Smarty Pants From The American Scholar

Some of our best poets have the greatest range: think of Shakespeare, in all his wild permutations, or Edna St. Vincent Millay boomeranging from heartbreak to revelry. Or, quintessentially, T. S. Eliot, who captured our bruised souls in “The Wasteland,” itemized the neuroses of unrequited love in Prufrock, and then turned around and set to verse the antics of cats like Growltiger and Rumpleteazer. You could say that the same range exists in the best of actors—like Jeremy Irons, say, who’s played everyone from starry-eyed Charles Ryder to Humbert Humbert himself. Irons’s iconic voice has lent itself to animated lions and audiobooks before, but now, he joins us to talk about perhaps his most ambitious project yet: narrating the poems of T. S. Eliot.Go beyond the episode:Jeremy Irons reads The Poems of T. S. Eliot from Faber & Faber and BBC Radio 4Read more about T. S. Eliot’s life at the Poetry FoundationMay we suggest Juliet Stevenson’s portfolio of Jane Austen’s novels&n