Apr

3

Auden: A New Selection.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

April 3, 2007 |

Just a little over one-hundred years ago, on February 21st, 1907, to be precise, Wystan Hugh Auden was born. To mark the occasion a new edition of his Selected Poems has been published, adding thirty poems to the one-hundred originally included in previous editions of his Selected Poems. This new edition also includes some explanatory notes to help illuminate some of Auden’s references, which is good. He could be very clear and straightforward, but we’re also talking about a guy who sometimes read the Oxford English Dictionary for fun.

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Auden’s poem Funeral Blues will be familiar to anyone who’s seen Four Weddings And A Funeral, and it’s a welcome addition to his selected poems. Maybe he didn’t think it was good enough to be remembered, but then Auden wasn’t necessarily the best judge of his own work.

Does a writer’s biography ever matter? Auden was born in England. He became a U.S. citizen in 1946, crossing paths with T.S. Eliot who was born in the United States but became a British citizen. He spent more than twenty years with his partner Chester Kallman. He taught at prominent universities and was a judge for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. He spent the last years of his life in Switzerland, and died on September 29, 1973. The first lines of his poem A Shilling Life Will Give You All The Facts say it so much better:

A shilling life will give you all the facts:
How Father beat him, how he ran away,
What were the struggles of his youth, what acts
Made him the greatest figure of his day.

For all the facts, and then some, and for a lot more than a shilling you can buy the biographies by his literary executor, Edward Mendelson, Early Auden (Viking Press, 1981) and Later Auden (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1999). Sixty-six years are summed up in more than nine-hundred pages.

The poem September 1, 1939 was included in the 1979 edition of his Selected Poems but not in his Collected Poems. Auden reworked and ultimately rejected this poem, his main problem being one line: “We must love each other or die.” He felt the line was false since we die anyway, and at one point changed it to “We must love each other and die” before he finally scrapped the entire poem. He also objected to the line being used, as “We must love each other or we must die” in Lyndon Johnson’s infamous “Daisy” commercial. I thought the line meant “we must love each other or we’ll destroy the human race”. This is apparently what Johnson meant, so Auden must have considered that too simplistic.

I remember the first poem by Auden I ever read. It was in my high school American English textbook. Auden had become thoroughly American, and yet the lines of As I Walked Out One Evening were distinctly English:

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.

I felt myself disappearing into that tea-cup crack and didn’t read any more Auden for a very long time.

Auden’s line “Poetry makes nothing happen”, from his poem In Memory of W.B. Yeats, has often been quoted as a way of saying that poetry is useless. Anyone who tries to get away with using it that way is grossly misrepresenting what Auden said, which is:

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.

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One of the first tapes released by Random House in their Voice of the Poet Series was W.H. Auden reading a selection of his poems. It’s now available on CD. Some of the recordings are from original recordings Auden did for the company Caedmon in 1953. His voice is not at all what I expected.

The Russian poet Joseph Brodsky loved the poetry of Auden and discovered it, as he explains in his essay, “To Please A Shadow”, in a Russian prison camp. Brodsky met Auden in Switzerland shortly after leaving Russia, and his description of his own giddiness at meeting such a great poet is hilarious. In the same book of essays, titled Less Than One (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987), is a transcript of a taped lecture by Brodsky explaining the poem September 1, 1939. Brodsky also quoted Auden in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, saying, “The poet, I wish to repeat, is language’s means for existence - or, as my beloved Auden said, he is the one by whom it lives.” A poem of Brodsky’s, titled In England, also has a section, “York”, dedicted and addressed to Auden, in which he says,

Subtracting the greater from the lesser–time from man–
you get words, the remainder, standing out against their
white background more clearly than the body
ever manages to while it lives, though it cry “Catch me!”–

thus the source of love turns into the object of love.

And yet, in the end, it must be Auden’s own words, also from In Memory of W.B. Yeats, that provide his best epitaph:

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.


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