WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - The Poetry Fix: The Boston Evening Transcript

Episode Date: October 10, 2025

Today, Erika Kyba reads "The Boston Evening Transcript," by T. S. Eliot. Much in the same vein as Henry David Thoreau, Eliot mediates on our constant obsession with the news, and what that does to the human person.

Welcome to the Poetry Fix on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm your host, Erica Kaiba, bringing you your weekly fix of poetry from across time. Today we're reading the Boston Evening Transcript by T.S. Eliot. Before we begin our discussion of the poem itself, it might be helpful to frame it with the philosophy of the great American transcendentalist, Henry David Thoreau. In his seminal work, Walden, there's a section where Thoreau contemplates our obsession with the news. He essentially thinks that we put off living in our immediate surroundings by absorbing a constant stream of events happening elsewhere. He notes that there's always some disaster happening somewhere, and we like to wring our hands about it and talk about the great crisis that the world is in.

The implication, though, is that we're worrying about something that we're powerless to do much about. And while we worry about that which we can't fix, we rob ourselves of opportunities to act in our own lives. This same dynamic takes a poetic shape in the Boston Evening Transcript. Elliot writes that as evening falls, it wakens the appetites of life in some, and to others, brings the Boston Evening Transcript. There's a dichotomy that's dividing these two. It's either the appetite for life or the evening paper. You don't get both.

And I think the reason why is that reading the news in Elliot and Thoreau's literary imagination is a sort of numbing agent. It's also noteworthy that the appetite for life, and the newspaper are both responses to evening quickening, which is a word that archaically is used to describe pregnancy. That's a little bit of a counterintuitive image, the evening being pregnant with possibilities, because the evening represents the end of the day. It's precisely the moment where you have exhausted your opportunities to do all the work and make all the choices that comprise your day. But I think that's part of the point. When evening falls, we're reminded that the day is finite, and really that our lives are finite. If there's anything we left undone or opportunities

that we let pass us by, we're struck with regret by the day's end. And that's why the evening awakens an appetite for life in some and quickens with possibility. It spurs them with energy to make the most of the next day, to rage against the dying of the light, as Dylan Thomas would put it. But there's another possible response to the evening, and that's shutting oneself up with the daily paper. The reader doesn't give himself the space to attend to his own life, reflect on regrets, and thus become hungry for new opportunities. Instead, he immediately seeks the stimulus of the paper after coming home from work, to read about lives that are not his own, and take an information about disasters that he has no power to change, thus robbing himself of power over his own life. Instead of activity,

the reader of the transcript is reduced to passivity, swaying in the wind, as Eliot writes, intellectually and emotionally influenced by someone else's thoughts, ripe as a field of corn for someone else to harvest. Whether or not Elliot was influenced by Thoreau's perspective on the matter is hard to say, but they certainly seem to be looking at the same problem and coming up with the same diagnosis. With all that said, let's dive in. The Boston Evening Transcript by T.S. Eliot.

The readers of the Boston Evening Transcript sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn. When evening quickens faintly in the street, wakening the appetites of life in some, and to others bringing the Boston evening transcript, I mount the steps and ring the bell, turning wearily as one would turn to nod goodbye to Roche Foucault, if the street were time and he at the end of the street.

And I say, Cousin Harriet, here is the Boston evening transcript. You've been listening to the poetry fix with Airbus. Erica Kaiba. If you enjoyed this episode, consider following The Poetry Fix on Spotify, YouTube, or Apple Podcasts. And if you have any poems you want to see in a future episode, email your suggestions to the Poetry Fix at gmail.com. Join me next week and we'll be reading Adam's Curse by W.B. Yates.