Listen to Charles Bukowski Poems Being Read by Bukowski Himself & the Great Tom Waits

in Poetry | August 13th, 2013

The out­spo­ken, ragged-edged poet and nov­el­ist Charles Bukows­ki entered our world 93 years ago this Fri­day, and pre­sum­ably began mak­ing trou­ble imme­di­ate­ly. Harper­Collins marks the occa­sion a bit ear­ly this year by releas­ing today eight Bukows­ki audio­books, the first of their kind. (Sign up for a Free Tri­al with Audible.com and you can get one for free.) Alas, Bukows­ki did­n’t live quite long enough to com­mit Post Office, South of No North, Fac­to­tum, Women, Ham on Rye, Hot Water Music, Hol­ly­wood, and Pulp to tape him­self. ”

It would be Bukows­ki him­self read­ing here, if the tech­nol­o­gy had advanced quick­ly enough,” Gal­l­ey­cat quotes pub­lish­er Daniel Halpern as say­ing, “but his voice rings clear and deep in these ren­di­tions – and from them, the genius of Bukows­ki flows forth.” Whether or not you plan to pur­chase these new audio­books, we offer you here a dose of Bukows­ki out loud.

At the top you’ll find one of Bukowski’s own read­ings, “The Secret of My Endurance,” a poem that appeared in Dan­gling In The Tourne­for­tia (1982). Down below you can hear Bukowski’s “Nir­vana” as read by Tom Waits, who pos­sess­es a voice famous­ly evoca­tive of unfor­giv­ing Amer­i­can life, one that per­haps sounds more like that of a Bukows­ki poem than Bukowski’s own. And if you missed our ear­li­er post fea­tur­ing Waits’ inter­pre­ta­tion of “The Laugh­ing Heart (mid­dle),” what more suit­able occa­sion could you have to cir­cle back and heed its bat­tered yet opti­mistic guid­ance: “Your life is your life. Don’t let it be clubbed into dank sub­mis­sion.”

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Charles Bukows­ki Sets His Amus­ing Con­di­tions for Giv­ing a Poet­ry Read­ing (1971)

“Don’t Try”: Charles Bukowski’s Con­cise Phi­los­o­phy of Art and Life

Charles Bukows­ki: Depres­sion and Three Days in Bed Can Restore Your Cre­ative Juices (NSFW)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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See Patti Smith Give Two Dramatic Readings of Allen Ginsberg’s “Footnote to Howl”

in Poetry | August 9th, 2013

We’ve brought you some choice tid­bits recent­ly from beat poet grand­dad­dy Allen Gins­berg, includ­ing his first record­ed read­ing of “Howl” and a glimpse of his anno­tat­ed col­lec­tion of pho­tographs. And we’ve also served up a few deli­cious treats from god­moth­er of punk poet­ry Pat­ti Smith, like her recount­ing of William S. Bur­roughs’ advice to writ­ers and a read­ing of Fed­eri­co Gar­cia Lor­ca.

Today, we bring the two togeth­er, in two ver­sions of Smith read­ing Ginsberg’s “Foot­note to Howl,” the orgias­tic coda to his 1955 epic. This makes so much sense I won­der why we haven’t fea­tured it before, and yet, here we are. In the first ren­di­tion, above, from 2012, Smith is backed by Philip Glass, her own Incred­i­ble Band, and some saf­fron-clad Tibetan monks. The ensem­ble con­vened in hon­or of a vis­it by the Dalai Lama.

There are doubt­less dozens of sto­ries to tell about Gins­berg and Smith. My favorite is their first chance meet­ing in 1969:

It’s Novem­ber 1969 and Ms. Smith is try­ing to buy a cheese sand­wich at the Horn & Hardart Automat on West 23rd Street in Man­hat­tan. When she finds her­self a dime short, Gins­berg approach­es her and asks if he can help. He offers her the extra 10 cents and also treats her to a cup of cof­fee. The two are talk­ing about Walt Whit­man when Gins­berg sud­den­ly leans for­ward and asks if she’s a girl.

“Is that a prob­lem?” she asks.

He laughs and says: “I’m sor­ry. I took you for a very pret­ty boy.”

“Well, does this mean I return the sand­wich?”

“No, enjoy it. It was my mis­take.”

Holy that sand­wich! Watch Smith above in Flo­rence, Italy forty years lat­er, chant­i­ng a cap­pel­la from “Foot­note to Howl” while the audi­ence claps, and howls, along. It’s decid­ed­ly rough footage, tak­en with a hand­held cam­era (cell phone?) from the crowd, but the audio is good, and it’s stir­ring stuff despite, or because of, the raw qual­i­ty.

Head over to The Allen Gins­berg Project for a few more record­ings of Smith read­ing from “Howl.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Allen Gins­berg Reads His Famous­ly Cen­sored Beat Poem, Howl (1959)

“Expan­sive Poet­ics” by Allen Gins­berg: A Free Course from 1981

James Fran­co Reads a Dream­i­ly Ani­mat­ed Ver­sion of Allen Ginsberg’s Epic Poem ‘Howl’

Watch Pat­ti Smith Read from Vir­ginia Woolf, and Hear the Only Sur­viv­ing Record­ing of Woolf’s Voice

Allen Ginsberg’s “Celes­tial Home­work”: A Read­ing List for His Class “Lit­er­ary His­to­ry of the Beats”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Bryan Cranston Reads Shelley’s Sonnet “Ozymandias” in Ominous Teaser for Breaking Bad’s Last Season

in Poetry, Television | July 31st, 2013

Since his improb­a­ble but riv­et­ing rise from put-upon, can­cer-strick­en chem­istry teacher Wal­ter White to socio­path­ic meth king­pin Heisen­berg, Bryan Cranston’s char­ac­ter in Break­ing Bad has come to embody all of the char­ac­ter­is­tics of an ancient despot: cun­ning, para­noia, the nurs­ing of old wounds and pre­ten­sions to unde­served great­ness. It seems per­fect­ly in char­ac­ter, then, that the show’s pro­duc­ers would tease the final sea­son with the omi­nous and dusty clip above, with Cranston read­ing Per­cy Bysshe Shelley’s son­net “Ozy­man­dias,” a poem about the hubris of anoth­er desert tyrant—well-known for his mega­lo­ma­ni­a­cal fol­ly—Ramess­es II (also known by a translit­er­a­tion of his throne name, Ozy­man­dias).

The speak­er of Shel­ley’s poem meets a trav­eller from an “antique land,” who describes an immense stat­ue, bro­ken to pieces and lying strewn in the desert where “Noth­ing beside remains.” On the stat­ue’s pedestal, a sculp­tor has inscribed the words, “My name is Ozy­man­dias, king of kings. / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair.” As Slate describes the teaser’s match-up:

The poem echoes all the show’s big themes: the mythol­o­gy of evil, the nuances of moral­i­ty, the arc of coro­na­tion and decay. The images, on the oth­er hand are fleeting—mostly New Mex­i­co desert and sub­ur­bia, though we end with a lin­ger­ing shot of Heisenberg’s dusty, worn hat rest­ing, like the poem’s once-colos­sal stat­ue.

Fans of the show famil­iar with the poem’s most pro­nounced theme, the fleet­ing nature of empires, no mat­ter how great, will know to antic­i­pate the fall of Heisen­berg in some spec­tac­u­lar fash­ion, though all we have so far are the vague hints of Walter’s esca­lat­ing vio­lence and para­noia from the last few episodes. Cranston seethes the poem’s most famous line—that one about despair (and the source of the poem’s cen­tral irony)—with par­tic­u­lar men­ace.

OzymandiasMSpage

The poem’s imagery, so com­mon to the ear­ly nine­teenth cen­tu­ry Egyp­tol­ogy of Shelley’s time and after, was alleged­ly inspired by a pas­sage in Roman-era his­to­ri­an Diodor­us Sicu­lus describ­ing just such a stat­ue. Also fuel­ing Shelley’s imag­i­na­tion were the Napoleon­ic archae­o­log­i­cal finds in Egypt, includ­ing news of the 1816 dis­cov­ery of a mas­sive Ramess­es II stat­ue by Ital­ian explor­er Gio­vani Bel­zoni (who sold it to the British Muse­um in 1821). Shel­ley wrote “Ozy­man­dias” in com­pe­ti­tion with a friend, financier and nov­el­ist Hen­ry Smith. Smith’s sub­mis­sion, “In Egypt’s Sandy Silence,” came first.

Crit­ic and writer Leigh Hunt pub­lished both poems in 1818 edi­tions of his month­ly mag­a­zine The Exam­in­er. While Smith’s poem bare­ly ris­es to the occa­sion, more clum­sy par­o­dy than seri­ous lit­er­ary endeav­or, Shelley’s—like the sculptor’s inscrip­tion in his poem—has out­last­ed the empire of his day and lives on in the micro­cos­mic TV rep­re­sen­ta­tions of our own impe­r­i­al works. Above, see an 1817 draft copy of Shelley’s iambic pen­tame­ter son­net, worked over with cor­rec­tions and revi­sions. Below see the fair copy he sent to Hunt for pub­li­ca­tion. Both copies reside at the Bodleian Library.

Ozymandiasfaircopy

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Inside Break­ing Bad: Watch Conan O’Brien’s Extend­ed Inter­view with the Show’s Cast and Cre­ator

Dis­cov­ered: Lord Byron’s Copy of Franken­stein Signed by Mary Shel­ley

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Bill Murray Reads Great Poetry by Billy Collins, Cole Porter, and Sarah Manguso

in Poetry | July 22nd, 2013

Any­one call­ing them­selves even casu­al Bill Mur­ray fans — and we here at Open Cul­ture have tak­en it well beyond casu­al­ness — will by now have read a num­ber of arti­cles on how the actor, come­di­an, and ear­ly Sat­ur­day Night Live alum­nus has rein­vent­ed him­self in the 21st cen­tu­ry. Though he still acts and makes us laugh more than ever in so doing, he picks his projects more care­ful­ly, tends to work with cre­ators pos­sessed of par­tic­u­lar visions (Wes Ander­son comes to mind), and at times appar­ent­ly lives his life like a form of self-sat­i­riz­ing per­for­mance art, pop­ping up now and then in the least expect­ed places amongst the least expect­ed peo­ple. Fans of Mur­ray’s from his Cad­dyshack, Stripes, and Ghost­busters days cer­tain­ly would­n’t expect to see him, for instance, at a poet­ry read­ing, much less onstage, much less read­ing seri­ous­ly.

And yet here we have three exam­ples, cap­tured live, of Bill Mur­ray’s poet­ry-read­ing acu­men. Up top, you can watch him read for­mer Poet Lau­re­ate of the Unit­ed States Bil­ly Collins’ “For­get­ful­ness” at the 16th Annu­al Poets House Walk Across the Brook­lyn Bridge. Just above, at the same event, Mur­ray reads “Brush Up Your Shake­speare” by song­writer Cole Porter from the lyrics of Porter’s musi­cal Kiss Me, Kate. Below, at the Poets House Walk din­ner, he reads “What We Miss” by Sarah Man­gu­so. We’ll add those three to the list of voic­es Mur­ray’s per­for­mances have done jus­tice — a list that includes such illus­tri­ous fig­ures real and imag­ined as Wal­lace Stevens, Emi­ly Dick­in­son, and Drs. Peter Venkman and Hunter S. Thomp­son.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bill Mur­ray Reads Wal­lace Stevens Poems — “The Plan­et on The Table” and “A Rab­bit as King of the Ghosts”

Bill Mur­ray Reads Poet­ry at a Con­struc­tion Site

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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The Poetry of Leonard Cohen Illustrated by Two Short Films

in Animation, Film, Literature, Poetry | July 18th, 2013

Look­ing back on the lit­er­ary career of Leonard Cohen—in full flower in the mid-six­ties before his sec­ond life as a folk singer/songwriter—one encoun­ters many com­par­isons to Joyce. For exam­ple, in the Nation­al Film Board of Canada’s descrip­tion of Ladies and Gen­tle­men… Mr. Leonard Cohen, the 1965 doc­u­men­tary film about the 30-year-old Cana­di­an poet, we find: “it tru­ly is, after Joyce, a por­trait of the artist as a young man.” On the back cov­er of Cohen’s sec­ond and final nov­el, the hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry, post­mod­ernist Beau­ti­ful Losers, we find a blurb from the Boston Sun­day Her­ald: “James Joyce is not dead…. He lives in Mon­tre­al under the name of Cohen.”

Beau­ti­ful Losers’ dense sys­tem of his­tor­i­cal ref­er­ences does put one in mind of Ulysses, but the lan­guage, the syn­tax, the eagle flights into the holy and dives into the pro­fane, remind me some­what of anoth­er Bud­dhist poet of Cana­di­an extrac­tion, Jack Ker­ouac. Cohen even sounds a bit like Ker­ouac, in the short 1967 film, “Poen” (above), an exper­i­men­tal piece that sets four read­ings of a prose-poem from Beau­ti­ful Losers to a mon­tage of stark­ly provoca­tive images from black-and-white film and pho­tog­ra­phy, Goya, and var­i­ous sur­re­al­ists. Made by Josef Reeve for the Nation­al Film Board, the short reels out four dif­fer­ent record­ed takes of Cohen read­ing the poem. At the end of each read­ing, he says, “cut,” and the film fades to black.

Tak­en from the novel’s con­text, the poem becomes a per­son­al med­i­ta­tion on med­i­ta­tion, or per­haps on writ­ing: “My mind seems to go out on a path, the width of a thread,” begins Cohen and unfolds an image of men­tal dis­cov­ery like that described by Don­ald Barthelme, who once said “writ­ing is a process of deal­ing with not-know­ing…. At best there’s a slen­der intu­ition, not much greater than an itch.”

In the ani­ma­tion above, from the NFB’s 1977 “Poets on Film No. 1,” Cana­di­an actor Paul Hecht reads Cohen’s poem “A Kite is a Vic­tim,” from his 1961 col­lec­tion The Spice-Box of Earth. Like the poem from Beau­ti­ful Losers, “A Kite is a Vic­tim” is also about process, but it’s a for­mal med­i­ta­tion, focused on the image of the kite, which flut­ters through each of the four stan­zas in metaphors of tam­ing, cap­tur­ing and nur­tur­ing lan­guage, then let­ting it go, hop­ing to be made “wor­thy and lyric and pure.” The pace of Hecht’s read­ing, the piano score behind his voice, and the vibrant col­or of the hand-drawn ani­ma­tion makes this a very dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence of Cohen’s writ­ing than “Poen.”

To see Leonard Cohen read­ing his poems as a young man, make sure you vis­it: Young Leonard Cohen Reads His Poet­ry in 1966 (Before His Days as a Musi­cian Began)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ladies and Gen­tle­men… Mr. Leonard Cohen

Street Artist Plays Leonard Cohen’s “Hal­lelu­jah” With Crys­tal Glass­es

Leonard Cohen and U2 Per­form ‘Tow­er of Song,’ a Med­i­ta­tion on Aging, Loss & Sur­vival

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Charles Bukowski Sets His Amusing Conditions for Giving a Poetry Reading (1971)

in Poetry | July 6th, 2013

BukowskiLetter

It takes a spe­cial kind of ded­i­ca­tion for a writer to quit his day job. When notably hard-liv­ing, hard-writ­ing poet Charles Bukows­ki took the plunge in 1969, at the behest of his Black Spar­row Press pub­lish­er John Mar­tin, he did it in the same spir­it of seri­ous­ness he’d reserved for smok­ing, drink­ing, women, and the writ­ten word. “I have one of two choic­es,” he wrote in a let­ter at the time, “stay in the post office and go crazy… or stay out here and play at writer and starve. I have decid­ed to starve.” Lat­er, in 1971, he wrote the let­ter above, a reply to an inquiry about the pos­si­bil­i­ty of his giv­ing a read­ing in Flori­da. His price? Round-trip air­fare from his home in Los Ange­les to Flori­da, rides from and back to the air­port, a place to stay, and $200.

Hav­ing already spent about two years work­ing as a writer and a writer alone (and hav­ing spent the first twen­ty nights of that peri­od furi­ous­ly com­pos­ing his first nov­el, Post Office), Bukows­ki quick­ly devel­oped a head for what he called “the lit­er­ary hus­tle.” He makes a dis­tinc­tive pitch for his poet­ic ser­vices: “Auden gets $2,000 a read­ing, Gins­berg $1,000, so you see I’m cheap. A real whore.” I can eas­i­ly envi­sion Bukows­ki ham­mer­ing out this let­ter at the front win­dow of his now-icon­ic bun­ga­low up on De Long­pre Avenue on anoth­er hot sum­mer 42 years ago, not least because he describes him­self doing it: “They say it’s 101 degrees today. Fine then, I’m drink­ing cof­fee and rolling cig­a­rettes and look­ing out at the hot baked street and a lady just walked by wig­gling it in tight white pants, and we are not dead yet.” If you nev­er had a chance to catch a Bukows­ki read­ing your­self, you can catch his read­ing at City Lights Poets The­ater, record­ed in Sep­tem­ber 1973. It’s just above.

via This Isn’t Hap­pi­ness

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Charles Bukows­ki Reads His Poem “The Secret of My Endurance”

“Don’t Try”: Charles Bukowski’s Con­cise Phi­los­o­phy of Art and Life

Charles Bukows­ki: Depres­sion and Three Days in Bed Can Restore Your Cre­ative Juices (NSFW)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Two Childhood Drawings from Poet E.E. Cummings Show the Young Artist’s Playful Seriousness

in Art, Poetry | June 24th, 2013

CummingsRhinoSoldier

Click images for larg­er ver­sions

Rebec­ca Onion over at Slate’s his­to­ry blog “The Vault” has brought to our atten­tion two delight­ful finds from the Mass­a­chu­setts His­tor­i­cal Soci­ety: child­hood draw­ings by poet and painter E.E. Cum­mings, made when he was 6 and 7 years old. Dat­ing from 1900–1902, the sketch­es, writes Onion, “reflect Cum­mings’ immer­sion in the pop­u­lar cul­ture of the time: cir­cus­es, Wild West shows, and adven­ture fic­tion.” These two draw­ings are fas­ci­nat­ing por­traits of the young Cum­mings’ mind at work. What a young mind he had.

Cum­mings began writ­ing poet­ry at age 8, and wrote a poem a day until he was 22. His mature work, which he began pub­lish­ing after his release from an intern­ment camp in Nor­mandy dur­ing WWI (where he was held for sus­pect­ed trea­son), shows the same kind of child­like play­ful­ness and dis­ci­pline. And while the draw­ing at the top is the work of a young boy strug­gling with the con­ven­tions of the writ­ten word, its odd­ly-spaced and punc­tu­at­ed text—the lex­i­cal and syn­tac­ti­cal ambi­gu­i­ties cre­at­ed by the layout—could cer­tain­ly have come from the pen of the adult poet. Cum­mings’ ideas about his poet­ry were delib­er­ate­ly idio­syn­crat­ic and force­ful­ly indi­vid­ual. As he would write, “may I be I is the only prayer—not may I be great or good or beau­ti­ful or wise or strong.” Or, as he expressed in a sim­i­lar sen­ti­ment in his 1926 col­lec­tion, is 5, per­haps in response to some crit­i­cal oppro­bri­um:

mr youse needn’t be so spry

con­cernin ques­tions arty

each has his tastes but as for i

i likes a cer­tain par­ty

CummingsWestShow
In the draw­ing above, the young Edward Estlin Cum­mings imag­ines him­self as a Buf­fa­lo Bill-like char­ac­ter. Onion points us toward the adult Cum­mings’ dark­ly iron­ic poem “[Buf­fa­lo Bill ‘s],” as a com­pan­ion to the boy Cum­mings’ star­ry-eyed self-fash­ion­ing and “hero wor­ship.” While on a super­fi­cial read­ing, Cum­mings’ work can some­times seem mad­den­ing­ly child­ish and sil­ly, poems like “[Buf­fa­lo Bill ‘s]” show him pluck­ing apart naïve illu­sions about hero­ism and spec­ta­cle as in so many of his oth­er poems he skew­ers the pre­ten­sions of urban sophis­ti­cates and tastemak­ers, pro­mot­ing a Roman­tic, unin­hib­it­ed idea of the self unfet­tered by social, and typo­graph­i­cal, con­ven­tions.

Cum­mings would be very appre­cia­tive of the work the Mass­a­chu­setts His­tor­i­cal Soci­ety has done in cat­a­logu­ing his fam­i­ly papers; he had a deep respect for history—above all for per­son­al his­to­ry. In the first of his so-called “non­lec­tures,” deliv­ered at Har­vard in 1952, he refers to his “auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal prob­lem” in a pas­sage that con­jures the dystopi­an visions of Hux­ley and Orwell:

There’d be no prob­lem, of course, if I sub­scribed to the hyper­sci­en­tif­ic doc­trine that hered­i­ty is noth­ing because every­thing is envi­ron­ment; or if (hav­ing swal­lowed this super­sleep­ing­pill) I envis­aged the future of socalled mankind as a per­ma­nent past­less­ness, pre­na­tal­ly envelop­ing semi­iden­ti­cal super­sub­morons in per­pet­u­al nonun­hap­pi­ness. Right­ly or wrong­ly, how­ev­er, I pre­fer spir­i­tu­al insom­nia to psy­chic sui­cide.

Per­haps Cum­mings could thank “spir­i­tu­al insom­nia” for his seri­ous word­play and bound­less curiosity—two child­hood traits he nev­er let go of.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Art of Sylvia Plath: Revis­it Her Sketch­es, Self-Por­traits, Draw­ings & Illus­trat­ed Let­ters

Dylan Thomas Sketch­es a Car­i­ca­ture of a Drunk­en Dylan Thomas

William S. Bur­roughs Shows You How to Make “Shot­gun Art”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Listen to T.S. Eliot Recite His Late Masterpiece, the Four Quartets

in Poetry | June 11th, 2013

Here is a com­plete record­ing of T.S. Eliot read­ing the mas­ter­piece of his lat­er years, the cycle of poems called Four Quar­tets.

Eliot con­sid­ered the Four Quar­tets his great­est work. “I’d like to feel that they get bet­ter as they go on,” he told Don­ald Hall in a 1959 inter­view for the Paris Review. “The sec­ond is bet­ter than the first, the third is bet­ter than the sec­ond, and the fourth is the best of all. At any rate, that’s the way I flat­ter myself.”

The Four Quar­tets are per­haps the most mys­ti­cal and reli­gious of Eliot’s poems. Each one is a med­i­ta­tion on time, mix­ing Chris­t­ian and Hin­du imagery with per­son­al and his­tor­i­cal events. “In The Waste Land the waste was place, the ‘Unre­al City,’ ” writes Eliot’s biog­ra­ph­er, Lyn­dall Gor­don; “here, the waste is time–time unre­deemed by a sense of the time­less.”

As in The Waste Land, Eliot uses the four clas­si­cal ele­ments as a struc­tur­al device in the Four Quar­tets. The first poem, “Burnt Nor­ton,” is asso­ci­at­ed with the ele­ment of air. It is named for an Eng­lish manor house Eliot vis­it­ed in the 1930s. The poem was first pub­lished in 1936. “East Cok­er” (which begins above at 10:46) is asso­ci­at­ed with Earth, and takes its name from the vil­lage in Som­er­set, Eng­land, from which the poet­’s ances­tor, Andrew Eliot, set out for Amer­i­ca in 1669. The third poem, “The Dry Sal­vages,” (begin­ning at 24:17) is asso­ci­at­ed with Water and is named for a treach­er­ous clus­ter of rocks off Cape Ann that was among the haz­ards Andrew Eliot’s ship need­ed to avoid in order to safe­ly reach the coast of Mass­a­chu­setts. The final poem, “Lit­tle Gid­ding,” (39:08) was pub­lished in 1942. Its under­ly­ing theme is one of pur­ga­to­r­i­al Fire. The poem is named for a vil­lage in Cam­bridgeshire, Eng­land, which was the site of a 17th cen­tu­ry Angli­can com­mune that based its dai­ly life around the Book of Com­mon Prayer.

The Four Quar­tets were first pub­lished as a uni­fied whole in 1943. Despite their ini­tial appear­ance as four sep­a­rate poems, the themes are tight­ly inter­wo­ven and each poem is com­posed of five par­al­lel parts. You can hear Eliot read­ing the Four Quar­tets above. To fol­low along as you lis­ten, click here to open the full text in a new win­dow. The first poem begins:

Time present and time past
Are both per­haps present in time future,
And time future con­tained in time past.
If all time is eter­nal­ly present
All time is unre­deemable.
What might have been is an abstrac­tion
Remain­ing a per­pet­u­al pos­si­bil­i­ty
Only in a world of spec­u­la­tion.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Foot­falls echo in the mem­o­ry
Down the pas­sage which we did not take
Towards the door we nev­er opened
Into the rose-gar­den. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

T.S. Eliot Reads His Mod­ernist Mas­ter­pieces “The Waste Land” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Rare 1959 Audio: Flan­nery O’Connor Reads ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’

Rare Record­ing: Leo Tol­stoy Reads From His Last Major Work in Four Lan­guages, 1909

Nabokov Reads Loli­ta, Names the Great Books of the 20th Cen­tu­ry

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