How listening to a poem can change the way you experience it

[luzula]

I'm going to talk about a specific reading here, because it's really the strongest such experience I've had: Elizabeth Klett's reading of T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land". You can download it at Librivox, and the text is online at Gutenberg.

I'd read this poem several times before, and found it captivating even though I don't get all the scholarly references in it. I think it's mostly the landscape descriptions and the connections between those and how society is described in the poem that got to me. I am a sucker for landscape and nature descriptions in basically any form, so this is no surprise if you know me.

Elizabeth Klett is one of my favorite Librivox readers--for example, her readings of the Austen novels are to die for--so when I saw that she'd recorded this poem, I downloaded it immediately. And wow. When I first listened to it, it gave me goosebumps and a sense of almost physical pleasure.

I got a new appreciation for the dialogue in it especially--she infuses all the dialogue with character so it really contributes to the overall impression of the poem. I never got that when I just read it on the page, and I'm far more likely to listen to this poem now than to read it.

This is my last post for this week! Thanks for inviting me, I've enjoyed it a lot. : )