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Language "caught alive" is an intoxicating experience in all poetry - the sound is "the gold in the ore", said Robert Frost - and most particularly so with the poems of TS Eliot.
When, as an undergraduate at Queens University Belfast, Seamus Heaney listened to Eliot's mature masterpiece, Four Quartets, spoken by the actor Robert Speight, he recalls that "what was hypnotic read aloud had been perplexing sight-read for meaning only".
And when Eliot himself first read his own earlier masterpiece, The Waste Land, to Virginia and Leonard Woolf, he spoke and indeed beat out its rhythms. Cyril Connolly told of the almost "drugged and haunted" condition the poem induced in undergraduates when published in 1922 as they gathered together to read it aloud.
Likewise in April this year, at the invitation of Harvard University's president, we read The Waste Land to students: many standing four-deep for the entire performance, they cheered. Something similar happened at The Donmar Warehouse in January, though the English were naturally a little more restrained.
Tonight as I sit on stage preparing to read, I know that even after all these years I, too, will be transported.
Our reading is one of a series which for the past five years we have held at the British Library. Actors read Eliot's poems - with incredible generosity, for no fee or expenses - and two books accompanied by CDs of past readings, Catching Life By the Throat and Words That Burn (Virago), are now accessible to schools.
The other voices which will "sound out" The Waste Land in celebration of the first TS Eliot Summer School are Seamus Heaney, Jeremy Irons and Dominic West, the classically trained star of Barack Obama's favourite TV show, The Wire.
They will tell of strange visions interposed with fragments of memory, sometimes in different languages, incorporating lines from sanskrit, the Bible and Jacobean tragedy. Sometimes it uses jazz rhythms - indeed, Ralph Ellison said The Waste Land was closer to jazz than the work of black poets - before changing to the formality of Elizabethan prose. This is the poem that marked the arrival of the man Ted Hughes believed was the greatest poet for 300 years, tracing the line back to Milton and from MiIton to Virgil.
Yet this great poet was not greeted with open arms - or ears - in his day.
The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, which Jeremy Irons will read tonight, written when Eliot was only 22, was turned down by many as "completely insane".
It took four years of unsparing effort by Eliot's friend Ezra Pound before it was published - even then reluctantly.
Perhaps this is because Eliot's is an "art of the nerves" and thus it disturbs.
According to the committee that awarded him the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948, it cuts into our "consciousness with the sharpness of a diamond".
Beware - your life really can be changed once you accept Prufrock's invitation, "Let us go then you and I" and enter the poem's strange "zone".
Meanwhile, Dominic West will read The Portrait of a Lady and leave us wondering whether, were the lady to die one afternoon, would he "have the right to smile"? It is chilling and witty.
The Waste Land is one of life and literature's great experiences; spoken, it is perhaps a form of poetic ecstasy.
Josephine Hart and others will be reading TS Eliot tonight at the Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre, School of Oriental and African Studies, Russell Square, WC1. She is chair of the Forward Poetry Prize.
Reader views (2)
Just want to note that Robert Speight has also recorded The Waste Land, Ash Wednesday, and Prufrock--very good readings but not quite on the level of his reading of the Four Quartets. (Speight also does a great job with Wordsworth).There is also a wonderful recording of Murder in the Cathedral with Robert Donat as Beckett. I have the vinyl version but it is being released on CD at the end of July 2009.
- Bill Lamsback, Philadelphia, PA, USA, 10/07/2009 14:18
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What a welcome relief it is to the waste land in which we live.
- John Problem, Hackney UK, 30/06/2009 16:11
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