The book excels in its tentative ruminations and quiet suggestiveness. Its premise is a good one-that we should read poetry not for poetry’s sake (it will, as Auden says, survive of its own accord), but for our own. There are plenty of things to admire in this pocket-sized volume. Now the author has written his own book-part memoir, part literary appreciation-on Auden, which takes the form of a kind of poetry user’s manual to life. 1 Ladies Detective series frequently refers to “Audanesque” principles when facing a moral quandary. What WH Auden Can Do For You, the latest offering, published last week to coincide with the 40th anniversary of his death, comes from Scottish novelist, Alexander McCall Smith. Civilisation might be on the brink of collapse, but, as Brodsky argued in his essay on Auden, the poem shows that the resourcefulness and adaptability of language can save a culture from the “unmentionable odour of death.”Īsked in 1972 which living writer he considered to be the “prime protector of the integrity of the English tongue,” Auden responded with characteristic quasi-flippancy: “Why, me, of course!” It is perhaps only fitting that Auden, whose poems often take the form of parables-a form that teaches us how to read, and whose meaning is different for each reader - has inspired such a wealth of personal tributes. The poem that is at once about imminent disaster is also about a poet trying to naturalise his identity. Marks crowd, that is candidly shrugged off in the third. There’s a kind of toughness to the first two lines, as if Auden were putting on his American leather jacket to blend in with the St. The lines are eerily prophetic but beyond the sense of history repeating itself, what distinguished Auden’s poem is its sheer virtuosity of registers and the poetic “I” sitting in exile in a bar in the midst of it all. 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 I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade But none of the poems written in the ensuing decade caught the prevailing mood so much as the one Auden wrote six decades earlier in response to a different crisis-that of Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland: In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, poetry-the most concentrated of verbal art forms-once again emerged as a vital, commemorative form. In 2001, on the cusp of another “low, dishonest decade," to use one of Auden’s terms for the 1930s, Auden was seen again as an indispensable poet of the age. Our language is peppered with his neologisms, not least the “Age of Anxiety,” defined in the OED as “a catch-phrase of any period characterised by anxiety or danger.” Auden’s lines are quoted, misquoted, appropriated, parodied, often without any attribution to the poet himself. Faber and Faber immediately cashed in with Tell me the truth about love, a pamphlet which sold a reputed 275,000 copies. One of Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 campaign ads included the signature line “We must love one another or die” from Auden’s poem “September I, 1939.” Two decades later, Auden’s lyric “Stop all the clocks” became the signature elegy of the AIDS era, and later made a cameo appearance in the 1994 romcom Four Weddings and a Funeral. The obituaries of the enfant terrible of poetry were detailed but rarely strayed from reflecting on his much-anthologised poems of the 1930s, “As I walked out one evening” and “Lullaby.”Īuden has always seemed ripe for quotation. Philip Larkin, for one, had dismissed his “rambling intellectual stew ” Randall Jarrell painted a sorry picture of a man “turned into a rhetoric mill, grinding away at the bottom of Limbo.” Jilted by his handsome younger lover, Chester Kallman, Auden took leave of all worldly pleasures, living out his last few years in a small town near Vienna. Morose and solitary, he described himself, in a poem of the early 1960s, as a “sulky 56,” who had “grown far too crotchety” and found a “change of meal-time utter hell.” In those later years, Auden seemed a shadow of his former self: his reputation had been tainted by some rather unforgiving reviews. When Auden died in 1973, forty years ago last week, it would have been hard to imagine how popular he would become in the ensuing decades.
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