The Impersonal Poet Reads in Person

Abstract

Abstract Despite admiring live performance all his life, T. S. Eliot dreaded reading in person, partly because his poems were multiply voiced and hard to read, and but partly because he had become most celebrated as the poet of impersonality, for whom a personal reading might seem a contradiction in terms. But ‘impersonality’ was originally an idea about how performers work, and Eliot’s technique of distancing himself from the poems he read could also turn the ‘impersonal’ into a dramatic technique. Through the way he performed the manic, sobbing, or pleading voices of The Waste Land and ‘Coriolan’, Eliot moved the occasion away from a revelation of his poem’s biographical sources towards a subtle recognition of the poet’s personal vulnerabilities, as a public figure kept there by his listeners’ projections. In a reading for a Jewish audience in New York, the metacommunication of these poems becomes a tacit bid for understanding, and possibly an apology.