But artists, though, are human; and for man
To be a scivvy is not nice at all:
So everyone will do the best he can
To get a patch of ground which he can call
His own. He doesn't really care how small,
So long as he can style himself the master:
Unluckily for art, it's a disaster.
-- from Letter to Lord Byron by W. H. Auden
-- sdh
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When the article, “On Working with W. H. Auden on The Psalms,” appeared here, I received a number of questions and requests for more information. So, I’m taking this opportunity to respond – at least, in part.
I’ve noticed it came as a complete surprise to many persons that W. H. Auden was so fully engaged, intellectually and emotionally, in the Episcopal Church’s revision of THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER, begun in earnest in the late 1960s. While a portion of his views on the subject was included in the article, associated material by and about Auden on the revision project is also contained in the final pages of Later Auden, the most recent biography by Edward Mendelson, Auden’s literary executor and principal biographer. To receive a little more flavor of the intensity of Auden’s perspective toward the subject, add the following excerpt from one of his letters:
“What has happened over the last few years has made me realize that those who rioted when Cranmer introduced a vernacular liturgy were right. When this reform nonsense started, what we should have done is the exact opposite of the Roman Catholics: we should have said ‘Henceforth, we will have the Book of Common Prayer in Latin.’ (There happens to be an excellent translation.)”
These views were further clarified and emphasized in the considerable communication that exists on various aspects of the revision process between Auden and Canon Charles Guilbert, who was, at the time, the Custodian of THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER of the Episcopal Church. The basis for Auden’s fundamental aversion to the revision can be summed up, I believe, in this thoughtful and quite eloquent excerpt from a letter, dated March 19th, 1968, to Guilbert:
“We had the Providential good-fortune, a blessing denied to the Roman Catholics, that our Prayer Book was compiled at the ideal historical moment, that is to say, when the English Language was already in all essentials the language we use now – nobody has any difficulty understanding Shakespeare’s or Cranmer’s English, as they have difficulty with Beowulf or Chaucer – at the same time, men in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries still possessed what our own has almost totally lost, a sense for the ceremonial and ritual both in life and in language.”
Although Auden’s ideas were decidedly contrary to much of the revision project, they were not as vehement regarding the psalm retranslation for which he served on the drafting committee before returning to Europe to live. In this respect, since the two of us held the position of poets on the committee, I’ve been asked from time to time if I could identify specific Auden contributions to the retranslated psalms, now contained in THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER. As a consequence of my joining the committee sometime after Auden had become a member, combined with his heavy schedule – mainly, Auden’s frequent trips to Europe and his eventual move from New York City – we never attended the same meetings of the drafting committee.Therefore, I cannot be an original source for Auden’s textual offerings to the finally adopted psalm retranslations. Nonetheless, I was, of course, very interested in the specific recommendations Auden would have made to the committee, and I inquired during my participation on the committee about those contributions. It should be obvious and noted that a true rendering of the translated meaning of the considered text, as a matter of principle, preceded, for obvious reasons, any contribution by either poet. Before the poets’ assistance was invoked, the scholars on the drafting committee traced, to determine if mistranslations surfaced at points along the trail, received text from the original Hebrew through the Greek (Septuagint), through Old Latin, and through St. Jerome’s Latin revision to Miles Coverdale’s 16thcentury translation, which also relied, in part, on Luther’s German Bible and which constituted, with little adjustment, the psalms contained in THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER for virtually the book’s entire life. One final step for the committee also involved a review of the 1928 version of THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER, which had accomplished a few modest adjustments to Coverdale.
According to comments of the chairman of the drafting committee, with whom I worked closely on the retranslation for more than five years to completion of the project, Auden provided three memorable contributions to the adopted retranslation: In psalm 27, he replaced “secret place” in both Coverdale and the 1928 version with “secrecy”; for psalm 42, he replaced “water pipes” in Coverdale and “water floods” in the 1928 version with “cataracts”; and for psalm 95, he replaced “prepared” in both Coverdale and the 1928 version with “molded.” I also believe Auden made an additional and fourth contribution: He presented forceful pleas for the committee to retain a variety of inherited language; for example, I know he argued for the preservation of this line from psalm 122: “Jerusalem is built as a city that is at unity with itself,” and that is what one finds today in THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER. I’d not be surprised at all if a few more traditional lines were also saved through his erudition and zeal.
Notwithstanding the deep reservations he held about the general revision, Auden still felt compelled to offer help, reflecting, among other things, his ties to both the institution and the qualities of the traditional liturgy. At one point in the correspondence, Auden writes to Guilbert, “I should be honored and delighted to serve in any capacity on the Standing Liturgical Commission.” I also believe the offer to assist illustrated a genuine generosity and good will, which unfortunately do not comport with the judgment, among many people, that Auden regularly exhibited a honed curmudgeon attitude. My interchange with W. H. Auden can not confirm this latter view; a person of strong ideas he was – with polymathic knowledge and precise proportion at his fingertips to enhance and justify those views, but he was mostly accessible and transparent and not rude, arrogant, or routinely short – not from my experience.
I distinctly remember my first encounter with him. In my early 20s, I decided to try out New York City as a place to live – during the late 1960s. Early on in the settling process, I found myself thumbing through the mammoth Manhattan phone book, and either accidentally or by intense curiosity, I unearthed the name, W. H. Auden. Now, surely, the poet would not be so open as to list himself in the phone book for everyone to know the number – I assumed it was just a duplicate name in the gargantuan city. Yet, to confirm my conclusion, I decided to call – the hubris of the young at play. Someone picked up the phone, and I began to inquire: “Is this W. H. Auden?” “Yes.” “Is this the poet, W. H. Auden?” “Yes.” It couldn’t be, could it? So, I started to stumble and stutter into some comment about how much I admired and enjoyed his verse. He immediately made me feel at ease, and we talked for awhile – I didn’t feel rushed to jump off the phone. Little did I know that, in four years, I’d be communicating with him over the retranslation of the psalms for THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER.
There is also a story involving Edward Mendelson that corresponds with my own, both of which could possibly help shed some of Auden’s adhering reputation among some people for brief tolerance and quick severity. Mendelson, an assistant professor at Yale at the time, had been given the job of serving as Auden’s chaperon and guide on a visit the poet made to the campus to talk with students and to record his poems. During the stay, Auden mentioned to Mendelson that he wanted to put together a new collection of his essays, to be titled FOREWORDS AND AFTERWORDS; however, Auden didn’t remember what he had written, to which Mendelson replied that he had copied all of Auden’s essays, which were then in Mendelson’s apartment. Auden, obviously pleased, spent a few hours with the copies but then said he would need to return at a later date in order to read all of the essays. Following the trip to Yale, after Auden had announced his departure for England, he wrote to Mendelson asking that he, Mendelson, make the selections for him, and sent a check for $150 to cover the costs of copying. In turn, Mendelson put together a preliminary list of contents, which Auden reviewed and amended; Mendelson, a few days later, sent a sheaf of copies to Auden. Sometime after these exchanges, Auden asked Mendelson to be his literary executor. And still later, Mendelson remitted a check to Auden for $40, the sum remaining after the costs of copying and mailing were paid. When Auden received the check, it apparently became a celebratory moment for him and Chester Kallman, with much waving of the check, for, as then exclaimed, they had, at last, found an honest man.
Mendelson chose to end his biography, LATER AUDEN, with attention to the poet’s fervid concentration on liturgy and the conduct of worship. Considering the remarkable focus and energy Auden placed on these issues during the last years of his life, there could be no more fitting way to close the final chapter on the poet’s life.
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The 150 mostly short poems constituting the psalter (the body of psalms) have engendered admiration, emulation, and enduring precedent for a long line of English and American poets. Like so many of those poets before and after him, W. H. Auden regarded the psalms as a special body of memorable poetry. Indeed, during the last years of his life, he was engaged, as a member of the drafting committee, in the retranslation of the psalms, as contained in The Book of Common Prayer (BCP), the famous book that serves as the liturgical guide for The Episcopal Church (USA), which had, at the time, authorized a complete overhaul of the entire book.
While the form for the psalms evolved through our language into different applications, their original construction influenced the direction of our verse. For example, though the ancient Hebrew ear apparently enjoyed more truncated lines and fewer cadences, the English-American ear, as a general matter, extrapolated verse structure into longer lines and more cadences. Notwithstanding many other adaptations, including major adjustments to subject matter and tone, the model of the psalms has persisted to effect a stylistic reference point among English and American writers of verse – in innumerable cases, no doubt, without the literary practitioner’s conscious knowledge of the association.
Modern scholarship has advised that the first psalms began to be written around 1,000 BCE, soon after David, the legendary warrior-leader-poet, forged Israel into a formidable theocracy,. Scholars generally agree that the composition of the psalms occurred continued through the period that followed the rebuilding of the second temple in Jerusalem and ended around 500 BCE. When the Hebrews returned from the Babylonian exile around 535 BCE, they renewed a commitment to the faith of their ancestors by taking a series of redemptive steps, including the codification of a worship book of psalms. So we poets today reach back through almost three millennia to establish a connection with some early architects and engineers of our craft.
Even though Auden viewed his participation in the overall revision of the BCP ambivalently, the project, including especially his more direct role in the retranslation of the psalms, nevertheless, occupied a good deal of his attention and seemed to be central to him during this period, as evidenced by the number and intensity of letters and other writings he wrote at the time.. For instance, Edward Mendelson, Auden’s literary executor and principal biographer, closes his most recent book, Later Auden, by discussing W. H. Auden’s role in and reactions to the project.
Auden’s views on the revision of the psalms for the BCP were protective of the verse, illustrated in a letter to me while we served as the two poets, on the drafting committee: “All I can do is to try to persuade the scholars not to alter Coverdale unless there is a definite mistranslation.” To him, if there were to be a revision to the original 16th century Anglican translation by Miles Coverdale, then Auden’s mission was to make sure the surgery on his beloved psalms happened tenderly.
His attitude toward certain other elements of change to the BCP was not so well-mannered and disciplined. A rather humorous moment occurred during this time that dramatically describes his irritation – no, his vitriolic anger – over aspects of the prayer book’s revision. In a letter to me during the summer of 1971, W. H. Auden shared his outrage over other adjustments then being considered for possible inclusion in the BCP, which dates back to 1549. Auden wrote:
“My own parish (St. Mark’s in the Bowery) has gone so crazy that I have to go to the Russian Orthodox Church where, thank God, though I know what is going on, I don’t understand a single word. The odd thing about the liturgical reform movement is that it is not asked for by the laity – they dislike it. It is a fad of a few crazy priests. If they imagine that their high jinks will bring youth into the churches, they are very much mistaken.”
Taking into account Auden’s strong, opposing views about certain facets (away from the psalm retranslation) of the changes to the BCP, it is a curious irony that the thirtieth anniversary of the 1979 publication of the BCP revision came on the heels of the thirty-fifth anniversary of the passing of W. H. Auden, the revision’s most celebrated participant.
The psalms on which he and I worked have now become part of the official BCP and have been adopted for worship books and services by Lutherans in Canada and the United States and by the Anglican Church of Canada. Auden’s part in the retranslation was quite consequential – one can point to specific and outstanding contributions he made to a number of individual psalms.
English and American poets have often employed their talents in adapting the psalms by having them become metrical and rhythmic for the English language, by using them for launching related or derived insights, by imposing on them personal and stylistic characteristics and devices, or by retranslating them so the poems comport with up-to-date Hebrew scholarship. George Herbert’s translation of the 23rd psalm, John Donne’s poem upon the translation of the psalms by Philip and Mary Sidney, and the Sidneys’ own psalm adaptations stand as outstanding examples. Robert Burns, John Milton, Samuel Coleridge and Francis Bacon also occasionally found ways to draw on the psalms.
More recently, American poets who have reached back to those ancient poems for their own particular purposes include Daniel Berrigan, Robert Pinsky, Kathleen Norris, William Stafford, and Anthony Hecht.
The psalms have also helped allay literary feuds. For instance, in the 1950s, both T. S. Eliot and C. S. Lewis, titans in the world of letters who disagreed on a great variety of subjects, were asked by the Archbishop of Canterbury to serve on the drafting committee for a retranslation of the psalms by the Church of England. Prior to joining the committee, the two had, more than once, traded cutting insults and excoriations. When Eliot first met Lewis, he is said to have derisively remarked: “Mr. Lewis, you’re much older than I thought you would be.” Lewis had previously referred to Eliot as a promoter of irresponsibility, and, at one point, apparently offered: “T. S. Eliot is the single man who sums up the thing I am fighting against.”
However, once they began to work on the psalms, the previously held antagonisms started to evaporate. For example, letter salutations from Lewis to Eliot are said to have changed from “Dear Sir” to “My Dear Eliot.” The ancient poems had broken through the borders of two well organized and well fortified states.
Why do the psalms fascinate poets of every age? It may be as simple as the words of one poet, who said a few years ago, meaning to be only half-facetious: “Poetry hasn’t improved much since the psalms.”
Professor Tolkien of The Hobbit once suggested that the worst thing that ever happened to poetry was the printing press; one can infer from the comment that poetry in the oral tradition, in which the psalms were fashioned, had to be immediate, attractive, intense, emotional and very personal. This view would also partially accord with the words of Auden, who wrote to me at one point: “I don’t believe there is such an animal as Twentieth Century Man.”
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via Faber Books photo stream
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Random thoughts . . . Tom Clark maintains his blog with rare dedication. Check out today's, devoted to a Joe Brainard prose piece and the drawings of Hans Holbein. . . We were talking about religion-substitutes recently. I nominated "art" and "politics." My friends volunteered "pornography" and "drugs." They won. . . I've been reading Auden writing in the Byronic manner:
<<<
I hate pompositas and all authority;
Its air of injured rightness also sends
Me shuddering from the cultured smug minority.
'Perpetual revolution,' left-wing friends
Tell me, 'in counter-revolution ends.
Your fate will be to linger on outcast
A selfish pink old Liberal to the last.'
>>>
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If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
-- from The More Loving One
by W. H. Auden (1907-1973)
Find more posts about W. H. Auden here.
-- sdh
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Hey there. Daniel Nester here. I've guest-blogged before in this space, so I'll cut to the quick and start posting things. If you want to know more about me and whatnot, check out where I live online as well as my usual blogging space, the group blog We Who Are About To Die.
I'll start off with a scan of W.H. Auden's "daydream College for Bards," from his essay "The Poet and The City" collected in The Dyer's Hand. I love bringing this up when, as the seasons seem to dictate, people start talking about the utility of graduate, and even undergraduate, writing classes.
I think I first encountered the Auden quote reading Clayton Eshelman's piece in the collection of poetry/prosody, Conversant Essays, in a class given by Mark Rudman. David Lehman mentions the Auden Daydream College in his introduction to the 2008 edition of Best American Poetry.
Writing in 1991, Erica Riggs addresses Auden's Item #5, the bit about cultivating a garden plot. Good ole Wystan stipulates this, Riggs writes, "perhaps to teach them how a crop is brought to "'ripeness.'"
Riggs continues to say that "a gardener can do much, using experience and judgment to produce asuccessful crop, just as a poet may bring critical judgment to bear on the composition of poetry. But the crucial processes of germination and fructification draw energy from earth and sun in their seasonal cycle--vast powers that he can only hope to engage by being humbly responsive to them."
I'll leave this this kicker-quote, also found in the Riggs. "I am always interested," Auden writes, "in hearing what a poet has to say about the nature of poetry, though I do not take it too seriously. As objective statements his definitions are never accurate, never complete, and always one-sided. Not one would stand up under a rigorous analysis."
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I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
'I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,'
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
-- W. H. Auden
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W.H.Auden
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
January, 1939
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1. In February, I met with P. Scott Cunningham and Pete Borrebach for lunch at a noodle house. I couldn't find the place at first because it was lodged in the lobby of a motel on Biscayne Boulevard that, in years past, was known more for hookers and guns and rock (and I don't mean 'and roll'). But this neighborhood has now reinvented itself --as is also the city of Miami's custom-- into a hamlet of galleries, eateries, and indie mom and pop shops. There are things to do here besides driving by with locked car doors. Scott and Pete were working on their own newborn - O, Miami, the city's first poetry festival.
I ate basil and tofu and listened to their schemes: they were going to try to place if only one poem into the hands of my hometown's 2.5 million citizens, regardless of whether they liked poetry or not. Scott and Pete were most interested in the latter, the possible converts, and they knew how to set the trap. They'd woo the city with a relentless courtship. O, Miami would wrap buses with couplets, fly in W.S. Merwin, the sitting U.S. poet laureate, invite Chilean poet Raúl Zurita, hip hop legend Kool Moe Dee, actor-now-writer James Franco, and many more to speak and read, host collaborative art shows and a literary death match, surreptitously sew poetry tags into shirts at thrift stores, drop poems from the sky, rent a Ferrari. They had a lot of wild ideas. Had they locked it all down yet? No. When would the festival launch? In about 6 weeks and running the whole month of April. I smiled and slurped my dripping and delicious noodles. I thought a) These guys are crazy. b) God, I hope they do it. All of it.
Continue reading "The Tropical Roundup: Highlights from O, Miami [by Emma Trelles]" »
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