W H AUDEN AND THE MAGIC OF POETRY

‘A poet is before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.’ W H Auden

The 1930’s for me will always be the poets decade. Many fine novels were written in the thirties but the commanding heights were occupied by the poets, Cecil Day Lewis, Stephen Spender, Louis Macneice, and of course W H Auden.[1]T S Eliot and Ezra Pound were both still dominant figures, though both had been supernova’s in the 1920’s and Eliot’s concerns were not those of ‘the thirties poets.’ These concerns, politics, particularly communism, social conditions and the struggle against fascism. The thirties poets tend often to be characterised as Auden and co, and it was Auden who shone brightest and there is still a wide audience for his work

“Poetry” Alan Bennett remarked, “ has the power to do magic.[2]This seems to me to be unquestionably true and no more so than in the case of Auden. The first Auden poem I ever read ‘What is That Sound’ with it chilling repetition, growing sense of menace and ultimate intimation of betrayal was one of my first experiences of the power of poetry, that with poetry you could do more with less.

It was Auden’s first lines that grabbed me, that touched those magic chords that start to gently vibrate and made the hairs on the back of my head stand on end, ‘Look stranger on this island now’, ‘Lay your sleeping head my love, human on my faithless arm,’ ‘August for the people and their favourite island.’ Many of these poems I don’t ‘understand,’ since, to quote Alan Bennett again, “they lead you down the garden path;” you never really know exactly where you are. But explaining what a poem ‘means’ seems to me  increasingly silly. It is like the philistine standing before a great work of art declaiming, “yeah, but what does it ‘mean!’ This is not to say that there is some innate merit in poetry being obscure only that some of the best poetry is mysterious, ambiguous, places you upon uncertain ground. It is upon this ground that some of the greatest magic occurs.

Look, stranger, on this island now
The leaping light for your delight discovers,
Stand stable here
And silent be,
That through the channels of the ear
May wander like a river
The swaying sound of the sea.

Auden of course is seen as being a political poet, a committed poet of the left, this of course is true, a fact that in later life he found embarrassing.

“What's your proposal? To build the just city? I will.
I agree. Or is it the suicide pact, the romantic
Death? Very well, I accept, for
I am your choice, your decision. Yes, I am Spain."

He was even embarrassed by September 1^st 1939, which he later said was the last poem he wrote in the ‘great grand manner.’  It is one of his greatest poems and a poem that gained a second lease of life after the events of September 11^th 2001. “All the positions I took only served to make people whom I liked and admired like and admire me, and did not save a single Jew.”

But before he was anything else Auden was a humanist and it is his humanism that holds true, that both carry’s and holds great weight and still has, that rather weary term, ‘relevance.’  As late as 1968 he could still pack a heavy punch against the preposterous tyrants strutting the world stage. (In this case the Brezhnev).

The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach:
The Ogre cannot master speech.

About a subjugated plain,
Among it's desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.

These lines immediately came to mind as I watched Mohmar Quaddafi making one of his last diatribes in Tripoli.

Along with Houseman, a poet whom Auden admired, Auden was one of the first poets whom I thought it worth committing to memory. Poetry has the capacity to enter the psyche, suddenly opening doors one never realised were there, or simply gives voice to elemental emotions, enriching our experience both of the particular and personal whilst shedding light upon the universal and transcendent. I learnt the following lines from September 1939 by heart, the last three lines presenting the contemporary human condition through the prism of a smoky Manhattan bar.

‘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.’

W H Auden September 1939.

This post will shortly be moved to The Blue Room 

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[1]Christopher Isherwood was very much a part of this group though was primarily a novelist.

It seems to me to have been Auden  and Louis Macneice who have both stood the test of time, Macneice being neglected and passed over for some years has recently enjoyed something of a renaissance.

[2]More people are affected emotionally by poetry than is often acknowledged. I know people who would never dream of going near a poetry book who are moved by a song lyric, a line from a hymn, or poetry read on the Tube. My mother, who hardly numbered poetry amongst her hobbies, had a great affection for Masefield’s Sea Fever, which I had read at her funeral. 

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