alt Hacker NewsAnyone who liked this article and like (or are curious about) the poem should check out the great Fiona Shaw's reading of it [1].
You can find recordings by many fine actor such as John Gielgud, Alec Guinness, and many others, and they tend to be dull, monotonous affairs. Shaw is very different. She's is an incredible actress, and since the 1990s she's been perfecting the poem as a kind of one-woman show where she reads it as the voices of many characters, which is what the poem (as I understand it) is.
Have you ever listened to Eliot reading it? Just the worst. "Apreel is the crewellest month..."
My thing here though is: this is awesome, Shaw's reading, but is it right? I feel like she's trying to make a coherent character reading at times out of passages deliberately written not to have a clear narrator.
(I write this in the spirit of every thread needing a certain titration of not knowing what the hell they're talking about, as an invitation to those who do, and that inviting cluelessness is the purpose I serve here.)