On T.S. Eliot | Halcyon

T.S. Eliot's legacy remains profound and his poetry moves me deeply.

In 2016 I had the privilege of visiting his final resting place, East Coker.

I read or listen to the peerless Little Gidding often, and almost every line entrances, as if peering through a veil at something once known, but half-forgotten because not looked-for.

Recently, The Waste Land and Modernity tried to figure out whether someone who captured modern life so well could really dislike it so much. When he stared out at a world of radio and cinema, of radical art and universal suffrage, did Eliot really see only a barren, featureless plain? (See, for example: The Waste Land describes a sickness, without a prescription.) Perhaps listening to Eliot himself read The Waste Land can give us clues?

2022 marked the centenary The Waste Land, published on 15 October 1922. For decades, Eliot actively discouraged biographical interpretations of his work, developing an ‘impersonal theory’ of poetry in which the private life of a poet was deemed irrelevant. Instead, scholars were guided by Eliot's own seven pages of footnotes to the poem, but, in 2020, there were dramatic new revelations that demonstrated how, behind the mask, there was a much more personal story to be found within the poem.