W. H. Auden (1907–1973)

Auden famously stated that "poetry makes nothing happen", which could be read or humility or a defense of art for art's sake. The latter makes more sense, as Auden was clearly hoping for a place in the lineage of his poetic antecedents, and a permanent home in the canon. And while he wrote big, important poems, his most direct influences were from those slightly older poets - Eliot and Yeats - who were concerned with creating a connection between personal faith and the decline of Western show more civilization.

Auden was writing poetry through the rise of fascism and Stalinism, along with the global trauma of World War 2, but he makes scant and oblique references to world events. He was more concerned with the personal and how it interacted with culture. While he ambitiously tried his hand at many different poetic forms, he most commonly can be seen in the mode of contemporaries like Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, only with a more British kind of emotional reserve, and a sharp sense of cultural context.

The last stanzas of "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" contradict Auden's belief in the limited power of poetry:

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.


Does Auden think that poetry save humanity? Or his he lauding the generous spirit of the artist? show less

I’m not sure there are any gems that aren’t already well known, but it was fascinating to read these in concert with a bunch about Churchill to get the literary version of the lamps going out all over Europe—lots of poems about dread. If you want one that hits different now, right before “Musée des Beaux Arts” there’s “Gare du Midi”: A nondescript express in from the South,/Crowds round the ticket barrier, a face/To welcome which the mayor has not contrived/Bugles or braid: show more something about the mouth/Distracts the stray look with alarm and pity./Snow is falling, Clutching a little case,/He walks out briskly to infect a city/Whose terrible future may have just arrived.” show less

A rather mixed, but mostly very enjoyable late collection of shorter poems. The sequence "About the house" - a poem for each of the rooms in their home - takes up about half the book, and is the most interesting part of the collection; then there are some poems written for particular friends, and a bunch of occasional poems written to mark various events (dinners, gaudies, etc.). These last were probably very impressive if you were there when Auden read them, but fifty years later you can't show more help feeling that he might have been better advised not to let them be printed.

I particularly enjoyed some of the odder poems in the "About the House" sequence, especially of course the Enderby-esque meditation on the cultural importance of defecation with which he celebrates "the smallest room". It's worth buying the book for this alone (and for the elegant Faber cover design, of course. show less

Domesday Song

Jumbled in one common box
Of their dark stupidity,
Orchid, swan, and Caesar lie;
Time that tires of everyone
Has corroded all the locks
Thrown away the key for fun.

In its cleft a torrent mocks
Prophets who in days gone by
Made a profit on each cry,
Persona grata now with none;
And a jackass language shocks
Poets who can only pun.

Silence settles on the clocks;
Nursing mothers point a sly
Index finger at a sky,
Crimson in the setting sun;
In the valley of the fox
Gleams the barrel of a show more gun.

Once we could have made the docks,
Now it is too late to fly;
Once too often you and I
Did what we should not have done;
Round the rampant rugged rocks
Rude and ragged rascals run. show less