Auden was the best poet of the twentieth century
"My dear, if you want romance fuck a journalist."
How to Read a Novel
Starting on 6th September, once a month for six months I am holding a discussion salon called How to Read a Novel. Think of it as a bookclub setting where we will learn about the techniques novelists use. Each month we read a short, classic novel and talk about how it works. We will cover beginnings, morality, patterns, character, irony, and precision. All important novelistic techniques. The first novel is Persuasion by Jane Austen where we will talk about openings. Why is it that a romance spends so long talking about the Baronetage in its first pages? And where is the heroine? The aim of these sessions is to enable you to read the clues that novelists leave and to get the most out of your reading. Get all the details here.
Writing elsewhere
This week I wrote for The Critic about why the decline of English Literature isn’t such a big problem. And I published some questions on this blog (which you will not have received by email) about talent. Answers in the comments, please.
I cannot quite justify buying the new two-volume Complete Poems of W.H. Auden. We already own the Collected Poems along with the Collected Shorter Poems and the single volume Another Time. None of that is a good reason to pass on the new volumes, full of footnotes and other editorial matter, not to mention the additional unpublished work. I will console myself with the thought that, at heart, I am not much of a completionist. And anyway, I will probably cave soon. I skimmed them at the library and they seem excellent, although the contents page could be more helpful.
Auden is the great English poet of the twentieth century. (Frost aside: he takes the prize in America.) Rankings are silly. Insisting on having a single greatest is silly. But there are good poets and bad poets, so many bad poets. And we do have the advantage in poetry of dealing with the common reader who wants to know which poets are excellent and truly worth reading. Many critics disagree with this assessment of Auden, preferring Yeats or Stevens or T.S. Eliot.
You hear a lot about T.S. Eliot. But that’s all just The Waste Land and Prufrock. And let me tell you, children, The Waste Land is overrated. Excellent, but overrated. Like the collection he wrote about cats, only half of it is for keeps. Yes there are some people who enjoy The Four Quartets, especially the misty-eyed and people who get soppy about nature writing. And there are some wonderful passages in those poems. But there are also passages of pure purple horror. Eliot is often convoluted, pompous, and windy. He is the poet of despair and prejudice and of having a PhD. You should read him. At his best, he’s outstanding. (He knew how to write in the plain style.) But for my money he never really recaptured the glories of Prufrock. In the stakes of all-time greats, Eliot is a near miss. The same is true of Yeats, whose best works like Sailing to Byzantium are just too finely wrought, too glittery, too forced.
Auden is the business. Auden has range. Auden brought back the sung lyric. He reinvigorated the Elizabeth love poem for the machine age. He wrote travel poetry. He wrote advertising poetry. One of his poems was famously used in Four Weddings and a Funeral. His lyrics can be about philosophy, the ancient world, left wing politics, or limestone; he memorialised great figures of his time like Sigmund Freud; he is witty, naughty, and writes in complicated rhyme schemes. He was competing with Milton, Byron, Campion, Keats, and Shakespeare, not to mention the minor poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Some poets of his time were conspicuously learned and their poetry has been forgotten under the weight of it; others were so absorbed in the predilections of modernism they are read by the specialist interest only; Auden has it all. Was there a verse structure he didn’t write in or a mode he didn’t attempt?
Auden was described by Richard Crossman as the last poet many people of his generation memorised. That might make him a candidate for one of the last poets, along with Betjeman and Larkin, that any generation memorised. Although the Insta poets are bringing the practice back. After Auden, poetry becomes a decidedly more elite affair. Auden made a happy marriage of high modernism and popular appeal. He has flow and rhythm and humour and elegance. And yet he is often thought of as a “difficult” poet. Imagine a poet who wrote for television today being thought of admiringly on all sides.
All of this is as nothing to the way he makes his lines move. When it comes down to brass tacks there really is only one requirement of a poet. Be good. You can spend your life arguing about what good means, but we all know it when we see it. Or so often in Auden’s case, when we hear it. Think about the poem, Musee des Beaux Arts. Every line a gem. Most especially at the end…
and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
That was published in Another Time, the 1940 volume that stands with Milton’s 1645 collection or Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798 or Keats in 1816 or Heaney in 1991. Some people won’t have it so, because Wystan included light verse. Well sucks to them. Milton told rude jokes after dinner at Cambridge. Keats got rough and tumble with the lads. Shakespeare is a fine master of the bawdy arts. Like them, Auden was clever enough to write the sort of light verse that can sit alongside his poem about the start of the Second World War.
And he was witty. Here he is talking about Jane Austen.
You could not shock her more than she shocks me; Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass. It makes me most uncomfortable to see An English spinster of the middle class Describe the amorous effects of ‘brass’
He could be poignant while he was being funny without being slushy or sentimental. That’s not the sort of circus trick any amateur acrobat can pull off. Try it at home and you’ll see. This is from O tell me the truth about love.
When it comes, will it come without warning Just as I’m picking my nose? Will it knock on my door in the morning, Or tread in the bus on my toes? Will it come like a change in the weather? Will its greeting be courteous or rough? Will it alter my life altogether? O tell me the truth about love.
What Auden knew was that you had to tell the truth. He wasn’t writing just for the sake of the writing. He wanted to get it right. Auden could write with specificity because he was a serious person. You might not always want to know such a person by the way. He picked his nose openly and admitted to pissing in the sink. He had full-volume, stand-up, debates with his lover on the tube about the correct Freudian interpretation of their relationship. One of his lovers said that he was remarkably unromantic, for a poet. “My dear,” Auden replied, “if you want romance fuck a journalist.”
Most of all, he worked. He took benzedrine every day to make him more productive. He was ambitious in a way most people cannot be comfortable with. Here’s the conversation he had with his tutor when he left Oxford:
Tutor: ‘And what are you going to do, Mr. Auden, when you leave the university?’
Auden: ‘I am going to be a poet.’
Tutor: ‘Well—in that case you should find it very useful to have read English.’
Auden: ‘You don’t understand. I am going to be a great poet.’
In later life, when he was a great poet, he was a terrible, terrible house guest. Clive James described it in What happened to Auden?
Regret By all accounts he sparingly displayed When kind acquaintances appeared upset, Their guest rooms wrecked as if by an air raid. He would forgive himself and soon forget. Pig-like he revelled in the mess he made,
A friend once left Auden in his flat for the day: “If it hadn’t been for the pictures on the walls I wouldn’t have known where I was. Frustrated burglars could not have created greater chaos.” Nor was he a forgiving host. He went to bed irrespective of who was over for dinner. The Paris Review reports that he once left his guests to have a bath, “making a spectacular appearance shortly afterward covered only in bubbles: he strode purposefully across the apartment casting a disapproving look at the nightbirds”.
Auden believed that poets’ biographies were not relevant to understanding their work. A ridiculous claim coming from one of the great love poets of all time whose own Freudian and Christian beliefs contradicted (and condemned) his own homosexuality. He said poetry makes nothing happen. Political poetry doesn’t. But he knew damn well that his sort of poetry makes all sorts of things happen to people’s lives. Why else did he write it? Why else did he care so much about telling the truth about love? He was so concerned with being specific that he insisted the line in September 1, 1939 “we must love one another or die” be changed to “we must love one another and die”, sometimes refusing to allow the poem to be reprinted.
Are you telling me that these verses have never jolted anyone to live even a little bit differently?
In headaches and in worry Vaguely life leaks away, And Time will have his fancy To-morrow or to-day. Into many a green valley Drifts the appalling snow; Time breaks the threaded dances And the diver's brilliant bow. O plunge your hands in water, Plunge them in up to the wrist; Stare, stare in the basin And wonder what you've missed. 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.
Perhaps the real comparison ought to be with Larkin, one of his successors and competitors. Auden achieved everything Larkin did. Popular appeal. Rhymes and meter in the age of free verse. Complexity that doesn’t exclude the common reader. But he achieved so much more. He wrote for everything from the bordello to the opera house (and both together in the case of The Rakes Progress). His complete works are vast where Larkin’s are slim. He saw so much of life, where Larkin often saw so little. They are both great. But Auden is the bigger, more catholic poet, who revived and reinterpreted everything from limericks to madrigals. Larkin wanted to get away from tradition; Auden reinvented it.
Complete Poems of W.H. Auden
How to Read a Novel
Starting on 6th September, once a month for six months I am holding a discussion salon called How to Read a Novel. Think of it as a bookclub setting where we will learn about the techniques novelists use. Each month we read a short, classic novel and talk about how it works. We will cover beginnings, morality, patterns, character, irony, and precision. All important novelistic techniques. The first novel is Persuasion by Jane Austen where we will talk about openings. Why is it that a romance spends so long talking about the Baronetage in its first pages? And where is the heroine? The aim of these sessions is to enable you to read the clues that novelists leave and to get the most out of your reading. Get all the details here.
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Loved this piece. I shamefacedly admit that though I've heard of Auden, I've never actually read his works proper. Thanks for rekindling my interest!
You know, I think you’ve persuaded me! I think Yeats is a bit guilty of being overwrought at times, and I am a walking case of only having read those works of Eliot’s for which he is most celebrated. Am tempted by those completed works of Auden you mention up top now!