Free Thinking - TS Eliot Prize
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 13 January 2015
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Scottish poet Robert Crawford and fellow-TS Eliot biographer, Lyndall Gordon join Anne McElvoy to work out Eliot's enduring power and appeal while the winner of this year's TS Eliot prize, David Harsent also takes a bow. Allan Ropper a US neurologist, talks about the mixture of intuition and medical knowledge that every brain doctor needs. He is joined by Brian Hurwitz, Professor of Medicine and the Arts at King's College London to discuss the role of case histories over time and new importance being attached to narrative medicine.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that at some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.4 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.9 | Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.0 | Tonight, the brain unraveled one of America's best-known neurologists, Alan Roper, |
| 0:37.0 | is here to tell us about his Alice in Wonderland-like journeys through the human brain, |
| 0:41.7 | and we'll also be discussing why medical case studies might be coming back into fashion. |
| 0:47.0 | And 50 years since his death, 100 years since the publication of the poem, which was nothing like what had come before, |
| 0:53.3 | we celebrate and explore the many voices of T.S. Eliot. |
| 0:57.7 | Let us go, then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table. |
| 1:06.9 | Let us go through certain half-deserted streets, the muttering retreats of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels, and sawdust restaurants with oyster shells, |
| 1:19.6 | streets that follow like a tedious argument of insidious intent to lead you to an overwhelming question. Oh, do not ask what is it. Let us go |
| 1:32.0 | and make our visit. T.S. Eliot, reading there the opening stanzas of the ground-breaking the love |
| 1:37.7 | song of J. Alfred Prufrock. While many now think of him as the 20th century's greatest pert, |
| 1:43.9 | he found it hard to get published. |
| 1:46.0 | According to Robert Crawford, the author of a new biography, Young Elliot, |
| 1:49.5 | one editor suspected the young poet was borderline insane. |
| 1:53.0 | Robert Crawford joins us shortly along with fellow Elliot biographer Lyndall Gordon |
| 1:57.1 | to uncover the boy and young man who would turn into the institution we know as T.S. |
| 2:02.9 | Eliot today. But first let's hear from the winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize for poetry for the best |
| 2:08.2 | collection written in the English language in the last year. David Harsent for his book, |
| 2:14.3 | Fire Songs. David, fifth time, lucky, but congratulations. |
| 2:18.2 | Would you get us going by reading for us? |
... |
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