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

Did you know T.S. Eliot’s por­ten­tous and heav­i­ly allu­sive 1922 mas­ter­piece “The Waste Land” was orig­i­nal­ly titled “He Do the Police in Dif­fer­ent Voic­es,” a quote from Charles Dick­ens’ Our Mutu­al Friend? Filled with ref­er­ences to Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Dark­ness, and James Frazier’s The Gold­en Bough, this most famous of high mod­ernist poems—scourge of mil­lions of col­lege fresh­man each year—was a very dif­fer­ent ani­mal before noto­ri­ous mod­ernist impre­sario Ezra Pound got his hands on it. Pound’s heavy rework­ing is respon­si­ble for the poem you hear above, read by Eliot him­self. The first image in the video shows Pound’s mar­gin­al anno­ta­tions.

In the video above lis­ten to Eliot read his sec­ond-most famous work, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” with the text of the poem chore­o­graphed by Wor­dook­ie, an open-source ver­sion of Wor­dle.  “Prufrock,” first pub­lished in 1915, is as dense with lit­er­ary allu­sions as “The Waste Land” (and thus as painful for the aver­age under­grad­u­ate). And if Eliot’s reedy alto doesn’t deliv­er “Prufrock“ ‘s grav­i­tas for you, lis­ten to Antho­ny Hop­kins read it here.

You can find these poems cat­a­logued in our col­lec­tion of 700 Free Audio Books and 800 Free eBooks.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

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