benbreenThe First Eighteen Lines of the Waste Land (1989)
Anyone who liked this article and like (or are curious about) the poem should check out the great Fiona Shaw's reading of it [1].
You can find recordings by many fine actor such as John Gielgud, Alec Guinness, and many others, and they tend to be dull, monotonous affairs. Shaw is very different. She's is an incredible actress, and since the 1990s she's been perfecting the poem as a kind of one-woman show where she reads it as the voices of many characters, which is what the poem (as I understand it) is.
Have you ever listened to Eliot reading it? Just the worst. "Apreel is the crewellest month..."
My thing here though is: this is awesome, Shaw's reading, but is it right? I feel like she's trying to make a coherent character reading at times out of passages deliberately written not to have a clear narrator.
(I write this in the spirit of every thread needing a certain titration of not knowing what the hell they're talking about, as an invitation to those who do, and that inviting cluelessness is the purpose I serve here.)
I've been fascinated with The Waste Land ever since junior year of high school, when my creative writing teacher saw a copy of it on my desk and said "why do you have that, you'll never understand it". (I mean, fair enough.)
This is interesting backstory! My perception of the poem is that it's sort of a fractal of backstory and that everywhere you look you find 2000-word articles on its historical antecedents, from Eliot's life, from the history of Europe, from friends of his lost in the war, &c.
There's a whole book on this that's very similar to the article:
https://www.amazon.com/Waste-Land-Biography-Poem/dp/03932402...
If you're bored, you can also kick back and bounce sections of it off Claude or GPT5 (or both and have them argue with each other).
I wonder how directly you can connect Ludwig to the Fisher King.
> I've been fascinated with The Waste Land ever since junior year of high school, when my creative writing teacher saw a copy of it on my desk and said "why do you have that, you'll never understand it”.
Was Teach’ really that crude or do you figure they were just trying to light a fire up under ye.