The Best American Poetry

Auden in New York (October 23, 2008)

"Auden in New York"

On Thursday evening, October 23, 2008., at 7 PM at
THE PHILOCTETES CENTER FOR THE MULTIDISCIPLINARY STUDY OF IMAGINATION
at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute
(EDWARD NERSESSIAN AND FRANCIS LEVY, DIRECTORS)

The Philoctetes Center
247 East 82nd Street
(Phone: 646-422-0544; email: info@philoctetes.org)

Our Life in Poetry: Auden in New York

Participants: Michael Braziller & David Lehman
Thursday, October 23, 2008  /  7 pm

We will read and talk about poems that W. H. Auden wrote in the decade after his arrival in New York City in 1939. Wystan Hugh Auden, one of the major poets of the twentieth century, spent the war years in New York , became a US citizen in 1946, and exercised an enormous influence on the direction of American poetry. The poems he wrote at this time are among the most significant -- and are without doubt the most controversial -- in the Auden canon.

"September 1, 1939" and "In Memory of William Butler Yeats" command our special interest not only for their literary excellence and fame but because of their publishing history (and because "September 1, 1939"has struck many readers as eerily apropos to the atrocious events of a more recent September). Auden grew unhappy with both poems for reasons that are worth investigating, and he revised them radically. Did he improve or harm them?  We will talk about his revisions, the ethical as well as literary implications of Auden's decisions, and about the lines in the poems that have generated the greatest amount of heat: "Poetry makes nothing happen." "We must love me another or die." The poems are challenging and will reward a close examination. 

You may best prepare for the evening by reading these and other Auden poems, such as "Under Which Lyre," "In Praise of Limestone," "The More Loving One," and the villanelle beginning "Time will say nothing but I told you so." (Auden gave various titles to this villanelle.) Ambitious participants may want to prepare by also reading "Caliban to the Audience," a long eloquent prose poem Auden wrote during this period.

"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 deaf,

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.

Defenceless 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.

"Uncensored Note to Auden" [by Jane Mayhall]

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

Academic Graffiti

Auden collected his clerihews under the title Academic Graffiti (1952, 1970). Here are several of my favorites from the Auden oeuvre:

When Karl Marx
Found the phrase 'financial sharks,'
He sang a Te Deum
In the British Museum.

*

Mallarme
Had too much to say:
He could never quite
Leave the paper white.

*

When the young Kant
Was told to kiss his aunt,
He obeyed the Categorical Must
But only just.

*

Lord Byron
Once succumbed to a Siren:
His flesh was weak,
Hers Greek.

-- DL

"Symposium" (by Maxine Kumin)

Symposium

Last call for the symposium at 4 p.m.
to examine the works of W. H. Auden
whom I remember always in carpet slippers.

X from Hum. 101 will discuss the early poems,
Y from Eng. 323 will discuss the later poems
in the symposium that opens at 4 p.m.

Spender famously said, Poor Auden; soon
we’ll have to take off his face and iron it to see who he is.
Perhaps he had bunions, thus the carpet slippers.

Lord Byron, Faustus, Yeats, September 1
1939, these poems should head the list
of works discussed in the symposium at 4 p.m.

which will reaffirm the poet’s place in the pantheon:
wittier than Eliot, more readable than Pound,
both too erudite to read in carpet slippers

but knowing how all the instruments can disagree
and cleverest hopes expire, let us revere
his pleated face in the symposium at 4 p.m.
while I revisit him on stage in carpet slippers.

-- Maxine Kumin

from Prairie Schooner (Spring 2008)

Two Byrons (by David Yezzi)

OK, it has been a day from hell--two days from hell, in fact. I don't know about you, but taxes were completely brutal this year. I envy you, if you are one of those fortunate people who actually gets money back! I more than envy you; I want to come stay with you and eat food out of your refrigerator. I'm also exhausted this morning. I was up until 2:30 finishing a review, for which I will receive a small amount of money that will then be reported to the IRS so that I will owe taxes on it next year.

I thought I might write about the blues today. I'm in the mood. I was planning to expatiate on the pleasures of Mississippi John Hurt's alternating-thumb base line on the acoustic guitbox, and how his treble-line melodies infuse traditional songs like "Stack O'Lee Blues," "Casey Jones," and "Frankie and Albert" with his singnature sound. Then there's "Candy Man." "Candy Man"!: "He's got stick candy that's nine inches long, / He sells it faster than a hog can chew his corn / Candyman, candyman!" But I think I'll do that tomorrow . . .

Instead, I want to quote from a book of Macaulay's essays that I picked up on the giveaway shelf at the library this morning. A free book! Things are looking up. Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) was an English poet, reviewer, essayist, historian, and MP for Edinburgh. Here's a bit from his essay on Lord Byron, which I read on the subway on my way to work (I want to quote a bunch of it because, a) it's a great portrait of Byron and B) the prose rocks):

In the rank of Lord Byron, in his understanding, in his character, in his very person, there was a strange union of opposite extremes. He was born to all that men covet and admire. But in every one of those eminent advantages which he possessed over others was mingled something of misery ans debasement. He was sprung from a house, ancient indeed and noble, but degraded and impoverished by a series of crimes and follies which he had attained a scandalous publicity. The kinsman whom he succeeded had died poor, and, but for merciful judges, would have died upon the gallows. The young peer had great intellectual powers; yet there was an unsound part in his mind. He had a naturally generous and feeling heart: but his temper was wayward and irritable. He had a head which statuaries loved to copy, and a foot the deformity of which the beggars in the street mimicked. Distinguished at once by the strength and by the weakness of his intellect, affectionate yet perverse, a poor lord, and a handsome cripple, he required, if ever man required, the firmest and most judicious training.

Macaulay goes on in this vein for quite a while. It's pretty good stuff, and wonderfully sympathetic to Byron, though not nearly as sympathetic as Auden's tribute to him in "Letter to Lord Byron." Auden doesn't name Macaulay, but it's critics of his ilk that he is skewering. In fact, there are enough correspondences between the essay and Auden 's poem that I can't help wondering if Auden had it partly in mind:

I like your muse because she's gay and witty,
       Because she's neither prostitute nor frump,
The daughter of a European city,
       And country houses long before the slump;
       I like her voice that does not make me jump:
And you I find sympatisch, a good townee,
Neither a preacher, ninny, bore, nor Brownie.

A poet, swimmer, peer, and man of action,
--It beats Roy Campell's record by a mile--
You offer every possible attraction.
      By looking into your poetic style
      And love-life on the chance that both were vile,
Several have earned a decent livelihood,
Whose lives were uncreative but were good.

You've had your packet from the critics, though:
      They grant you warmth of heart, but at your head
Their moral and aesthetic brickbats throw.
      A "vulgar genius" so George Eliot said,
      Which doesn't matter as George Eliot's dead,
But T. S. Eliot, I am sad to find,
Damns you with: "an uninteresting mind".

--DY

Modernist Mag (by David Yezzi)

I realize it’s cheeky of me to kick off my first day of guest-blogging on the BAP site not with a look at a best American literary journal but with one of the coolest poetry magazines from the U.K.: Agenda. I’ve followed Agenda for years, beginning with my time at Parnassus: Poetry in Review--more about the new issue of that estimable doorstop later in the week!--when it would show up in Parnassus's dilapidated one-room office on Union Square in New York crammed with news of that vital tradition of innovation and experiment called modernism.

Is it strange to think that there should be a magazine devoted to modernist poets coming out of England? Only last week, someone suggested to me that modernism had to a great extent bypassed Britain. True, the poems of Hardy, Edward Thomas, Betjeman, and Larkin might lead one to think this, but what of David Jones, Basil Bunting, and, more recently, Geoffrey Hill, who strikes me in many ways as the last of the modernists? Several years ago, Agenda put together a splendid special issue on Hill. (Others special issues have focused on: Thomas Hardy, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, William Carlos Williams, Hugh MacDiarmid, Kathleen Raine, David Jones, R.S. Thomas, Thom Gunn, Charles Tomlinson, Peter Dale, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott.)

In fact, the modernist slant of the journal is not strange at all: it was founded by Ezra Pound and William Cookson in 1959. Agenda is currently edited by Patricia McCarthy, who co-edited the magazine with Cookson for several years before his death in January 2003. As Cookson tells it: "Pound liked the first issue and wrote, 'Pleased with Agenda. It don’t look too Poundista. At lease not too unadulteratedly.' "

The current issue is titled "Lauds," after Auden's poem from Horae Canonicae. I love the photo on the cover of young Wystan reading with his mother sometime around 1912. The little sailor suit just kills me. The issue includes tributes to Auden and to Louis MacNeice, both of whom had their centenaries last year. Peter Mumford, at the time married to Auden's niece Rita (whose sister Anita was a long-time editor at Agenda!), recounts family dinners in the Sixties and early Seventies with Auden in his essay "The Memorableness of W. H. Auden":

These dinners were very much family occasions; and as with all family reunions not without their tensions. Wystan enjoyed them because of his affection for a family he did not have, and because this was a place where the public figure, his face recognized wherever he went, could become entirely the private man. . . .

. . . Wystan, who always arrived promptly at six for his martinis, brought with him laughter, with irritation at times, concerning every-day things, and gossip about mutual friends. The local and the particular sometimes ranged into the universal. On one occasion, he was especially delighted by Martin Gardner's The Ambidextrous Universe (1964) which provided the scientific evidence for Nature having a "left-handed twist."

That sounds like Auden down to the ground. The issue also includes a feature on Michael Hamburger and a host of fine poems, as well as poems by two "Broadsheet Poets," from the magazine's ongoing series of features on younger poets. It's well worth a look--DY

Why Auden is an Aquarius (by Jill Baron)

Wystan Hugh Auden, born February 21, 1905

When I read Under Which Lyre: A Reactionary Tract for the Times (the Phi Beta Kappa Poem he read at Harvard in 1946) for the first time, my astrological radar detected an Aquarius. Who but the Water Bearer -- also known (according to astrologer Steven Forrest’s list of Aquarian archetypes) as the Genius, the Truth Sayer, the Scientist, the Exile, the Revolutionary -- would write these lines: “Thou shalt not be on friendly terms / With guys in advertising firms, / Nor speak with such / As read the Bible for its prose, / Nor, above all, make love to those / Who wash too much. // Thou shalt not live within thy means / Nor on plain water and raw greens. / If thou must choose / Between the chances, choose the odd: / Read The New Yorker, trust in God; / And take short views.”

Only an Aquarius would have the chutzpah, or, in Auden’s case, the gall, to reveal opinions so conclusive they sound like truth. For an Aquarius is above all a person of strong individuality. An Aquarius speaks his mind without fear of recrimination. Despite pressure to conform, socialize, and be accepted, an Aquarius will choose his own path, remaining loyal to his personal truths. An Aquarius is a maverick. Auden is a maverick. Therefore, Auden is an Aquarius.

You may be thinking: but all poets are mavericks. Well, wasn’t Auden especially so? Doesn’t Auden represent the Truth-Sayer, the Exile, and the Revolutionary? Liberty and freedom of choice are paramount to him. As he wrote in his essay “The American Scene": "liberty cannot be distinguished from license, for freedom of choice is neither good nor bad but the human prerequisite without which virtue and vice have no meaning. Virtue is, of course, preferable to vice, but to choose vice is preferable to having virtue chosen for one.” Auden’s biographer Edward Mendelson wrote, “[Auden] hoped that art could serve persuasion as well as freedom by guiding its readers into making the right free choice instead of the wrong one.” And Marianne Moore has commented, “the thought of choice as compulsory is central to everything [Auden] writes.” So yes, fellow poets and devotees of Auden – what we have here is an Aquarius through and through.

Imagine my dismay when I discovered that our Truth-Sayer, Revolutionary, and Exile all wrapped into one was not technically an Aquarius but a Pisces! The sun rests in Aquarius from January 20 to February 18, throwing Auden in deep water with the other fish. And yet despite the plain facts of the case, I have decided - in true Aquarian spirit - to hold fast to my own personal truth. That’s right. No one could ever confuse Auden for a Pisces, the sign of dreamers and mysticism. In fact, didn’t Auden deplore Yeats for the elder poet’s interest in the magic and the occult? “The deplorable spectacle of a grown man occupied with the mumbo jumbo of magic and the nonsense of India.” This was a man – and a poet – who told it like it was, in plain talk, or (in Marianne Moore's phrase) “plain American which cats and dogs can read!”

Or – did he? Was Auden as clear as air, or rather, a poet who made much use of irony, a rather more murky enterprise that achieves its means, according to Fowler, through – gasp! – mystification! Oh dear. I’m afraid that my aim – to prove that Auden is an Aquarius – has come undone. Perhaps my reliance on sun signs is flawed.

Not many essayists disprove their thesis in the middle of an essay and continue writing in an attempt to make amends, but I suppose not many essayists write the words “Aquarius” and “Auden” in the same title line. Maybe it’s just this: I admire the Aquarian traits, and I admire Auden, and I wouldn’t mind having some more of the former, and being more like the latter, and I would foolishly like to think of Auden not as a human being, complex in his beliefs and counterbeliefs and charms and foibles, but as the fulfillment of the archetype of the Trailblazing Poet and Ideas Man. Which he was, undoubtedly - though he was also a devout Christian, raised on Norse mythology, whose “first religious memories [were] of exciting magical rites.”

The problem with archetypes is their one-dimensionality, which I suppose is why we really shouldn’t use the sun sign to define an individual’s personality. If Auden were here today, reading my defense of astrological reasoning, I suspect he would turn that superb one-liner on me: “Sorry, my dear, one mustn’t be bohemian!”

-- JB

How Well Do You Know Auden?

Find out here.

-- sdh

Wind Makes Weather

   Winds make weather; weather
Is what nasty people are
  Nasty about and the nice
Show a common joy in observing. . . 

Guess the title of this poem and series of which it is part.

-- sdh