The European Radio Broadcasts of T.S. Eliot

Abstract

Although T. S. Eliot is among the most-studied figures in literary history, the 80-90 radio broadcasts he did between 1929-1964 have yet to receive critical attention. It is less striking that Eliot should have been attracted to radio than it is that, after 1941, he increasingly directed his broadcasts to European and Asian audiences. After all, numerous other modernist writers and poets experimented with radio (though few others made Eliot' s sustained commitment to the medium). If Eliot's foreign broadcasts conform to the studied ecumenicity of his other talks before the microphone, in addressing German or Eastern European audience they did nevertheless test ecumenical limits. Today, at the end of the century, the idea of "Europe" has more currency than ever before, but with the end of the Cold War we have to strain to hear anyone insisting on the unity of European "culture". In this sense, Eliot' s broadcasts comprise a uniquely modernist moment: an attempt to use a new technology to recognize a dream in which the rest of the world was rapidly losing interest.