The Essential T.S. Eliot
About this audiobook
A selection of the most significant and enduring poems from one of the twentieth century’s major writers, chosen and introduced by Vijay Seshadri, performed by T.S. Eliot, Vijay Seshadri, Daniel Halpern, Willem Dafoe, Natasha Trethewey, Meghan O'Rourke, Natalie Diaz, Frank Bidart, Joy Harjo, Rosanna Warren, Emily Jungmin Yoon, Tracy K. Smith, Nicole Sealey, Jorie Graham, Kevin Young, Louise Glück, Eileen Myles, Carol Muske-Dukes, Campbell McGrath, Robert Hass, and Monica Youn.
T.S. Eliot was a towering figure in twentieth century literature, a renowned poet, playwright, and critic whose work—including “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915), The Waste Land (1922), Four Quartets (1943), and Murder in the Cathedral (1935)—continues to be among the most-read and influential in the canon of American literature.
The Essential T.S. Eliot collects Eliot’s most lasting and important poetry in one career-spanning audiobook, with an introduction from Vijay Seshadri, one of our foremost poets.
PERFORMER TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction by Vijay Seshadri: Vijay Seshadri
La Figlia che Piange: T.S. Eliot
Portrait of a Lady: Daniel Halpern
Preludes: T.S. Eliot
Rhapsody on a Windy Night: Meghan O'Rourke
Mr. Apollinax: Natalie Diaz
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: Frank Bidart
Gerontion: Joy Harjo
Dans le Restaurant: Rosanna Warren
Whispers of Immortality: Emily Jungmin Yoon
The Waste Land: Willem Dafoe and Tracy K. Smith
The Hollow Men: Nicole Sealey
Ash Wednesday: Jorie Graham
Marina: Kevin Young
Journey of the Magi: Louise Gluck
Coriolan: Eileen Myles
Choruses from “The Rock”: I, III, IV, VII: Carol Muske-Dukes (III, VII) and Natasha Trethewey (I, IV)
Old Deuteronomy: Campbell McGrath
Sweeney Agonistes: Vijay Seshadri and Rosanna Warren
From Four Quartets: Burnt Norton; Little Gidding: Robert Hass
Tradition and Individual Talent: Monica Youn
Text from Collected Poems, 1909-1962:Copyright 1930, 1940, 1941, 1942, 1943, 1963 by T.S. Eliot; Copyright 1954, 1956, 1959, 1963 by Thomas Stearns Eliot; Copyright renewed 1958, 1962, 1964 by Thomas Stearns Eliot; Copyright 1934, 1936 by Harcourt Brace & Company; Copyright 1948 by Faber & Faber Limited; Copyright renewed 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1982, 1984, 1991 by Esme Valerie Eliot; Text from Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats: Copyright 1939 by T.S. Eliot; Copyright renewed 1967 by Esme Valerie Eliot.
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About the author
THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT was born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1888. He moved to England in 1914 and published his first book of poems in 1917. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Eliot died in 1965.
Daniel Halpern is the president and publisher of Ecco. He is the author of nine books of poetry, including Tango and Something Shining, and the founder and long-time editor of the literary magazine Antaeus. He was born in Syracuse, New York, and lives in New York City.Julie Strand is a retired psychologist in Seattle.
Natasha Trethewey is a former US poet laureate and the author of five collections of poetry, as well as a book of creative nonfiction. She is currently the Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University. In 2007 she won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her collection Native Guard.
Emily Jungmin Yoon is the author of Ordinary Misfortunes, the 2017 winner of the Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize by Tupelo Press. Yoon was born in Busan, Republic of Korea and received her BA at the University of Pennsylvania and MFA in Creative Writing at New York University. She has been the recipient of awards and fellowships from Ploughshares’ Emerging Writer’s Contest, AWP’s WC&C Scholarship Competition, and the Poetry Foundation, among others. Her poems and translations have appeared in publications including The New Yorker, POETRY, The New York Times Magazine, and Korean Literature Now. She currently serves as the Poetry Editor for The Margins, the literary magazine of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and is a PhD student studying Korean literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago.
Born in St. Thomas, U.S.V.I. and raised in Apopka, Florida, Nicole Sealey is the author of The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the 2015 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. Her other honors include an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, a Daniel Varoujan Award and the Poetry International Prize, as well as fellowships from CantoMundo, Cave Canem, MacDowell Colony and the Poetry Project. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker and elsewhere. Nicole holds an MLA in Africana Studies from the University of South Florida and an MFA in creative writing from New York University. She is the Executive Director at Cave Canem Foundation.
Jorie Graham is the author of fourteen collections of poems. She has been widely translated and has been the recipient of numerous awards, among them the Pulitzer Prize, the Forward Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and the International Nonino Prize. She lives in Massachusetts and teaches at Harvard University.
Kevin Young's first book, Most Way Home, was selected for the National Poetry Series by Lucille Clifton and won the Zacharis First Book Prize from Ploughshares. His subsequent poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, Grand Street, Kenyon Review, Callaloo, and Code; his work has also been featured on National Public Radio's All Things Considered and in The Beacon Best of 1999. A former Stegner fellow in poetry at Stanford University, Young is currently an assistant professor of English and African American studies at the University of Georgia in Athens.
Louise Glück (1943-2023) was the author of two collections of essays and thirteen books of poems. Her many awards included the Nobel Prize in Literature, the National Humanities Medal, the Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris, the National Book Award for Faithful and Virtuous Night, the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Triumph of Achilles, the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poems 1962–2012, and the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. She taught at Yale University and Stanford University and lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Eileen Myles (they/them, b. 1949) is a poet, novelist, and art journalist whose practice of vernacular first-person writing has made them one of the most recognized writers of their generation. Pathetic Literature, which they edited, came out in fall 2022. a “Working Life,” their newest collection of poems, is out now. They live in New York and Marfa, TX.
Campbell McGrath is the author of nine previous books, eight of them available from Ecco Press. He has received numerous prestigious awards for his poetry, including a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has been published in the New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, the Paris Review, the New Yorker, Poetry, and Ploughshares, among other prominent publications, and his poetry is represented in dozens of anthologies. He teaches in the MFA program at Florida International University, and lives with his family in Miami Beach.
Robert Hass was born in San Francisco. His books of poetry include The Apple Trees at Olema (Ecco, 2010), Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Time and Materials (Ecco, 2008), Sun Under Wood (Ecco, 1996), Human Wishes (1989), Praise (1979), and Field Guide (1973), which was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets Series. Hass also co-translated several volumes of poetry with Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz and authored or edited several other volumes of translation, including Nobel Laureate Tomas Tranströmer's Selected Poems (2012) and The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa (1994). His essay collection Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry (1984) received the National Book Critics Circle Award. Hass served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997 and as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He lives in California with his wife, poet Brenda Hillman, and teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.
