The T.S. Eliot of the post-World War I peri­od was a poet who stood Janus-faced on the thresh­old of old and new worlds. He looked back­ward to the moun­tain ranges of Euro­pean tra­di­tion and mar­veled at their alpine peaks. At the same time, he seemed acute­ly aware of what a ridicu­lous fig­ure he some­times cut in his self-seri­ous, pedan­tic ven­er­a­tion for the past. Eliot acknowl­edged the inex­orable move­ment of time in poems like “The Waste Land,” “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and “The Hol­low Men,” even if time only moved for­ward into entropy and medi­oc­rity. When Eliot looked ahead, after the hor­rors of war and the increas­ing speed of mod­ern­iza­tion, what he saw was frag­men­ta­tion, wreck­age, and waste. I have heard his strat­e­gy in “The Waste Land” described as a “ter­mi­nal aesthetic”—a beau­ti­ful­ly destruc­tive poet­ics, and one which could go no fur­ther.

Eliot’s high mod­ernist poems stand in very dif­fer­ent rela­tion to the post-WWI world than the work of for­ward-look­ing 20th cen­tu­ry avant-garde artists of the peri­od. As James Mar­tin Hard­ing notes in Adorno and “A Writ­ing of the Ruins,” what “dis­tin­guish­es Eliot from the avant-garde is that… the pol­i­tics of the avant-garde evinced a faith in rev­o­lu­tion­ary progress…. One would have to ally Eliot’s imagery with the dawn­ing of the postmodern”—with ideas, that is, of the “end of his­to­ry.” In terms of form—characterized by pas­tiche, irony, self-ref­er­en­tial­i­ty, and a blend­ing of high and low culture—Eliot’s poet­ics were dis­tinct­ly post-mod­ern.

But post­mod­ernists have gen­er­al­ly cel­e­brat­ed the frag­ment­ing of tra­di­tion and the loss of grand nar­ra­tives. Eliot cher­ished the old, destroyed world, and most­ly despaired of any­thing of val­ue replac­ing it. His imme­di­ate pre­de­ces­sors, whom he imi­tat­ed and ref­er­enced often, were the French sym­bol­ists and deca­dents; mod­ernist aes­thetes who mourned unnamed cat­a­stro­phes and cat­a­logued absurd cor­re­spon­dences. Crit­ic Cleanth Brooks sin­gles out one poem that Eliot quotes at the end of “The Waste Land,” Ger­ard de Nerval’s “El Des­dicha­do,” for its sug­ges­tion that “the pro­tag­o­nist of the poem has been dis­in­her­it­ed, robbed of his tra­di­tion.” Even in trans­la­tion, we can hear in Nerval’s lines the dark­ly com­ic, cos­mi­cal­ly iron­ic, despair of Eliot’s Prufrock:

My very supernova’s been snuffed out, and my one
shiny-ten­doned lute has been silenced by DEPRESSION.

I think you can hear that same world-weary depres­sion and sense of cul­tur­al exhaus­tion in Eliot’s voice as he reads from both “The Waste Land” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” above and from “The Hol­low Men” below (unfor­tu­nate­ly drowned out near the end by some added music). I don’t mean to sug­gest that Eliot him­self suf­fered from some form of clin­i­cal depres­sion. But his poet­ic speakers—and in the case of “The Waste Land” his jum­ble of com­pet­ing voices—all join in an apoc­a­lyp­tic cho­rus as though wit­ness­ing the world’s end. Per­haps the poet­ry exag­ger­ates Eliot’s own per­son­al atti­tudes for effect, per­haps it acts as a series of guis­es for the philo­soph­i­cal and crit­i­cal ideas he explained with­out arti­fice in his essays.

This is how many peo­ple have read Eliot’s poems, myself includ­ed: as con­tain­ers for abstract ideas about cul­tur­al decay and the nature of art and tra­di­tion. But Eliot and his some­time edi­tor and friend Ezra Pound would like­ly object to this kind of approach to poet­ry. Added at the insis­tence of his pub­lish­er, Eliot’s foot­notes to “The Waste Land” seem to mock read­ers anx­ious to leap to inter­pre­ta­tion. Instead, the poet would ask us to attend not to ideas, but to the images, and the emo­tions they evoke—and in this case, to attend also to the poet­’s voice.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free

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

Young T.S. Eliot Writes “The Tri­umph of Bullsh*t” and Gives the Eng­lish Lan­guage a New Exple­tive (1910)

Grou­cho Marx and T.S. Eliot Become Unex­pect­ed Pen Pals, Exchang­ing Por­traits & Com­pli­ments (1961)

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

Many of us today think of Vin­cent Price as the face, and an even more so the voice, of mod­est­ly bud­get­ed mid­cen­tu­ry hor­ror movies. But over his long and pro­lif­ic career, he showed just what mul­ti­tudes he could con­tain. Price could ele­vate schlock, of course, but he could also rise to the chal­lenge of mas­ter­pieces: here on Open Cul­ture, we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured his read­ings, on record and on cam­era, of the work of Edgar Allan Poe, the orig­i­nal mas­ter of the psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly trou­bling tale. Today, we have for you a set of recita­tions well out­side the realm of the scary: Price read­ing the poet­ry of Per­cy Bysshe Shel­ley, free on Spo­ti­fy (whose soft­ware you can down­load here).

Shel­ley, as any­one inter­est­ed in 19th-cen­tu­ry Eng­lish poet­ry knows, did­n’t have a long career, but the can­dle that burns quick­ly, as they say, burns bright. Before his death at the age of 29 in a storm on the Gulf of Spezia, he man­aged to write such immor­tal works as Music, When Soft Voic­es Die, Ozy­man­dias, To a Sky­lark, Ode to the West Wind, and the dra­ma Prometheus Unbound, all of which we hear Price read whole, or in part, in this playlist. And for its final four tracks, we hear famed Eng­lish stage actor Ralph Richard­son deliv­er four poems from the equal­ly endur­ing lega­cy of Shel­ley’s rough con­tem­po­rary Samuel Tay­lor Coleridge, includ­ing Kubla Khan and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

The vivid­ness of the imagery and the time­less res­o­nance of the themes in both poets’ work hold up well on the page, but no mat­ter how many times you’ve read it, hear­ing it inter­pret­ed by per­form­ers like Price and Richard­son can let you expe­ri­ence it in a new way. Their dra­mat­ic back­grounds empow­er them to bring out lev­els of emo­tion you might nev­er have felt in your own read­ing; cer­tain­ly Price’s world-weary yet faint­ly arch tone does well with Ozy­man­dias’ gaze-into-the-abyss evo­ca­tion of hubris, imper­ma­nence, and the ulti­mate fate in obliv­ion of all things great and small. Maybe the man who starred in The Pit and the Pen­du­lum nev­er real­ly strayed far from hor­ror after all.

The Price/Richardson read­ing will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

5 Hours of Edgar Allan Poe Sto­ries Read by Vin­cent Price & Basil Rath­bone

Watch Vin­cent, Tim Burton’s Ani­mat­ed Trib­ute to Vin­cent Price & Edgar Allan Poe (1982)

Watch Vin­cent Price Turn Into Edgar Allan Poe & Read Four Clas­sic Poe Sto­ries (1970)

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

Learn to Write Through a Video Game Inspired by the Roman­tic Poets: Shel­ley, Byron, Keats

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

James Mer­cer Langston Hugh­es’ poetry—joyful, cel­e­bra­to­ry, cut­ting, filled with deep long­ing, play­ful jabs, bit­ter­sweet images, and earnest affirmations—is pre-emi­nent­ly African Amer­i­can poet­ry. But in say­ing that I mean also to say that it is pre-emi­nent­ly Amer­i­can poet­ry, as the jazz and blues Hugh­es drew so much from is pre-emi­nent­ly Amer­i­can music. Hugh­es was com­mit­ted to the promis­es of the Amer­i­can experiment—despite and in full recog­ni­tion of its vicious con­tra­dic­tions—and he was also in live­ly con­ver­sa­tion with the poets who cap­tured and trans­mut­ed the country’s unique voic­es.

His “major ear­ly influ­ences,” writes crit­ic Arnold Ram­per­sad, “were Walt Whit­man, Carl Sand­burg, as well as the black poets Paul Lawrence Dun­bar, a mas­ter of both dialect and stan­dard verse, and Claude McK­ay, a rad­i­cal social­ist who also wrote accom­plished lyric poet­ry.” All of these influ­ences are read­i­ly appar­ent in his ear­ly work, and it was Sand­burg who led him “toward free verse and a rad­i­cal­ly demo­c­ra­t­ic mod­ernist aes­thet­ic.”

Hugh­es also descend­ed from a rad­i­cal polit­i­cal tra­di­tion, his cho­sen first name, Langston, the sur­name of an abo­li­tion­ist grand­fa­ther who died fight­ing with John Brown; when his grand­moth­er remar­ried, it was to a promi­nent Recon­struc­tion politi­cian. It’s a lega­cy that seems to have inspired in the poet a fierce hope for the country’s future that he express­es in that famous response to Whit­man, “I, Too.”

Tomor­row,
I’ll be at the table
When com­pa­ny comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.

Besides,
They’ll see how beau­ti­ful I am
And be ashamed—

The lines of his col­lect­ed works have been read aloud in count­less class­rooms and from count­less stages as rep­re­sent­ing the best of the Harlem Renais­sance’s buoy­ant cri­tique and cel­e­bra­tion of every­thing con­tained in the des­ig­na­tion “African-Amer­i­can.” That’s not to say that Hugh­es’ poet­ry or his vision res­onat­ed with all of his con­tem­po­raries.

Two years after his death in 1967, author Lind­say Pat­ter­son in the New York Times called Hugh­es “the most abused poet in Amer­i­ca…. Seri­ous white crit­ics ignored him, less seri­ous ones com­pared his poet­ry to Cas­sius Clay dog­ger­el, and most black crit­ics only grudg­ing­ly admired him. Some like James Bald­win, were down­right mali­cious about his poet­ic achieve­ment.” Bald­win, writes Ani­ta Pat­ter­son (no rela­tion to Lind­say), “fault­ed Hugh­es for fail­ing to fol­low through con­sis­tent­ly on the artis­tic premis­es laid out in his ear­ly verse.” The lat­er poems, wrote Bald­win in 1959, “take refuge, final­ly, in a fake sim­plic­i­ty.”

And yet, Lind­say Pat­ter­son point­ed out, crit­ics like Bald­win and oth­ers mis­took “the sim­ple form and lan­guage of Hugh­es’ poet­ry for pauci­ty of mean­ing. His real mean­ings are nev­er that appar­ent,” and his poet­ry “must be heard, rather than read silent­ly, for one to real­ize its emo­tion­al scope.” In 1962 and 63, Hugh­es sat down with the BBC for a series of read­ings and inter­views, and lat­er, Caed­mon Records, who have for many decades record­ed and pre­served the voic­es of 20th poet­ry, released por­tions of those ses­sions as part of their “Essen­tial” series. That record­ing has now been ful­ly released on Spo­ti­fy (stream the 47 minute record­ing right below), and appar­ent­ly YouTube too.

You can hear Hugh­es read the famil­iar favorite “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (top) and below it, an auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal intro­duc­tion to the poem. Fur­ther down, hear the less well-known, and much more tren­chant, poem, “The South,” which begins with grotesque, almost Faulkner­ian images in its open­ing lines:

The lazy, laugh­ing South
With blood on its mouth.
The sun­ny-faced South,
Beast-strong,
Idiot-brained.
The child-mind­ed South

Of anoth­er less­er-known poem, “Mer­ry-go-Round,” above, Hugh­es says in com­men­tary titled “In My Poet­ry”: “I’ve nev­er been at a loss for mov­ing sub­ject mat­ter because I myself have faced many of these racial prob­lems all over the Unit­ed States, hav­ing lived from one end of the coun­try to the oth­er, in my now more than 50 years of life. One of the dra­mat­ic ways of express­ing the race prob­lem, I’ve found, is to express it through the eyes of a child, and I have done this through sto­ries and poet­ry.”

In the short, vio­lent “Ku Klux Klan,” above (some­times pub­lished as just “Ku Klux”) —a poem still trag­i­cal­ly all too relevant—Hughes dra­ma­tizes the bru­tal­i­ty a racist ide­ol­o­gy requires to force oth­ers to acknowl­edge it. The inter­nal rhymes and brevi­ty of the poem present us with an almost com­ic con­trast to the sub­ject. It is, writes crit­ic John Moore, “a strange­ly humor­ous poem,” sug­gest­ing “the pos­si­bil­i­ty that the man being lynched might be laugh­ing” at “the rit­u­al­ized bom­b­a­sity of the Klans­man,” fur­ther incit­ing his rage.

The ear­ly lyric poems in this record­ing show us Hugh­es engag­ing direct­ly with the lega­cies of slav­ery and Jim Crow and their last­ing effects; in these poems, he names “the bit­ter truth” Bald­win accused him, unfair­ly, of hid­ing behind the “hiero­glyph­ics” of jazz idioms in lat­er works like Mon­tage of Dream Deferred. The bits of expla­na­tion and auto­bi­og­ra­phy between the record­ed read­ings make the whole album a very reward­ing lis­ten. Whether you already know Hugh­es’ poet­ry well or have only encoun­tered famous poems like “Harlem,” The Essen­tial Langston Hugh­es will like­ly show you a side of the poet you may not have known before.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Langston Hugh­es Read Poet­ry from His First Col­lec­tion, The Weary Blues (1958)

Langston Hugh­es Presents the His­to­ry of Jazz in an Illus­trat­ed Children’s Book (1955)

Hear Hem­ing­way Read Hem­ing­way, and Faulkn­er Read Faulkn­er (90 Min­utes of Clas­sic Audio)

Hear Ten­nessee Williams Read Hart Crane’s “The Bro­ken Tow­er” and “The Hur­ri­cane” (1960)

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