, Eldritch himself isn’t a very attractive person, from what I can tell. Ambitious, and takes no prisoners, I would say. Scornful of fools, clever but knows it and opinionated – a brittle ego with a lot of defence mechanisms for his weak spots. But he wrote a lot of powerful, intoxicating songs and created a total package, from costume to stage presence to artwork to typeface to logo to drum programming, drawing on many influences, from Bowie to Suicide to Glitterband, from Motorhead to Stones to Hot Chocolate, and from Shelley to Eliot.
You don’t need to know your high poets to enjoy Amphetamine Logic or Dominion, but if you do, it adds another dimension to your appreciation.
Counterpoint works in lyrics as in melody – juxtapose different ideas, even ones that jar and fight, and the dynamics spark over utterly groovy bastard tunes.
I know the Sisters better than I probably should, but there are other musical inheritors of the poetic muse. Apparently “Eliot’s influence extends across the whole of PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake”, “Thom Yorke reached for it to evoke his own sense of dislocation and lurking horror on Paranoid Android’s neurotic babble of unidentified voices “Lynskey.
And there are other poets quoted and cited by modern musicians. @Kaisfatdad connected The Bangles and Matthew Arnold through Dover Beach, though I think they completely misinterpreted the poem. It’s not about escape, it’s about loss of Faith.
Any other poet/pop connections?
The Waterboys have a strong affinity with Yeats, from the full album An Appointment With…to the sublime The Stolen Child on FB. My avatar is – shock! – not me at all, but Mike Scott underneath the striking three-faced mask he donned for the remarkable performance of Mad As The Mist And Snow/The Second Coming on the 2014 tour.
Christy Moor did a tremendous setting of Wandering Aengus. Yer actual silver apples. Lovely…
The Cocteau Twins had a song called The Hollow Men. Other than the title, I don’t think it has any connection to the poem though.
Talking of the poem, perhaps my favourite Eliot verse:
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.
Like the Cocteaus, Gravenhurst were cited in the Lynskey article.
This song shamelessly steals the bass line from Marian, but is otherwise intriguing. I’d never heard of them before, but the songs that this lead into are intriguing and make me want to explore more. From wiki “dark and atmospheric, veering between the noisy shoegazing sound of guitar bands such as My Bloody Valentine, the harmony-laden singer-songwriter territory of Simon and Garfunkel, and the intricate fingerpicking guitar styles of Bert Jansch and Nick Drake”.
Sadly the singer and mainstay, Nicholas John Talbot, died in 2014. Does anyone know anything about him?
Vini Reilly loved the line “Lips that would kiss”, too…
Well there’s always Iron Maiden’s reboot of Coleridge.
I love it that they did it bur it’s a bit raucous for me. Great codpiece!
Those creepy, grotesque Tiger Lilies have also have also had a bash at STC
Here’s the whole show. Fades in slowly after 8 minutes but worth waiting for.
Lloyd Cole quotes the “should I part my hair behind” line in Mister Malcontent. But then he was allus one for the book learnin’ was Lloyd.
I think, but I don’t know for sure, that the title is a reference to the play by John Marston about a sort of Jacobean Mark E Smith (if you don’t believe me, there’s a stage direction about “the vilest out-of-tune music being heard”)
I just listened to Anthony Hopkins reading The Love Song of J Arthur Prufock.
It is a poem I know very well and like a lot but I haven’t listened to in a while. I think Anthony reads it a tiny bit too fast, but he reconfirmed my opinion that is is one of the finest poems in the English language.
Image after spectacular image, building up the portrait of an insecure, disappointed, indecisive, middle-aged man, hopelessly out of his depth among the beautiful, well-read women in the literary salon.
Just listen to the music of it all. Eliot has a great knack for memorable lines.
Enjoy!
Thanks for posting, KFD – I agree it is rather fast. I would have enjoyed more lingering over the phrases, more pauses. But he does have a beautiful voice
“an insecure, disappointed, indecisive, middle-aged man, hopelessly out of his depth” – oh dear, I fear you are holding up a mirror.
Suzanne Vega revisits Carson McCullers …
All art is quite useless.
That’s you lot told.
Get madam!
Was referencing the A House song not Oscar Bleedin’ Wilde obvs, he says retaining his street cred by referring to a no 46 smasheroonie in 1991.
A work of art is useless as a flower is useless. A flower blossoms for its own joy. We gain a moment of joy by looking at it.
Flowers are useless? Tell that tut bees. They’ll look at you askance.
Askance!
Consider the lilies.
At this time, a friend shall lose his friend’s hammer…. hammer time, if you will.
Are they pink?
(Goddam it. Every time I struggle to think of something to say, Moose gets in there first). I’m wasted.
Just some wilde quotes we’re throwing out there. Wait till April – then I’ll get cruel on those lilacs in the dead land.
Time for this I think.
Toilets
by T.S. Eliot
Let us go then, to the john,
Where the toilet seat waits to be sat upon
Like a lover’s lap perched upon ceramic;
Let us go, through doors that do not always lock,
Which means you ought to knock
Lest opening one reveal a soul within
Who’ll shout, “Stay out! Did you not see my shin,
Framed within the gap twixt floor and stall?”
No, I did not see that at all.
That is not what I saw, at all.
To the stall the people come to go,
Reading an obscene graffito.
We have lingered in the chamber labelled “Men”
Till attendants proffer aftershave and mints
As we lather up our hands with soap, and rinse.
More anagrammatical fun at http://www.modernhumorist.com/mh/by/anagram/
I make no apology:
The Waste Land: Five Limericks
I
In April one seldom feels cheerful;
Dry stones, sun and dust make me fearful;
Clairvoyantes distress me,
Commuters depress me–
Met Stetson and gave him an earful.
II
She sat on a mighty fine chair,
Sparks flew as she tidied her hair;
She asks many questions,
I make few suggestions–
Bad as Albert and Lil–what a pair!
III
The Thames runs, bones rattle, rats creep;
Tiresias fancies a peep–
A typist is laid,
A record is played–
Wei la la. After this it gets deep.
IV
A Phoenician named Phlebas forgot
About birds and his business–the lot,
Which is no surprise,
Since he’d met his demise
And been left in the ocean to rot.
V
No water. Dry rocks and dry throats,
Then thunder, a shower of quotes
From the Sanskrit and Dante.
Da. Damyata. Shantih.
I hope you’ll make sense of the notes.
— Wendy Cope
Brilliant!
That’s excellent.
I used to know a rep who had been with Faber so long that he remembered when TS Eliot was still working there, and had a sign on his door reading ‘Thomas Stearns’. I mentioned this on Twitter, and suggested that the sign used to read ‘TS ELIOT’ until the unfortunate incident with the dyslexic. The editor of Eliot’s letters then told me that the signed had belonged to Eliot grandfather (or was it uncle?) for whom he was named, and that Eliot took delight in wordplay and was more than aware of the punning potential of his name.
Talking of the punning potential of his name, an interesting article from a few years ago on the possible origin of the name “Stetson”, as used in The Waste Land (anagram of Stearns Eliot = Ariel Stetson):
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/08/ts-eliot-waste-land-stetson-anagram-riddle
anagrams of Thomas Stearns Eliot:
anaesthetist looms
latent homeostasis
loathsome nastiest
monotheist atlases
toastiest manholes
toothiest salesman
Anagrams of Salwarpe:
ale wraps
laser paw
laws rape
real wasp
sale warp
seal wrap
swear pal
was paler
That’s me told, er, Rag-y.
Toastiest Manholes… reminds me of when I took a wrong turning out in Singapore…
“anaesthetist looms”? Well, that would explain the “patient etherized upon a table”, anyway.
A perfect Dr Who episode?
It is 1816. Having completed his poem, Xanadu, Coleridge is whisked off to 1980 to meet that voluptuous Aussie superstar, Olivia Newton John.
And that’s just the start…
“Back in the Tardis, Sam! We’re off to see a metal concert!”
The loot of the world!
Sorry, wrong Xanadu…
I suspected William Blake had been set to music!
Allen Ginsberg did a whole album back in 1970.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songs_of_Innocence_and_Experience_(Allen_Ginsberg_album)
I knew I would find some Emily Dickenson!
Australian singer-songwriter, Paul Kelly, has done a whole album of poems set to music, Thirteen ways to look at birds.
Here is his version of Emily’s Hope is the thing with feathers.
Exquisite!
In your searches for poems set to music, @Kaisfatdad, have you come any tracks where poetry is woven into the artist’s own songs? These ‘cover versions’ are, I’m sure, very appealing, but I was hoping to discover new examples of musicians taking poetry quotations and stitching into the fabric of their own material.
You mean like Idlewild using Edwin Morgan (more than once)
Yes, that’s a good example of the sort of thing I had in mind – thanks. Do you know if Morgan wrote specifically for that song, or whether it was an already existing poem?
I’m pretty sure Morgan wrote it for the song.
Or, thinking Idlewild, the Roddy Woomble curated collection/connection between scottish bands/singers and scottish poets (from which the above track came), “Ballad of the Book”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballads_of_the_Book
And then there’s fellow scot Mike Scott and his love of W.B. Yeats:
https://youtu.be/vOzbqY1ABwQ
Ahem…^^^
Well, I sorta guessed, but it was so far up the page, and I couldn’t face all that erudite stuff about the Rum Tug Tugger hitmaker again, for fear of tugging my own in sheer hot sauce desperation.
Hands where we can see ’em, feller!
Well, I never, @retropath2. What an ambitious project and what a remarkable gathering of talents that was!
Polwart, Rankin, Yorkston, Middleton, Vashti Bunyan, Trashcan Sinatras, King Creosote, Mike Heron, Aidan Moffat…. It’s like an A list of modern Scottish talent.
I am very glad you mentioned it. But you under-sold it!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMEhze6s49Q
In the days to come I will be giving it a serious listen!
Ok! I am on the case!
You are the Sherlock Homes/bloodhound of the Afterword!
I must be the Sherlock Hemlock.
Do you feel a hand thrust up your posterior and working your gums?
(Just to take things back to the thread title)
Not while I’m on duty, but it’s very civil of you to enquire.
Would someone like Linton Kwesi Johnson count?
Sonny’s Lettah
Someone like Linton Kwesi Johnson always counts.
Linton certainly counts!!
Here’s Lana quoting Walt Whitman and or Ray Bradbury:
I sing the body electric.
Early Sisters know a song about that – though less sultry and more psychotic.
LKJ’s young acolyte, who sadly never became much older:
Not the brief quote you asked me for, but Iggy pop doing Dylan Thomas deserves a mention.
In connection to that is this rather enjoyable interview with the Wild Man of Rock.
His dad was an English teacher who did not approve of his son’s musical ambitions but …….
Give a listen.
Here’s Welshman John Cale with his oddly upbeat version of the same poem.
Cale inspired by Dylan Thomas? This is the song. It also fits Sal’s brief better as it’s not a direct quote.
That led me to this excellent overview of Cale’s life and career. He spoke only Welsh until he was seven. A bit of a hassle for his dad who didn’t speak it at all.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/john-cales-inventive-retrospection
Some interesting selections there, KFD. Both Pop and Cale bring something of their own art to the poetry of Dylan by the musical setting they bed the words in. As your New Yorker article says about Cale, “He is the person you want in the room when you are afraid that what you are doing is benign”.
I’ve written on this site before about what Cale did with Nick Drake’s ‘Fly’ (he unzipped it). Realizing he played one note continuously on “I Wanna Be Your Dog’ warms my heart to the cold Welshman even more.
As you give me musicians taking Dylan Thomas into their canon, I give you Dylan Thomas taking a pot shot at Eliot with someone else’s parodic cannon, (which starts with a bang, but sadly whimpers out. Still worth it for the opening stanza, I think).
You end with an article. Let me do that as well, with a different Dylan rubbing up against Eliot.
It’s a slight article, but it does link to some interesting clips and other texts, so in that regard, it is somewhat Eliotian (Eliotesque? Elioty?) I do like the final line:
“what seems to set both Dylan and Eliot apart from their peers is their compete disregard for notions of authenticity in favor of the play of “different voices”—impersonation, quotation, and homage to the artists they admire”
Thanks for such a rich, interesting answer, @Salwarpe.
Eliot, Dylan, Cale and Thomas: there is a lot to talk about!
Chard Willow read by Thomas was brilliant. He gets Eliot’s intonation perfectly.
I’d never heard of it but it was written by a poet called Henry Reed who sounds like a fascinating character all round.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Reed_(poet)
He spent most of WW2 working as a Japanese translator for the Army. He hated it!
I’d like to dig deeper there and find out more about him.. Incidentally, Eliot found Chard Willow very amusing.
Now for our Welsh poet. I am an enormous fan of Dylan Thomas. What a wordsmith!
Here’s Richard Burton reading from the start of DT’s radio paly Under Milk Wood.
A great contemporary actor reading a great contemporary poet. Just listen to the music of the verse, Afterworders, and enjoy!
If you want to know more, give this a try.
That article on Eliot and Dylan is excellent. Lots to chew on there!
Propaganda kick off A Secret Wish with Edgar Allen Poe: “All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream”.
Nick Mulvey’s Cucurucu is basically DH Lawrence’s Piano with a few extra twiddles.
Of course, the elephant in the room is that Eliot won a Tony Award for the best lyrics for the work he put in with Lord Webber in writing Cats. Trevor Nunn managed to transform
Twelve o’clock.
Along the reaches of the street
Held in a lunar synthesis,
Whispering lunar incantations
Dissolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations,
Its divisions and precisions,
Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.
into
Midnight, not a sound from the pavement
Has the moon lost her memory?
She is smiling alone
In the lamplight, the withered leaves collect at my feet
And the wind begins to moan
……..
Every street lamp seems to beat
A fatalistic warning
Someone mutters and the street lamp sputters
And soon it will be morning
That is hilarious @davidg.
Not much of TS left there!
Our Trev could probably transform Prufrock into a snappy 2 minute pop hit.
The other Tony contestants must have felt very hard done by.
That is rather like taking , for example, Hamlet and transforming it into a jolly kids cartoon show.
Scooby or not scooby? That is the question!
Has anyone mentioned the new Cerys Matthews LP? I haven’t heard or listened, as I can’t stand her voice, but I guess it fits the bill.
https://www.folkradio.co.uk/2021/01/cerys-matthews-we-come-from-the-sun/
Thanks for mentioning that, Retro.
It all sounds rather promising. Lots of talented people involved.
The first track by MA.MOYO certainly grabbed my attention.
Retro – here’s something I haven’t listened to and I haven’t heard, or even had the sound waves near my eardrum, by someone whose voice I hate.
KFD – here are two tracks for you
I know my audience and he knows mine.
Retro, to his great credit, has introduced us on this thread to two albums which involved a dynamic collaboration between musicians and poets.
Cerys’s We come from the Sun.
And then, a few days ago, Roddy Woomble’s project with Scottish indie label Chemikal Underground, The Ballads of the Book.
Bringing people into the same room who would not normally work together and opening all kinds of doors.
Ian Rankin was paired with Aiden Moffat and was apprehensive about working with an artist who produced such good lyrics already.
Off at a tangent, two other poetic combinations.
The Poet Laureate! Betjeman’s Banana Blush
And by complete contrast!
John Cooper Clarke and Factory’s “houseband” the Invisible Girls. The two albums they did together are superb.
Vini Reiliy on fine form.
He also appeared several times on the OGWT.
Aaaaaarh ! What happened? Am I on drugs?
Suddenly JCC is singing Macarthur Park
Benjamin Zephaniah “Money”
Recording level was a bit low. You might need to turn it up a bit.
.
Probably need to turn it back down for this one
Bit of bush poetry for youse, thanks to Henry Lawson
Thanks Sniffity. Really enjoyed that.
A national hero. The first Australian writer to be granted a state funeral. The stuff we learn on the AW!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Lawson
I just remembered a recent Swedish TV show called Helt Lyriskt (Completely poetic).
https://www.svt.se/kultur/han-vill-overbrygga-klyftan-mellan-sangtexter-och-poesi
Every week, a modern Swedish singer was given the task of setting a classic Swedish poem to music. The programme followed them during the process culminating in a live performance of the song. Lively, entertaining and very informative: top notch TV.
Here is Petra Marklund who you may know from Hello Saferide or Säkert,
And now Lisa Nilsson sings of suburban matrimony: When I was married to Herman. Lyrics by the very popular poet Kristina Lugn.
Poetry and rock music used to be the very best of pals.
The very first big gathering of what would become the Underground Scene was a poetry reading by Ginsberg at the RAH.
The Fugs on Ready Steady Go were a revelation.
And back in the early days of the Venerable Peel, poetry was an integral part of the programme. The Liverpool Scene were frequent guests.
Try their album.
Liverpool was a city of poets
A discovery! Neil Innes and Linda Thompson perform a song with lyrics by Brian Patten!
The Exorcism of the White House by The Fugs in 2017.
On the 50th anniversary of their exorcism of the Pentagon in 1967.
What a find , Mike! The Fugs channeling the Edgar Broughton Band in 2017.
I was moved and impressed.
Anyone for a bit of William Blake?
Music by Mike Westbrook, sung by Phil Minton, with Kate Westbrook and the London College of Music Chamber Choir.
Double album of jazzy Blake songs. That does sound interesting.
https://www.westbrookjazz.co.uk/mikewestbrook/blake/index.shtml
Adrian Mitchell arranged the majority of the poems with Mike Westbrook.
I went to a great live performance of it, at King’s Place IIRC, a few years back. It was a great, riveting and uplifting performance.
There is a live DVD + CD package of it also available, recorded and filmed in 2008 at Toynbee Hall, with slight differences between the CD and DVD versions of a couple of the songs. One that was cut short in the DVD is heard in full on the CD and another on the CD was recorded the following night and is a longer version.
I can see someone looking through their Doors LPs…..
Macavity: The Mystery Cat (almost) fits perfectly with Cool for Cats.
O, ye of short memory, forgetting John Betjeman’s words allied to the music of Mike Read (not that one, him off TOTP) featuring Leo Sayer, Marc Almond, Colin Blunstone. And, marking his invention of poetry, DONOVAN: