The Best American Poetry

Mary Jo Salter on W. H. Auden (& more) in the new "Literary Matters"

Mary Jo Salter on W. H. Auden in Literary Matters

What is the secret meaning of the last line of "Epitaph on a Tyrant": 
"And when he cried, the little children died in the street"?

To what extent does "New Year Letter" owe its greatness to Auden's mastery of the tetrameter line?

"Poetry might be defined as". . .
complete the sentence with a six-word formulation derived from Auiden.

David Lehman thinks "Caliban to the Audience" is Auden's greatest prose poem. What would Mary Jo Salter say?

To get the answers to these and other fascinating questions related to the great W. H. Auden read Mary Jo Salter's essay in the new issue of Literary Matters, edited by Ryan Wilson. Salter reviewed the two new volumes of Auden's collected poetry edited by Edward Mendelson, with elaborate annonations, published in 202 by Princeton UP.

An excerpt:

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One could spend years tracing such unwitting rehearsals and deliberate rethinkings. In Another Time’s “XXIX. Song,” whose manuscript Mendelson dates from September 1939, Auden writes “Silence invades the breathing wood” although he has already written, in January of that year, the famous line of the Yeats elegy, “Silence invaded the suburbs.” Maybe he didn’t remember. I prefer the line from the Yeats elegy, not because of the difference between a wood and a suburb, but because the past tense, “invaded,” makes you wonder what comes after the silence. In “X. Brussels in Winter,” I prefer the arresting 1966 revision “And fifty franks will earn a stranger right / To take the shuddering city in his arms” to the milder 1938 original, “And fifty franks will earn the stranger right / To warm the heartless city in his arms.” In “Music is International” (1947), Auden writes that “we may some day need very much to / Remember when we were happy,” which is fine, but it’s not as delightful as the ending to “Goodbye to the Mezzogiorno” (1958) : “…though one cannot always /  Remember exactly why one has been happy, / There is no forgetting that one was.” Auden was often wrong-headed to ditch his earlier poems, but it’s a pleasure to see him, late in his career, writing better versions of similar material, either in revised poems or wholly new ones. He also recasts ideas from prose into poetry, or the reverse. Among many examples, in “Vespers” (1954) from Horae Canonicae, he writes, “In my Eden our only source of political news is gossip”; in a section of his essay “Reading,” he lists the attributes of his “personal Eden”, and one of them is “Sources of Public Information: Gossip.”

And there’s yet another pleasure in store for the reader who plans to peruse these two volumes—as I do—for the rest of life itself, studying just a few pages in detail at a time.  You can never overestimate Auden’s technical ingenuity. [Edward] Mendelson alerts us to some of the most winning bits: for instance, a note says that Auden told Malcolm Cowley that the eleven-syllable line used in both “Miranda” (in “The Sea and the Mirror”) and “Lullaby” (in “For the Time Being”) “comes from Ireland—there has to be a caesura after the fifth syllable.” In another note, we learn that Auden proposes (insanely?) to Theodore Spencer, whose writing course at Harvard he will be visiting, “What about making your class write a drapa?” If you don’t know, and I didn’t, this is a Medieval Icelandic form, a death-lament or dirge, with a very long list of undergraduate-unfriendly requirements like this: “the odd lines contain an internal assonance, the second of which falls on the penultimate syllable.” 
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And there many other great things in the issue.

https://www.literarymatters.org/15-2-our-auden/

On Auden's "September 1, 1939": An Exchange with Lawrence Raab [by David Lehman]

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October 30, 2001
Dear David

It was very nice indeed to meet you and hear your poems. I have a quick question. Do I remember correctly your saying that you had received via e-mail a number of copies of Auden's "September 1, 1939" after Sept. 11? I ask because I've agreed to give a lecture here in the spring on the subject of -- vaguely -- poetry in the world, or poetry/art's response to events like Sept. 11, or more precisely, the relation of poetry to consolation. I want to use Sept. 1, 1939, especially in light of Auden's fraught relationship with the poem and particularly with what seems like its key line--"We must love one another or die." Nobody sent me any poems after Sept. 11, but I'm interested that the Auden poem would be one that was going around electronically. Am I right in recalling that you mentioned this? Do you remember if that line was in the versions sent you? (Auden changed the line, as you probably know, and later cut the whole stanza, before disavowing the entire poem.) Thanks, Larry
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November 1, 2001

Hello, Larry, and thanks for your note. I undoubtedly did mention receiving "September 1, 1939" in the form of an e-mail. At least four or five persons sent it to me in the immediate aftermath of September 11. Many have commented on the electronic circulation of this poem in particular and of poems in general. Others making the rounds include Yeats's "Easter 1916," Larkin's "An Arundel Tomb," and Marianne Moore's "What Are Years?" but Auden's "September 1, 1939" had by far the greatest circulation. A column about it appeared on "Slate" toward the end of September and someone responded with a less enthusiastic view of the poem [going so far as to associate it with conservative Republicanism]. "Sept. 1, 1939" also turned out to be the subject of an "American Notes" column in the "TLS." There has been a recent spate of articles about poetry's "healing" properties, the appeal of verse in difficult times, including an otherwise unremarkable piece in today's "New York Times" (Nov. 1), which, of course, mentions Auden's "September 1, 1939" prominently. Part of the reason for the poem's sudden relevance is the general suspicion that September 11th may be our September 1st, the first day of a global war on a scale and against a foe that may make us nostalgic for the [ambiguities of the] Cold War. And then there are the blind skyscrapers and dense commuters, the odor of death in the September night, and the great flawed stanza, with that line Auden wound up hating. (But the more accurate "We must live one another and die" just doesn't work, does it?) The history of the poem, with Auden's hesitations, revisions and disavowals, would make fascinating reading right now. I've always been curious about just those poems of his that Auden ruthlessly disowned like "Spain 1938" and almost the whole of "The Orators." In any case the excised stanza was (to answer your question) included in the poem as it made the rounds last month. I hope very much you'll let me read what you write. Good luck on it. I'm so glad you were able to come to my reading. All the best, David
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November 2, 2001
Dear David,

    Many thanks for the response, which is very useful.  I'd be happy
to show you the lecture, if it turns out well, that is.  And I agree that
"We must love one another and die" doesn't do it, though I don't think
it's more accurate, since we must die, but loving each other is surely a
more optional matter, and no doubt impossible for some, who will die
anyway.  The earlier "or" line seems to me truer if read as meaning that
we may die from the condition of not loving one another.  The notion that
if we love one another we won't die is either true as an act of religious
faith, or so obviously untrue as to be merely silly.  So I'm thinking at
the moment.  But then there's another problem, which I'd be interested in
knowing if you feel is even in the poem.  That stanza begins: "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:"  Following that colon are three statements, the last of which is
"We must love one another or die."  Syntactically, wouldn't these be
examples of romantic lies, rather than the truth, even though they sound
true?  I wonder.

    All best, Larry
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November 3 [?]

This is a brilliant reading. And it may be that "There is no such thing as the state / And no one exists alone" would exemplify the "folded lie", "Hunger allows no choice / To the citizen or the police" would be the law of authority speaking, and then "We must love one another or die" becomes very specifically "the romantic lie in the brain / Of the sensual man in the street." The much-discussed line is then, if a point of light, an ironic one.

The major problem with this interpretation as I see it is that Auden uses colons throughout the poem but not in a consistent way. Certainly in several places the colon is used to introduce or identify or indicate an equality of the propositions preceding and following it; but there are also instances -- in stanzas 1, 2, 4, 6 -- where the colon is used more ambiguously, as if to indicate a simple advance in the argument.

Please let me know if you have thought further about this.

On another note, kudos on "Saint Augustine's Day" in "The New Republic"of September 17. A wonderful poem. I am only now beginning to catch up on my  reading.

David
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"September 1, 1939" [by W. H. Auden]

Here it is again: September 1, 1939, seventy-eight years later. Can you picture Auden at that "dive" on Fifty-Second Street, (aka Swing Street) on that terrible day when the Germans invaded Poland and quaked the earth? One of the best stanzas is a metaphorical description of that bar and others like it.

Quiz of the day:
WHA disliked the last line of the penultimate stanza because he felt it was "dishonest," by which I think he meant "untrue."

He changed it to
(1) We must love one another and die
(2) We must love one another or die
(3) We must love one another or diet
(4) One must love mother nature or die
(5) If winter comes, can spring be far behind?

Light up a Winston and think of dear Wystan. Bragging rights go to the winner!

 

"September 1, 1939" [by W. H. Auden]

September 1, 1939

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

Epigraph of the Month: "Tremor of Intent"

Anthony Burgess's Tremor of Intent (1966), his satire of espionage novels, bears a double epigraph. The first is from W. H. Auden:

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But between the day and night
The choice is free to all, and light
Falls equally on black and white.
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The second, from T. S. Eliot (pictured, right):

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The worst that can be said of most of our malefactors, from statesmen to thieves, is that they are not men enough to be damned. >>

J. D. McClatchy as Editor: "Uncensored Note to Auden" [by Jane Mayhall]

 

 

 

In a year of losses we lost a mainstay of the poetry scene yesterday when J. D. McClatchy (pictured at left, with James Merrill) succumbed after a long bout with cancer. Of his poems he wrote this In 2009: 

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Poems accumulate--or mine tend to. Tremulous globules . . . an image, a phrase, a feeling . . . begin to condense on the pane of a larger idea. Proximity encourages their combination into something larger, moister, more glistening. Even so, there are times when some bead or other doesn't join, is left at the edge. Most are then merely shaken off. Sometimes, one is transferred to the notebook, a note too sharp or flat to go with the rest. I noticed a few of these, and strung them together as "Lingering Doubts," the title pointing to their common occasion. I might have let each stand on its own, but the age of the epigram seems to have passed with J. V. Cunningham. Hence this small suite of doubts, their tone of voice shifting from the ironic to the embittered to the plaintive. >>>

The occasion was poem Sandy wrote that David Wagoner selected for The Best American Poetry 2009. The richness of metaphor, the elegance of composition, were the virtues of McCatchy's prose, which was itself continuous with his finely wrought, formally ambitious  poems. McClatchy did so much so well -- he wrote libretti and taught at several major universities -- that I would point to one area for which he has not yet been fully recognized. He was a tireless editor -- of books and collections of poetry, of anthologies and, for a quarter of a century, of The Yale Review. I love literary magazines and know how much work goes into editing an issue, let alone four of them in a year.I was thinking of some of the pieces Sandy published and remembered a day in 2008 that was brightened by my reading of The Yale Review. -- DL

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During the summer I like picking up an old literary magazine lying around from some previous season to see what I might have missed the first go round. To the hammock today I went with the October 1999 issue of The Yale Review (vol. 87, no. 4) smartly edited by J. D. McClatchy. There's a nice little piece on Auden by a Cambridge Fellow, Ian Sansom, and a very fine poem on the same subject by Jane Mayhall, which I am going to type below. In Mayhall's poem I admire the way the writing -- the line-lengths even -- approach prose but turn back at the last minute into the terrain of verse. The landscape imagery is sustained and given a biographical edge ("the wrinkled Grand Canyon of your face") and the diction moves from high poetic ("madrigal sunlight") to academic vernacular ("radically moral score-keeping") in a single bound. I think Auden would have liked "the dreamy / semen of a distinguished flotsam." It's a line he might have written, but he would have revised it out of a subsequent reprinting of the poem.

-- DL

Auden in 1970
(photo credit: Tyrone Dukes / New York Times)

Uncensored Note to Auden

To bask in your intelligence, when the wither
and time-gaps are stalking around me,
when the literal husks and brains never tried are
going to steer me off the road, I service
myself to the faint yellowed pages of this book, its
tiny lighted torch figure,

the running insignia on the spine of
a 1958 Modern Library Edition, and I come to whatever dense
trilogies; compassion, spirited wit, wide-reaching
intellect, emotional power. These obviously
unstable and ridiculous concepts given
over to donkeys, ("some great

gross braying") predicaments out of date -- in these
I would take long breaths of pure joy. The madrigal sunlight,
roboust willows of your radiant, asymmetrical
and radically moral score-keeping. The dreamy
semen of a distingushed flotsam. I need
that satirical pastiche,

against the false simplicity
your imitators have become.
The wrinkled Grand Canyon of your face gives me that
wreath, infinitude; the tropics and winter of
the real world, you have reproachfully
left us.

-- Jane Mayhall

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From our archives. Originally posted August 4, 2008.

"Their Lonely Betters" [by W. H. Auden]

As I listened from a beach-chair in the shade
To all the noises that my garden made,
It seemed to me only proper that words
Should be withheld from vegetables and birds.

A robin with no Christian name ran through
The Robin-Anthem which was all it knew,
And rustling flowers for some third party waited
To say which pairs, if any, should get mated.

Not one of them was capable of lying,
There was not one which knew that it was dying
Or could have with a rhythm or a rhyme
Assumed responsibility for time.

Let them leave language to their lonely betters
Who count some days and long for certain letters;
We, too, make noises when we laugh or weep:
Words are for those with promises to keep

"Parlor Game for a Wet Afternoon" [by W. H. Auden]

 “Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow.

“A parlor game for a wet afternoon — imagining the mirrors of one's friends. A has a huge pier glass, gilded and baroque, B a discreet little pocket mirror in a pigskin case with his initials stamped on the back; whenever on looks at C, he is in the act of throwing his mirror away but, if one looks in his pocket or up his sleeve, one always finds another, like an extra ace.

“Most, perhaps all, our mirrors are inaccurate and uncomplimentary, though to varying degrees and in various ways. Some magnify, some diminish, others, whatever their owner does, will only return lugubrious, comic, derisive, or terrifying images.

“But the properties of our own particular mirror are not so important as we sometimes like to think. We shall be judged, not by the kind of mirror found on us, but by the use we have made of it, by our riposte to our reflection.”

***

"A vain woman realizes that vanity is a sin, and in order not to succumb to temptation, has all the mirrors removed from her house. Consequently, in a short while she cannot remember what she is like. She remembers that vanity is a sin, but she forgets that she is vain."

Epigraph of the Month: Why Art? [by David Lehman]

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                   We have Art
in order that we may not perish from Truth.

                                      -- F. W. Nietzsche
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The opposition of art to truth is vehement in this, the epigraph to Auden's essays in The Dyer's Hand (1962). -- DL

Auden on Lenin: Propaganda poems make nothing happen (twice)

Happy birthday, Wystan, born today 112 years ago (February 21, 1907).

Here's an article that appeared in the Guardian in 2009. Note that the newspaper uses a photograph of Auden the elder statesman, face cracked; Auden would never have written poems in praise of Lenin after 1939.

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Unpublished Auden poems surface in film archive
Translations of Soviet propaganda songs discovered in the British Film Institute archives
Alison Flood
Saturday May 23 2009
guardian.co.uk

Three unpublished poems by W. H. Auden have surfaced in the archives of the British Film Institute more than 70 years after they were written.

They were discovered by David Collard while he was working through the papers of Ivor Montagu, the co-founder of the Film Society, as part of the research for a study of Auden's career in the cinema. The verses are a poetic translation of anonymous Russian peasant songs extolling the virtues of Lenin and his political heir Stalin, which Auden was asked to produce for the world premiere of a Russian propaganda film, Three Songs of Lenin, in October 1935.

When arranging subtitles for Three Songs of Lenin, Montagu had decided the songs -- around which the film is structured -- needed a more poetic English rendering, and approached Auden. The poet worked from a literal translation to produce three songs, published for the first time this week in the Times Literary Supplement.
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Read the rest of the Guardian story here. 

From the archives. Originally posted May 26, 2009. 

Lehman on Auden [by Angela Patrinos]

Auden in New York. Why does he seem so inviting? Angela Patrinos reports.

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Even with all the rain, last night’s event at the New School was standing room-only.  Yet again.

David Lehman presented a lecture on W. H. Auden, giving us in one hour’s time the vital details and contradictions of the poet’s life and work, and addressing such questions as “Can a flawed poem be a great poem?”

By the age of twenty-two, Wystan Hugh Auden was the most prominent poet in England, with a sound more modern than any of the day.  For example:  “It’s no use raising a shout./No, Honey, you can cut that right out.”  And yet, in January of 1939, he left England and moved to New York City. His reason for coming to NYC—not definitively clear:  “He’d become accustomed to peregrinating,” David said.  Perhaps NYC was the next place on his list.  But perhaps, too, Auden desired to be a less-known entity.  Or perhaps it was because he fell in love with a young man from Brooklyn named Chester Kallman.

He seems to have been happy in New York —it certainly was his choice to be here—and yet he wrote “Refugee Blues” and “The Unknown Citizen,” and he spoke of loneliness.  Perhaps this was a loneliness that followed him here.  David read a poem that Auden wrote just before his arrival in NY, a poem inspired by a painting he’d seen in a museum in Brussels. “Pay attention to the adjectives and adverbs,” David said.

In order of appearance, they are “human, dully, reverently, passionately, miraculous, dreadful, untidy, doggy, innocent, leisurely, forsaken, important, white, expensive, delicate, amazing, calmly.’

The poem is titled “Musee des Beaux Arts” and the painting is Brueghel’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.”  Without a title placard for this uncanny painting, it’s unlikely that a viewer would know to search for, and find, the very subject of the painting.  No clues can be gotten from the gaze of the personages in the foreground, who leisurely turn away from what’s taking place in the horizon—the disaster, the forsaken cry, the unimportant failure of the fallen Icarus.

The poem begins:

“About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just
                        walking dully along”

(David points out that to reverse the inversion in the first two lines to “The Old Masters were never wrong about suffering” would be to lose the eloquence.)

The poem is an example of Auden’s later style—which held more gravitas than his earlier work.  It was a style of poetry that was wordy, discursive (too wordy, too discursive, said his critics).  You can contrast the style of “Musee des Beaux Arts” with that of the conversational, idiomatic style of William Carlos Williams’s poem, “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” written twenty years later and inspired by the same painting.  In Williams’s poem, there is only one word that editorializes: “unsignificantly.”

That no one chose to notice the fall of Icarus, that his death made nothing happen, brings us to the famous line that appears in Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats (d. January 1939).”: “For poetry makes nothing happen.”

Yeats died right before Auden came to America, and Auden’s eulogy marks his first American poem. “You were silly like us,” Auden writes at the start of the poem’s second section.  Yeats, silly?  David explains: “Very esoteric pastimes did Yeats have.”

(Note that to reverse the inversion would be to lose David’s eloquence: “Yeats had very esoteric pastimes.”)

Auden’s eulogy, David points out, is poised between two contradictions: “And each in the cell of himself is almost/convinced of his freedom” and “In the prison of his days/Teach the free man how to praise.” (I wondered if there might be, within these contradictions, a nod to the paradox in Yeat’s poem, “The Balloon of the Mind”:  “Hands, do what your bid: /Bring the balloon of the mind/ that bellies and drags in the wind/into its narrow shed.”  Here Yeats implies that the mind needs restrictions, not total freedom.)

David then read “September 1, 1939.”  This was the poem that began circulating the internet immediately following September 11, 2001, and was excerpted on the subway walls for the Poetry in Motion series so that those who’d had no previous exposure to the poem, were now reading it during their anxious commutes.  It seems that we instinctively countered all that was unprecedented with the precedence of poetry.

Some of Auden’s most famous poems were ones that he would later revise and, finally, renounce, “September 1, 1939” being one of these.  The couplet at the end of stanza two, “Those to whom evil is done/ Do evil in return,” has been criticized for implying a justification for Germany's behavior in the wake of the Versailles Treaty.

Auden wanted to cut the second to last stanza. He called it “intellectually dishonest,” but before finally renouncing the entire stanza, he revised the last line, a line that he felt was false, and a line that David says is rhetorically the strongest in the entire poem.
The line: “We must love one another or die.”
Auden’s revision: “We must love one another and die.”  (Emphasis is mine).
This version, David says, weakens the polemical effect.  Imagine if Patrick Henry had said not: “Give me liberty or give me death” but “Give me liberty and give me death.”  Brodsky’s take on the line was: “We must love one another or kill.”
When David has his Oulipo on, he likes to tag on a ‘t’: “We must love one another or diet."

David made the decision to include all of the original stanzas of “September 1, 1939” in The Oxford Book of American Poetry because, he says, the inclusion dramatizes an issue that should not be neglected: Does the greatness of art excuse its meaning—ever?

P.S. (Auden-unrelated) I often hear people talk about what a brain and a wit and a gentleman and a true scholar David is, but I don’t hear enough about the way he dresses.  Last night he lectured in a shirt, tie, and jacket ensemble that, with its deep tones of blue accented with amber, had an alchemy that was so very easy on the eyes and made his face glow.  Wear it again, David.

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From the Archives (originally posted April 7, 2009)

On D-Day: Auden on War and Peace [by David Lehman]

On D-Day, I think of the success of that unprecedented cross-channel invasion -- and my gratitude to the people that fought and won the war. This year I find myself returning to the subjects of war and peace, revolution and resistance, and other such antitheses worth analyzing. I think, too, of the rampant ignorance of history, a phrase worth dwelling on because it goes both ways. We ignore history -- to do so seems part and parcel of the American impulse, the self-created ideal. But history is pretty good at ignoring us, too.

One reason Auden's poetry gives me pleasure is that he uses poetry as a vehicle for thought. Sometimes that thought was on an abstract plane, words with capital letters duking it out. At other times in his late career, after he had established himself as an institution in New York literary circles, he can resemble the Walter Cronkite of poetry, a bohemian eccentric version of the most trusted voice in America. In the least of his efforts his astuteness of intellect is matched by his mastery of rhetoric and form. 

Beyond category is "The Shield of Achilles," one of the strongest poems of Auden's later period. And here I pick up on my essay on "Peace and War in American Poetry," a fragment of which we posted on Memorial Day. -- DL

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"The Shield of Achilles" (1952) invokes the Homeric precedent -- the great shield that the god designs for Achilles -- to throw into relief the bleakness he sees around him. World War II may have ended in 1945, but Auden’s shield reflects a world dominated by implacable hostility between erstwhile allies. We were at peace, but the supreme metaphor of the era joined winter freeze with military might: the Cold War. On the shield of Achilles, as Auden pictures it in 1952, are “an unintelligible multitude,” a disembodied voice proving “by statistics that some cause was just,” a martyrdom enclosed in barbed wire, a thug wielding a weapon:

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
       Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
      That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
      Were axioms to him, who’d never heard
Of any world where promises were kept
Or one could weep because another wept.

It is a deeply pessimistic view of human nature.

In his elegy for William Butler Yeats (1939), Auden declared that “poetry makes nothing happen.” The assertion is debatable; exceptions come to mind. Poems have saved old battleships, changed attitudes, tested the judiciary, rallied people. But the larger point seems incontestable. Poetry has little effect on politics, while politics has damaged an awful lot of poetry. Art and even love are powerless against the ruthless use of superior force. Indifference “is the least / We have to fear from man or beast.” A spirited rendition of Beethoven’s fourth Piano Concerto will not stop the wars, make the old young again, or lower the price of bread. “We must love one another or die”: a noble sentiment, but it will not help you win the war against the Third Reich or the Empire of Japan. 

So, in Lenin's immortal words but with a rather different intent, what are we to do?
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For more of the essay on "Peace and War in American Poetry," click here.

Auden's "Parlor Game for a Wet Afternoon" [by David Lehman]

 “Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow.

“A parlor game for a wet afternoon — imagining the mirrors of one's friends. A has a huge pier glass, gilded and baroque, B a discreet little pocket mirror in a pigskin case with his initials stamped on the back; whenever on looks at C, he is in the act of throwing his mirror away but, if one looks in his pocket or up his sleeve, one always finds another, like an extra ace.

“Most, perhaps all, our mirrors are inaccurate and uncomplimentary, though to varying degrees and in various ways. Some magnify, some diminish, others, whatever their owner does, will only return lugubrious, comic, derisive, or terrifying images.

“But the properties of our own particular mirror are not so important as we sometimes like to think. We shall be judged, not by the kind of mirror found on us, but by the use we have made of it, by our riposte to our reflection.”

[In “Lecture Notes,” in Commonweal, 6 November 1942, Auden begins this sequence of reflections with the sentence: “Every child, as he wakes into life, finds a mirror underneath his pillow.”]

Auden also has a parlor game called "Purgatory Mates." More on that soon. Meanwhile, here is one of WHA's observations:

 

<< 

A vain woman realizes that vanity is a sin, and in order not to succumb to temptation, has all the mirrors removed from her house. Consequently, in a short while she cannot remember what she is like. She remembers that vanity is a sin, but she forgets that she is vain.

>>

 

So eat, drink, and make merry
for tomorrow
is time enough for sorrow.
Today the fragrance of wild strawberry
is in the air. Not every epicurean
can become David Ben-Gurion."

-- Yoel Halevi (1961)

 

Wystan Knows Best [by David Lehman]

 “Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow.

“A parlor game for a wet afternoon — imagining the mirrors of one's friends. A has a huge pier glass, gilded and baroque, B a discreet little pocket mirror in a pigskin case with his initials stamped on the back; whenever on looks at C, he is in the act of throwing his mirror away but, if one looks in his pocket or up his sleeve, one always finds another, like an extra ace.

“Most, perhaps all, our mirrors are inaccurate and uncomplimentary, though to varying degrees and in various ways. Some magnify, some diminish, others, whatever their owner does, will only return lugubrious, comic, derisive, or terrifying images.

“But the properties of our own particular mirror are not so important as we sometimes like to think. We shall be judged, not by the kind of mirror found on us, but by the use we have made of it, by our riposte to our reflection.”

[In “Lecture Notes,” in Commonweal, 6 November 1942, Auden begins this sequence of reflections with the sentence: “Every child, as he wakes into life, finds a mirror underneath his pillow.”]

<< 

A vain woman realizes that vanity is a sin, and in order not to succumb to temptation, has all the mirrors removed from her house. Consequently, in a short while she cannot remember what she looks like. She remembers that vanity is a sin, but she forgets that she is vain.

-- W. H. Auden, "Lecture Notes" (in Commonweal 6 Nov 1942)  >> 

Psychoanalysis, like all pagan scientia, says: "Come, my good man, no wonder you feel guilty. You have a distorting mirror, and that is indeed a very wicked thing to have. But cheer up, For a trifling consideration I shall be delighted to straighten it out for you. There. Look. A perfect image. The evil of distortion is exorcised. Now you have nothing to repent of any longer. Now you are one of the illumined and elect. That will be ten thousand dollars, please."

And immediately come seven devils, and the last state of that man is worse than the first.

-- W. H. Auden, "Lecture Notes" (1942)

Note: Multiply the bill by twelve for 2016 dollars. The devil count remains the same. -- DL

Medium of the Month: Stacey Harwood-Lehman; Ghost Poet: W.H. Auden

In the spirit of Halloween, I'm serving up poets from the past for the New School's Inquisitive Eater. Here's my second post, about a W.H. Auden poem inspired by M.F.K. Fisher: 

M.F.K. Fisher (1908-1992), could count among her many admirers the poet W. H. Auden (1907-1973) who in his introduction to Fisher’s “The Art of Eating” (MacMillan, 1954) boldly states: “I do not know anyone in the United States today who writes better prose.” He cites several examples, including the passage below.

“I now feel that gastronomical perfection can be reached in these combinations: one person dining alone, usually upon a couch or a hillside; two people, of no matter what sex or age, dining in a good restaurant; six people, of no matter what sex or age, dining in a good home. . . A good combination would be one married couple, for warm composure; one less firmly established, to add a note of investigation to the talk; and two strangers of either sex, upon whom the better-acquainted could sharpen their questioning wits . . .” (The Art of Eating, pg. 738)

Isn’t’ that terrific? Fisher’s conviction and specificity are qualities that make her writing so enjoyable, and so difficult to imitate, though many have tried.The essay from which the passage is taken (“From A to Z: The Perfect Dinner”) likely inspired Auden’s poem “Tonight at 7:30.” in which he translates into poetry what Fisher describes so deftly in prose. Here is a representative excerpt:

            For authentic 
comity the gathering should be small and unpublic:
at mass banquets where flosculent speeches are made
            in some hired hall
we think of ourselves or nothing. Christ’s cenacle
seated a baker’s dozen, King Arthur’s rundle
the same, but today, when one’s host may well be his own
           chef, servitor and scullion,
when the cost of space can double in a decade,
even that holy Zodiac number is
            too large a frequency for us:
in fact, six lenient semble sieges,
           none of them perilous,

            Is now a Perfect
Social number. But a dinner party,
            however select,
is a worldly rite that nicknames or endearments
            or family
diminutives would profane: two doters who wish
to tiddle and curmurr between the soup and fish
belong in restaurants, all children should be fed
            earlier and be safely in bed.
Well-liking, though, is a must: married maltalents
engaged in some covert contrast can spoil
           an evening like the glance
of a single failure in the toil
            of his bosom grievance.

Continue reading over at The Inquisitive Eater

 

On Working with W. H. Auden: Illuminating Interview with J. Chester Johnson in Illuminations

Back in 2012, we posted two articles by poet J. Chester Johnson about his work with W.H. Auden on the revisions to the BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER. You can read Johnson's posts here and here. 

We've just learned that the current issue of Illuminations features an interview with J. Chester Johnson in which he continues to deepen our understanding of his groundbreaking work with Auden--how he came to replace Auden, correspond with the great poet, and then set about helping the Episcopal Church refine the Psalms in the light of new scholarship. Poet and translator Ann Cefola interviews Johnson about the influence this experience with Auden and the retranslation of the Psalms had upon Johnson's literary career; she also discusses with Johnson the principles and practices that guided the retranslation process that lasted for nearly a decade. The interview encapsulates a critical period in Episcopal Church history and valuable insight into translating sacred texts.

You can find the interview in its entirety here.

Find out more about J. Chester Johnson's work here. 

-- sdh

"In My End Is My Beginning" [by David Lehman]

Here is this week's challenge on "Next Line, Please," sponsored by The American Scholar. It is, you wiill see, very Auden-centric, though it begins with a quote from Eliot. To enter, click here -- and be prepared to submit your entry in the comment field.

<<<

“In my end is my beginning,” T. S. Eliot wrote in Four Quartets. He meant something specific about circularity and the spiritual journey he was undertaking, but the line has more than one application, and I find it works to designate certain tactics or challenges that poets may employ to jump-start their imaginations. One such is to begin with a last line and then write the poem that leads up to it. Another—and the one I propose we use for this week’s competition—is to retain the end words of an admirable poem, scrap the rest, and fill in the blank space with one’s own poem.

Here is “Gare du Midi” by W. H. Auden. Only eight lines long, it implies a whole narrative with a sinister flavor suitable to Western Europe bracing for the gathering storm of World War II. The poem rhymes, but the rhymes are staggered—“contrived” in line three, for example, does not meet its mate until the last line of the poem. This allows the poem not only to evade expectation but almost to approach prose before fulfilling its obligations as verse.

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: 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.

Now remove the title, and retain only the end-words:

South,
face
contrived
mouth
pity.
case,
city
arrived.

Option two: For those who would be happier if confronted not with an entire poem but just its end-words, here are the end-words of another poem from the Auden canon:

after,
understand
hand,
fleets;
laughter
streets.

It is not necessary to retain Auden’s punctuation. But be sure to give a title to your effort.

Incidentally … suggestions for future contests (another haiku perhaps? a poem based on a comparison? a cryptogram?) are always welcome, and you should know that I love it when people comment on the poems of others and on the exercise itself.

Deadline: Midnight, Saturday, May 30.

>>

https://theamericanscholar.org/in-my-end-is-my-beginning/#.VWaqA7Pw9Bw

More words that marked me, by John Foy

Earlier this year I was put to thinking about lines of poetry that meant a lot to me. This began when the poet Gerry Cambridge, who edits a fine, international literary journal in Scotland called The Dark Horse, asked me and several other poets to write brief essays on particular lines that had shaped us. So I wrote a short piece, published now in the current issue of The Dark Horse, about this line from Thomas Wyatt:

    Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind

The line had an effect upon me during my adolescence when I was just starting to see how language could light you up and open the doors of the heart and mind. Of course, all poetry seeks to hold the wind, a thought that imparts beauty to this line. So I wrote my appreciation for The Dark Horse. But in doing so I realized it was impossible to zero in on just one line of poetry. I decided, therefore, to go back and select more lines from other poems that have, in one way or another, put me on the path.

 

… Mark here below
How tame these ashes are, how free from lust,
That thou mayst fit thy self against thy fall.
(George Herbert)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

     So I would have had him leave,
So I would have had her stand and grieve,
So he would have left
As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised,
As the mind deserts the body it has used.
I should find
Some way incomparably light and deft,
Some way we both should understand,
Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand.
(T.S. Eliot)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.
(Robert Frost)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.
(W. B. Yeats)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nights come bringing the snow, and the dead howl
Under headlands in their windy dwelling
Because the Adversary put too easy questions
On lonely roads.
(W.H. Auden)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He runs, he runs to the south, finical, awkward,
in a state of controlled panic, a student of Blake.
(Elizabeth Bishop)

 

 

 

 

 

 

It pleases me to stand in silence here.
(Philip Larkin)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Out there in Jutland
In the old man-killing parishes
I will feel lost,
Unhappy and at home.
(Seamus Heaney)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are more, but that's for another time.

Best,
John

Auden at the Philoctetes Society

 

Poetry makes nothing happen? Think again! [by Don Share]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I'm going to begin the week by reprising a piece a version of which I once ran on my own blog; it's the best opening salvo I can think of for a few days of rumination.  In the days to come, I'll muse on such subjects as secrets of the editing trade, favorite words, what the heck is going on at Poetry magazine (or maybe not!).  But I find myself repeating the substance of what follows in many conversations, so I hope you'll forgive me for kicking off with it now.

*

You see the phrase, “poetry makes nothing happen” trotted out over and over again, attributed to W.H. Auden as some sort of evidence for the reductiveness and hermetic inutility of poetry. There's no Fifth Amendment that prevents an art from testifying against itself, of course... And yet…

The fact is that the phrase occurs in a POEM – one, moreover, that eulogizes a poet who made things happen (being a politician and activist, as well as a writer), W.B. Yeats. And in context – only part of that context, since I can’t legally quote the entire poem, and that context is absolutely enormous – the poem actually says:

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

I’m not practicing literary criticism here, by the way; I’m reading exactly what it says on the page: poetry survives: it is a way of happening, a mouth.

Even if, as some argue, by the time of the poem’s publication Auden had lost his belief in poetry as an agent of political change, he would not, as Jon Stallworthy points out, have dared say the words “poetry makes nothing happen” to the living Yeats, no sir.

As it happens, the origin of the phrase is Auden’s Partisan Review essay of about the same time (1939), “The Public v. the Late Mr. William Butler Yeats,” in which he imagines putting Yeats on trial for his belief in fairies and other “mumbo-jumbo.” As the British poet Angela Leighton remarks, “in the imaginary court case to which he brings the poet, the defence lights on a phrase which will yield its own poetic riches.” In Auden’s courtroom “the case for the prosecution [of Yeats] rests on the fallacious belief that art ever makes anything happen, whereas the honest truth, gentlemen, is that, if not a poem had been written, not a picture painted nor a bar of music composed, the history of man would be materially unchanged.” When this gets reworked into the famous “makes nothing happen” bit, Leighton observes, the phrase “turns, by a tiny inflection, a redistribution of its stresses, into its opposite: ‘poetry makes nothing HAPPEN.’ By this accentual difference, ‘nothing’ shades into a subject, and happens. This is an event, and its ‘happening’ sums up the ways of poetry. Intransitive and tautological, nothing is neither a thing, nor no thing, but a continuous event.” So for Auden, the job of the poet is not to be what he called, at about this time, a “crusader” – but to make poems happen.

Poetry, that is, "survives / in the valley of its making…”

Is it romantic to imagine poetry accomplishing anything in a world of happenings? Maybe so, with a big R; as A.F. Moritz says in an essay, “What Man Has Made of Man,” in Poetry magazine:

“Poetry is not at all what it’s often said to be, the indulgence, development, and expression of private inward life. This is one of those half-truths that is the worst error, even a lie. Poetry is inward self-development plus the insistence that this must have a principal place in the public forum plus a third thing, a conclusion that flows from the first two. Everyone must be allowed full personal development, and everyone must be allowed full participation, since only full participation leads to full personal development, and in turn a proper society can only be produced by full development of each member. Poetry is, above every other human endeavor, the place where person and society are not merely joined but revealed in their original unity. Poetry is the place where the strange, painful division we have created between person and society is suffered, despaired over, denounced, subjected to comparison with memories and dreams and myths of better times, and given the gift of a prophecy: that the proper unity still and always persists, and that it can become the world we actually live in, not just in verse, but on both sides of our front door.”

And Moritz traces this view back to Wordsworth, who came up with

“the famous phrase ‘what man has made of man’ … in a time of war: the French Revolutionary Wars of 1792 to 1802, which after 1800 merged into the Napoleonic Wars that lasted to 1815: twenty-three years of almost unbroken international violence. Let’s recall the history of this phrase in such a way as to underline its meaning and continuing relevance. It occurs in the poem ‘Lines Written in Early Spring,’ which Wordsworth composed and published in 1798, in the aftermath of great disappointment. Wordsworth had been in France at the time of the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. At first he was an eager partisan of the Revolution. It seemed to promise that the world would suddenly be made new in the shape of justice, that people everywhere would shake off chains. ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,’ he wrote, ‘But to be young was very heaven!’ Soon, though, the Revolution descended into ruthless violence, partisan exterminations, then war by France against neighbors, and Wordsworth renounced it. But he was in despair because his hope had been destroyed, and he felt he did not know who he was or what he should try to make of himself. His beloved England had opposed the new freedom, and then the new freedom had turned into cruelty and tyranny. Was there hope of freedom anywhere in the world? Was there any way of living that did not mean joining in a worldwide status quo of injustice: being given influence if you serve oppressive regimes, being let alone if you acquiesce in them, receiving poverty if you happen to occupy a lower rung, and oppression, even death, if you resist? Could any of this be called communion? Wasn’t the whole landscape nothing but isolation, because even if you agreed and participated, you really were denying yourself, falsifying yourself? In this desolate situation, which was equal parts political and personal, Wordsworth set out to rebuild hope and a vision of possibility for a transformed society.”

In the end, Wordsworth drew inward; society transformed itself in ways he hadn’t dreamed of, and he lived out his life writing lots of dull late-period poems few enjoy much now. But the hope and vision persist, and Moritz traces them up through our own recent history by way of Juan Ramón Jiménez and Czeslaw Milosz.

The question of hope and vision remains timely. There’s explosive political and economic turmoil around the world every single day of our lives. Can poetry matter... for us?  Claude Lévi-Strauss, who lived to be 100 years old, and saw lots of the world, wrote in his classic Tristes Tropiques:

“Man is not alone in the universe, any more than the individual is alone in the group, or any one society among other societies. Even if the rainbow of human cultures should go down for ever into the abyss which we are so insanely creating, there will still remain open to us — provided we are alive and the world is in existence — a precarious arch that points toward the inaccessible. The road which it indicates to us is the one that leads directly away from our present serfdom: and even if we cannot set off along it, merely to contemplate it will procure us the only grace that we know how to deserve. The grace to call a halt, that is to say: to check the impulse which prompts Man always to block up, one after another, such fissures as may open up in the blank wall of necessity and to round off his achievement by slamming shut the doors of his own prison. This is the grace for which every society longs, irrespective of its beliefs, its political regime, its level of civilization. It stands, in every case, for leisure, and recreation, and freedom, and peace of body and mind. On this opportunity, the chance of for once detaching oneself from the implacable process, life itself depends.

Farewell to savages, then, farewell to journeying! And instead, during the brief intervals in which humanity can bear to interrupt its hive-like labours, let us grasp the essence of what our species has been and still is, beyond thought and beneath society: an essence that may be vouchsafed to us in a mineral more beautiful than any work of Man: in the scent, more subtly evolved than our books, that lingers in the heart of a lily; or in the wink of an eye, heavy with patience, serenity, and mutual forgiveness, that sometimes, through an involuntary understanding, one can exchange with a cat.”

To grasp the essence of what our species has been and still is: this is at once political, personal… and poetical.

Michael Wood writes, in his book, Yeats & Violence: "Of course many provisos and restrictions leap to mind. If a poem isn't any good, nothing will happen. Even if a poem is a masterpiece, nothing will happen if we don't allow it to. And most important of all, it is characteristic of this sort of happening that we find it very hard to say what has happened - that is why it sometimes seems as if nothing has happened."

Actually, much of our lives pass by during which nothing happens.  Auden's poem, though he was a great poet of the quotidian as well as of history, flies a bit higher than might suit most of us.  He's writing, after all, about another great poet, Yeats.  W.B. was "silly like the rest of us," Auden says - though it seems to me that Yeats was silly in his own peculiar way; at any rate, "his gift survived it all," and that's not promised to mere mortals.  The fact is that most of us who are poets risk having our work consigned to oblivion, or at least to the recycle bin.  This leaves a fair number of us saddened.

And so I'll end with Jack Spicer's "Golem," which can be read as a direct - and also witty, and down-to-earth - response to the elegy for Yeats; here's the concluding section:

He died from killing himself.
His public mask was broken
because
He no longer had a public mask.
People retrieved his poems
from wastebaskets. They had
Long hearts.
Oh, what a pain and shame was
his passing.
People returned to their
business somewhat saddened.

Pictured: a valley, perhaps of our saying. Conclusion: nothing happened!

-- Don Share 

Something Is Familiar, Yes?

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