We have a battered copy of The Waste Land And Other Poems on our kitchen table. I should put it back on the bookshelf before too much slop gets on it, but I’m enjoying it too much. The slim volume reminds me of our dinner conversation earlier in the week, the one in which we were discussing T. S. Eliot’s poetry.
The conversators (hee hee) were not members of a literary salon, but my husband, teenage sons and me. It wasn’t the first time T.S. Eliot has come up in conversation at our house. It all started a couple of years ago when Mark asked me if I knew the poem containing the following lines:
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper
"The Hollow Men"? I guessed, as a weird stew of shock, wonder and redemption bubbled up in my brain. That’s T.S. Eliot, I said. Yeah, I know. Are you reading him in English class? No, it’s in a video game.
A video game? Bits of the poem are apparently scattered throughout the wildly-popular best-selling “Halo” series. What’s T.S. Eliot doing in teenage wasteland?
Here’s the really good part, especially for English-major parents: Mark ended up writing a term paper that year on how Eliot’s poems still resonate in today’s cultural landscape. I have not railed against video games since.
I don't remember exactly how Mr. Eliot crept into our conversation the other night. Mark mentioned something which caused Harry to remark that his English teacher says "The Waste Land" is one of the greatest and most difficult poems ever written. The next thing we knew, we were arguing about whether "The Hollow Men" is a section of "The Waste Land" (it’s not, which prompted the appearance of the book), which eventually led Mark to quote "Fire and Ice" by Robert Frost. Bang, whimper, fire, ice—the world’s ending baby, one way or another. A short discussion of "Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening" brought our postprandial talk to an end.
It had been nice to linger at the dinner table chatting about poetry, but my teenagers had miles of homework to do, and I needed sleep.
Recovery to Equilibrium
1 year ago
2 comments:
Now that's what I call dinner conversation!
How lucky your kids are to have parents who can engage in this kind of give and take.
Eliot is a bottomless well. My favorite has always been "Prufrock." "In the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo."
My cat Macavity agrees that Eliot is the best, although he assures me that he himself has never been "the Flying Squad's despair."
How perfect is the last sentence of the post --amazing.
One of these days I'll mail you an audio recording of Eliot reciting his poetry, unless you don't have it already.
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