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System shock midwife fan art8/23/2023 (Notice how the poem is named in both titles, as the unarguable hinge on which Eliot’s existence turned.) From Lyndall Gordon, who has already written copiously on Eliot’s life, comes “ The Hyacinth Girl: T. Louis to ‘The Waste Land,’ ” came out in 2016. Newly available is “ Eliot After ‘The Waste Land,’ ” the second volume of a capacious biography by Robert Crawford the first part, “ Young Eliot: From St. Publishers, too, are paying heed to the centenary. All in all, it will be a relief to show up at the 92nd Street Y, on December 5th, when Ralph Fiennes will read the poem, the whole poem, and, with any luck, nothing but the poem. I liked the range of the wilding, but, at the risk of being a heathen, I do wonder how far you can stray from “The Waste Land” without losing the thread. The word “fragments,” to any Eliot fan, leads instantly to the climax of “The Waste Land,” as it proceeds through cacophony to a haggard hush: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” (Eliot originally wrote, “These fragments I have spelt into my ruins,” but the final version is stronger for its hint of desperate and unavailing bodily effort.) In another of this year’s tributes, “Re-Wilding the Waste Land,” shards of the poem were mingled with musical offerings from a choral ensemble, I Fagiolini, including two settings of “Deus Venerunt Gentes”-“O God, the heathen are come,” from Psalm 79. Though it covers vast geographical tracts, from Munich to the Himalayas, it is considered, with justice, to be one of the great poems about London, and, in April, various readings, concerts, and conversations, bundled together under the title “Fragments,” took place in churches across what Eliot calls the “unreal city.” Against the blackened wall of All Hallows by the Tower, there was a performance of Olivier Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time.” Elsewhere, as a nod to the presence of the single word “Alexandria” in “The Waste Land,” the Palestinian DJ Sotusura played “old Arabic funk.” Would that Eliot had been alive to lend an ear. “Do you think that poetry is a necessity to modern man?” Eliot: “No.” “What in modern life is the particular function of poetry as distinguished from other kinds of literature?” Eliot: “Takes up less space.”Ĭumberbatch’s contribution was one of a host of events that are being held in 2022, to mark the centenary and, one hopes, to probe the tenacity with which “The Waste Land,” far from wilting, has taken root and spread. Eliot’s sense of humor, whether savage, lugubrious, or droll, never lay far below the surface, and, as we honor the centenary of his most celebrated work, it’s worth bearing in mind his responses to a questionnaire that was sent out to a batch of poets, in July, 1922. Cumberbatch, keyed up by the piano and the other instruments arrayed behind him, took the lines at quite a tilt, slipping between accents like a quick-change artist donning pants and hats, and thus reminded us how funny this bitter poem can be. The occasion was a rare one, because the recitation was entwined with music: a score composed in the nineteen-seventies by the novelist Anthony Burgess, no less, to accompany the poem. Eliot’s “ The Waste Land,” which will shortly celebrate its hundredth birthday. “White bodies naked on the low damp ground / And bones cast in a little low dry garret.” And this: “Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit.” And again: “In this decayed hole among the mountains / In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing / Over the tumbled graves.” What had we done, in the sun-warmed paradise of Charleston, to deserve all these mountains, bones, and teeth? So much death, on a day that promised such life!Ĭumberbatch was, needless to say, reading T. April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.
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