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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 backgro
by hyperhello 1y ago
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 https://mypoeticside.com/poets/t-s-eliot-poems
- lemonberry 1y agoI find conjuring my inner Maynard G. Krebs helps a lot.
- xhkkffbf 1y agoYes, 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 1y agoAbsolutely. I still enjoy his books.
- keiferski 1y agoI 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. https://www.gilderlehrman.org/sites/default/files/inline-pdfs/San%20Francisco%20Scene%20Excerpt%20and%20Questions.pdf https://www.gilderlehrman.org/sites/default/files/inline-pdf... https://youtu.be/CMMBP19ma60?si=lB6gzWBtaZp2f_Oy https://youtu.be/CMMBP19ma60?si=lB6gzWBtaZp2f_Oy
- multjoy 1y agoHe was also a virulent anti-semite
- alkyon 1y agoLike 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 1y agoOP 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 1y agoI 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.
- Slava_Propanei 1y ago[dead]
- danans 1y agoWhich was sadly not uncommon in those days. The Nazi party had a significant following in both the US and the UK at that time.
- bryanrasmussen 1y agoThe beatniks were most active in the 50s, maybe as early as the mid 40s, but definitely not 1925.
- danans 1y agoThough 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 1y agoHe 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 1y agoThere 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