Wystan Hugh Auden

[Cleanthess]

What no Auden thread? Let me fix that.

W. H. Auden, American citizen, arguably the greatest American writer of all times, a man of enormous erudition and an amazing ease for writing great poetry. The usual Wikipedia search will give you the facts of his life. I only want to point out that like Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla before him he became a U.S. Citizen. And that he wrote poetry in many styles and forms, both long and short, ranging from couplet to libretto.

Auden was an extraordinary poet, IMHO the greatest poet of the XXth Century English language. His gift for a light, even flippant touch mixed with deep ideas and perfect phrasing has no peers. When you read other famous poets veiling their meaning or their lack of meaning behind surrealism, cryptic phrasing, pretentious allusions, you think of the enormous learning of Auden hidden behind his friendly verses:

Common people.

Each to his secret cult. Now each of us
Prays to an image of his image of himself:

'Let me get through this coming day
Without a dressing down from a superior
Being worsted in a repartee,
Or behaving like an ass in front of the girls;
Let something exciting happen,
Let me find a lucky coin on a sidewalk,
Let me hear a new funny story.'

Professionals:

You need not see what someone is doing
to know if it is his vocation,
you have only to watch his eyes:
a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon
making a primary incision,
a clerk completing a bill of lading,
wear the same rapt expression,
forgetting themselves in a function.
To ignore the appetitive goddesses,
to desert the formidable shrines
of Rhea, Aphrodite, Demeter, Diana,
to pray instead to St. Phocas,
St. Barbara, San Saturnino,
or whoever one's patron is.

There should be monuments, there should be odes,
to the nameless heroes who took it first,
to the first flaker of flints
who forgot his dinner,
the first collector of seashells
to remain celibate.
Where should we be but for them?
Feral still, un-housetrained, still
wandering through forests without
a consonant to our names,
slaves of Dame Kind, lacking
all notion of a city.

Leaders:

You need not hear what orders he is giving
to know if someone has authority,
you have only to watch his mouth:

their lips and lines around them
relax , assuming an expression
not of simple pleasure at getting
their own sweet way, but of satisfaction
at being right, an incarnation
of Fortitudo, Justicia, Nous.
we owe them basilicas, divas
dictionaries, pastoral verse,
the courtesies of the city:
without these judicial mouths
how squalid existence would be,
tethered for life to some hut village,
afraid of the local snake
or the local ford demon,
speaking the local patois
of some three hundred words,
(think of the family squabbles and the
poison-pens, think of the inbreeding).

 

[Cleanthess]

about the soviet invasion of some behind-the-iron-curtain country or another:

The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach:
The Ogre cannot master speech.

About a subjugated plain,
Among it's desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.

about human love:

As I walked out one evening,
down by the river brimming
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
'Love has no ending.

'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,

'I'll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.

'The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.'

But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
'O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.

'In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.

'In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.

'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.

'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.

'O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

'O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.'


Now you go back to your Arberry, your Merrill and your Hill and despair.

 

[Cleanthess]

And to show how even in a subject matter as dry as politics Auden was at least interesting, and sometimes brilliant:

On Churchill

Providentially
right for once in his life-time
(his reasons were wrong),
the old sod was permitted
to save civilization.

Utopia

Victorious over
the foreign monster,
the patriots retained

his emergency
police regulations,
devised to suppress them.

To Goethe:

How wonderfully your songs begin
With praise of Nature and her beauty,
But then, as if it were a duty.
Your drag some god-damned sweetheart in.
Did you imagine she'd be flattered?
They never sound as if they mattered.

Their lives were boring and undignified:
They worked a little, they consumed, they died.

The Horatians

Into what fictive realms can imagination
translate you, Flaccus, and your kin? In all
labyrinthine economies

there are obscure nooks into which Authority
never pokes a suspicious nose, embusque havens
for natural bachelors
and political idiots.

You thought well of your Odes, Flaccus, and believed they
would live, but knew, and have taught your descendants to
say with you: 'As makers go,
compared with Pindar or any

of the great foudroyant masters who don't ever
amend, we are, for all our polish, of little
stature, and, as human lives,
compared with authentic martyrs

like Regulus, of no account. We can only
do what it seems to us we were made for, look at
this world with a happy eye
but from a sober perspective.'

 

[Cleanthess]

What do I mean when I say that Auden hides his enormous learning behind his easily accessible verses? Well, for starters, consider that favorite poem of conservatives 'The Horatians' (despite the fact that Auden calls them political idiots in that poem).

First, Auden wrote the poem in a metric structure (feet) similar to to the one that Horace used for his odes. Next when Auden writes:

compared with authentic martyrs/like Regulus

Auden is referring to Horace's

Ode III.5 (not my translation)
...
Regulus’s far-seeing mind warned of this,
when he objected to shameful surrender,
and considered from its example
harm would come to the following age,
It’s said he set aside his wife’s chaste kisses,
and his little ones, as of less importance,
and, grimly, he set his manly face
to the soil, until he might be able

to strengthen the Senate’s wavering purpose,
by making of himself an example no
other man had made, and hurrying,
among grieving friends, to noble exile.
Yet he knew what the barbarous torturer
was preparing for him. Still he pushed aside
the kinsmen who were blocking his way,
and the people who delayed his going.

And when Auden writes:

'compared with Pindar or any/of the great foudroyant masters'

Auden is referring to Horace's

Ode IV.2 (not my translation)

Iulus, whoever tries to rival Pindar,
flies on waxen wings, with Daedalean art,
and is doomed, like Icarus, to give a name
to glassy waters.

Like a river, rushing down from the mountains,
that the rain has filled above its usual banks,
so Pindar’s deep voice seethes, immeasurably,
and goes on flowing,
...
Son of Antony, a powerful breeze raises
the Dircean swan, whenever it’s carried
to cloudy heights. While I create my verses,
in the manner

of a humble Matinian bee, that goes
gathering pollen from all the pleasant thyme,
and labors among the many groves, on the banks
of flowing Tiber.

 

[Ben Jackson]

One 20th Century poet that I have respect for. I don't really like British poetry that much, apart from Dylan Thomas, but Auden's beautiful poet. Favourite poems from him include: Funeral Blues, In Memory of Yeats (Time will pardon Language), As I Walk Out One Evening. One thing about Auden's the wide range of themes. If you're looking for poet with diverse themes, I think Auden's the poet to read. I don't know any poet with such wide-range of themes. I have his Collected Poems to read so I will have a better opinion on him when I'm done.