Wednesday, January 17, 2007

T.S. Eliot - The Waste Land

I've found some audio files of T.S. Eliot reading his classic poem "The Waste Land."



Born in St. Louis, Missouri, and educated at Harvard, Eliot lived most of his life in England. In 1948 he was awarded the Nobel Prize. The poem has five sections and has been split into four sound files:

The Waste Land is considered to be Eliot's masterpiece, rich in symbolic, literary, and historical references as the poem explores the struggles of a soul in despair.


Funny, this isn't how it sounds when I read it to myself...


For additional information and references, see Wikipedia::The Waste Land
N.B. These audio files were originally hosted at media.org. The site contains a large collection of media from the early days of the Internet rescued from digital oblivion. The HarperAudio section contains several dozen audio files of poems and excerpts from novels being read by their authors. Faulkner, Burgess, Hemingway, Thomas are just a few.
Even Shakespeare reading some of his sonnets!