TS Eliot audiobook

Someone gave me this set of cassette tapes soon after I first read Four Quartets, about a year ago. They feature Eliot reading his own poetry. I listened to Four Quartets straight away, and was unsurprised to find that I understand them no better in aural than in written form, although the rhythm does come across better because of course Eliot knows best where the rests are supposed to be.

After Four Quartets I put the tapes away and didn't get them out again until last week. Admittedly this resurrection of interest was mainly due to a severe attack of insomnia. But no, in case you're wondering, poetry does not put me to sleep.

So I listened to the first half of The Wasteland before getting hopelessly confused and looking for a print version instead, and then I listened to the one remaining side, which is a collection of shorter poems. Most of them were easier to understand, because the whole could be held more easily in the memory; the main problem with listening to long poems, rather than reading them, is that the reader almost invariably goes too fast for your personal comfort. You can't reconsider lines in an audiobook. Nor can you appreciate the layout on the page, or pause, or take time to reflect on a particular rhyme or image. Audiobooks, in short, are not well suited to poetry.

But the poems that I already knew committed fairly well to the aural form. Morning at the Window has never been remarkable and still isn't, but La Figlia Che Pianga was pleasing to the ear. Among those with which I was unfamiliar, I truly enjoyed Macavity, and having spent a large part of my working and intellectual life thus far in close contact with the public sector, I sympathised with parts of Difficulties of a Statesman. However, The Hollow Men disappointed me. Perhaps the terrible sound quality didn't do it justice - but Eliot's characteristic monotone didn't help either.

I've since found a print version of that, too. It seems like there's some Eliot I simply adore, and some that I will never feel comfortable with, even if I do someday grow to understand it. The Hollow Men is of the second type. Like The Wasteland, it reminds me of nothing so much as a nightmare surrealist painting with images of horror and misery scattered ad hoc around the canvas - especially with stanzas like this one sprinkled throughout:
"For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the"

Poetry is much like wine or music. You can always learn more about them, but when it comes down to it, you either like what you taste/hear/read or you don't, and no one can tell you otherwise. I like Prufrock and Portrait of a Lady and most of Eliot's shorter poems, and I don't like his longer ones. Nor do I like audiobooks. Being read to is lovely, but if poetry was meant to be read aloud it would be written quite differently. Postmodern free verse cannot compete with classic ballads like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner for readability, and should be left on the page where it belongs.

Hey... only two more Fridays :D :D :D