The Hollow Men is from 1925. Try to read it like a beatnik poet, world-weary and confident, with finger snaps and bongo drums or a jazz orchestra in the background. Eliot was a fascinating fellow traveler person. My favorite site for his poems is here: https://mypoeticside.com/poets/t-s-eliot-poems
keiferski 115 days ago [-]
I recommend the same thing for the actual beatniks themselves like Kerouac. You have to read it like spoken poetry, not merely written. This song uses lines from one of his stories and when set to music it fits perfectly.
I find conjuring my inner Maynard G. Krebs helps a lot.
xhkkffbf 115 days ago [-]
Yes, a funny character and a spot-on parody of the genre, but I found it really insightful to watch some interviews with Jack Kerouac to get a feel for his personality. It's a bit different from our rosy-eyed view of that era. He was harder and harsher than we want to imagine.
lemonberry 115 days ago [-]
Absolutely. I still enjoy his books.
danans 115 days ago [-]
Though their genres and styles were completely different, the timing of his work, its reflections on the trauma of WW1, and then his conversion to conservative Catholicism reminds me more of Tolkien.
dhosek 115 days ago [-]
He wasn’t actually Catholic-Catholic, but Anglo-Catholic, a faction within the Anglican church which revived a lot of Catholic liturgical practices without entering into communion with Rome.
halJordan 115 days ago [-]
There are recordings of TS Eliot reading this poem. So while we should imagine your desired reading for its own worth, a "beatnik" reading shouldn't be implied as the original reading
bryanrasmussen 115 days ago [-]
The beatniks were most active in the 50s, maybe as early as the mid 40s, but definitely not 1925.
multjoy 115 days ago [-]
He was also a virulent anti-semite
alkyon 115 days ago [-]
Like Wagner and lots of other artists around that time. Agatha Christie's most famous novel? - Ten Little Niggers. Jean Genet was a convicted criminal. I try to separate the work from the artist, even if it's difficult.
multjoy 115 days ago [-]
OP doesn’t even acknowledge it.
Eliot chose, in 1948, when the Holocaust was common knowledge, to reprint a poem that contains the line:
>On the Rialto once./The rats are underneath the piles. The jew is underneath the lot.
That isn’t a poet following a common zeitgeist, that is a deliberate, provocative act.
tptacek 115 days ago [-]
I think it's a valid and important observation, but it's not incumbent on someone bring up T.S. Eliot to offer a disclaimer about it, and you shouldn't write a comment that implies otherwise.
multjoy 110 days ago [-]
Why? Who are you to say what I can, and cannot, write?
tptacek 110 days ago [-]
I mean, you do you, but it's not a reasonable complaint.
danans 115 days ago [-]
Which was sadly not uncommon in those days. The Nazi party had a significant following in both the US and the UK at that time.
multjoy 115 days ago [-]
That doesn’t make it any better. They also had significant opposition.
danans 115 days ago [-]
Indeed, they had opposition. However, the way we have been taught history has been laundered to make us think that Nazi ideology never had a significant base of support outside of Germany, when the truth was that it was not only significant, but segregated American society under Jim Crow was in several ways a model for the Nazis.
aspenmayer 115 days ago [-]
US treatment of migrant workers under the Bracero program and US usage of Zyklon B on migrant workers as a delousing agent directly inspired Nazis. This came to a head at the so-called bath riots in 1917:
I was going to respond saying how much I dislike the way the narrator reads the poem - like a vicar 45 minutes into an overlong Sunday sermon, as bored as the congregation - then I saw the OP article included a link to Eliot reading his own poem. And that one sounds like the vicar now entering the third hour of his overlong Sunday sermon. So I have to agree: your favourite reading is the better reading of the poem.
zabzonk 115 days ago [-]
For those interested in Eliot, the BBC has a lot of stuff (criticism, recordings, etc.) in various places. Just search for "bbc ts eliot".
every 115 days ago [-]
This is the poem I used for speech contests in high school...
Rendered at 20:15:28 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
https://www.gilderlehrman.org/sites/default/files/inline-pdf...
https://youtu.be/CMMBP19ma60?si=lB6gzWBtaZp2f_Oy
Eliot chose, in 1948, when the Holocaust was common knowledge, to reprint a poem that contains the line:
>On the Rialto once./The rats are underneath the piles. The jew is underneath the lot.
That isn’t a poet following a common zeitgeist, that is a deliberate, provocative act.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1917_Bath_riots
This has come up a couple times before on HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38552760
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40381708
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40382627
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40646876