T.S. Eliot Reading Poems and Choruses
The serious-minded Modernism of T.S. Eliot, and the poet’s drily ironic delivery of his own lines on records like this one, are often lazily condemned (in some circles, at least) as the antithesis of the spoken word scene’s more democratic energies. But any reader or listener who can’t see this 1955 reading of his early masterpiece The Love Song Of J Alfred Prufrock bringing down the house in a live setting with the same riotous force as the poem manages on paper is allowing Eliot’s forbidding reputation to get between the actual words and a more instinctive response to their effect.
The truth is that however dry Eliot’s reading seems, there’s real humour in the play between his high-serious tones and the absurdist doggerel of such iconic couplets as “I grow old, I grow old/I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled” and “In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michaelangelo”.
This LP – released as part of the Caedmon Literary Series in 1955 – opens our selection of recordings made between the 1950s and 1970s, all precursors of today’s spoken word scene, and many by poets more closely associated with the page than the stage. It’s partly a draft version of a feature we’re compiling on the Prehistory of Spoken Word for Staple 72: The Music Issue, but also, I hope, an attempt to bridge the gap perceived to exist between the realms of written and performed poetry in the UK. We very deliberately open proceedings with this recording of a man who is in many ways held up as the totemic ‘difficult page poet’ by both his supporters and detractors in the belief that Prufrock – first published in 1917 – unsettles that view at a very fundamental level.
It’s not just my view that Eliot bridges the divide between page and stage approaches, either: the poet’s love of music hall is well known (he even wrote an essay on Marie Lloyd) but perhaps more revealing is that during an interview I did with Linton Kwesi Johnson for The Big Issue in the North in March 2001, the renowned dub-poet mentioned in passing that he had himself recorded a reggae version of Eliot’s poem, to make exactly this point. At the time of writing, Linton Kwesi Johnson’s Prufrock remains unreleased, but it would be wonderful, and no doubt transformative, if Eliot’s estate were to one day relent and allow Johnson’s so far unheard dub take on Prufrock to take its place beside Eliot’s own reading.
Perhaps this Youtube mash-up of Eliot and Portishead makes the point well enough, and for other performative takes on Eliot’s lines, these two film-collage and animated responses to Eliot’s text also seem worth a look.
