User Reviews

GREAT POETS IN THEIR OWN WORDS offers a fascinating - and rare - opportunity to watch some of the twentieth century's most celebrated artists either talking about or reading from their work. They include T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden, Robert Graves, Hugh McDiarmid, Stevie Smith, Edith Sitwell, R. S. Thomas and Dylan Thomas. Some of the archival film is extremely old: the clips of Sitwell, Eliot and (some of) Auden date from the Forties and Fifties, while Dylan Thomas' readings are from the Caedmon recordings made in New York the year before his death in 1953. What emerges most tangibly from this documentary is the elusiveness of many of the poets' works - despite critical contributions from figures such as John Mullan (who devised the series), Blake Morrison, Germaine Greer, Simon Armitage and Liz Lochhead - their comments do not really sum up the essence of what we hear and witness on screen. For works like "The Waste Land," for instance, the real effect stems from listening to the words and drawing one's own conclusions, rather than looking for any fixed "meaning." The same also applies to "The Four Quartets" as well as much of Smith's poetry. Some of the poets are also shown being interviewed; I particularly enjoyed McDiarmid's comments on the value of poetry as well as his anti-Englishness, and Sitwell and R. S. Thomas' analogy between poetry and religion. If nothing else, GREAT POETS IN THEIR OWN WORDS underlines the power of poetry; it is not just something to be studied or analyzed, but could be approached at a subliminal level as something to be enjoyed emotionally and/or spiritually. Forget the labels - such as "Modernism" or "anti-Modernism"; just treat the poems on their own terms as imaginative responses to the World, in which sound and sense assume equal significance.