For years I've had this W. H. Auden compliation and never opened it. Two weeks ago, I grabbed it for some humor, expert rhymes and musical lines. Auden is one of the first poets I became familiar with, assigned to report on him in my very first poetry class in high school. I did a short study of the two perinnials: "The Unknown Citizen" and "O Tell Me the Truth About Love." I was reminded of him again when "Funeral Blues" came up in Joan Dideon's recent book Blue Nights.
What I enjoyed about reading Auden this time were his takes on other writers and pop culture, all the times he dropped in celebrity names. My least favorite poems were the love poems with the exceptions of "What's in Your Mind, My Dove, My Coney" and "Song" that begins with "You were a great Cunarder, I/Was only a fishing smack."
Celebrity culture is dealt with in "Who's Who" and he often references the famous: Mae West, Fred Astaire, John Gielgud, and Valentino in between his thoughts on war and Quantum Theory. "Imagine what the Duke of Ellington/Would say about the music of Duke Ellington." (from "Letter to Lord Byron")
There are always lovely rhythms in his lines. From "Foxtrot from a Play:"
"The soldier loves his rifle,
The scholar loves his books,
The farmer loves his horses,
The film star loves her looks…
And this refrain in the poem:
"Some lose their rest for gay Mae West,
But you're my cup of tea…
Some like a tough to treat 'em rough,
But you're my cup of tea…
And some I know have got B.O.
But you're my cup of tea…
Ending on:
And dogs love most an old lamp-post,
But you're my cup of tea.
I enjoyed wading through his long epic "Letter to Lord Byron" to see how he handled the extended celebrity poem. In the poem he mentions Gary Cooper, Jane Austin, Crawford and 'Mr. Yates' among others.
I loved how he takes the piss out of advertising in "Ode" going deep into the selling and being-sold-to psyche:
"Though I know that the Self's an illusion,
And that words leave us all in the dark,
That we're all serious mental cases
If we think that we think that we know."
"The Truest Poetry is the Most Feigning" is a great discussion of the politics of word choice. More on writers ("the snivelling sonneteer") and healers:
"The friends of the born nurse
are always getting worse."
–"Shorts"
"Every brilliant doctor
Hides a murderer."
–"Many Happy Returns"
"The average poet by comparison
Is unobservant, immature, and lazy.
You must admit, when all is said and done,
His sense of other people's very hazy,
His moral judgements are too often crazy,
A slick and easy genereralisation
Appeals too well to his imagination."
–"Letter to Lord Byron"
"It may be D.H. Lawrence hocus-pocus,
But I prefer a room that's got a focus."
–"Letter to Lord Byron"
"Joyces are firm and there there's nothing new,
Eliots have heardened just a point or two.
Hopkins are brisk, thanks to some recent boosts.
There's been some further weakening in Prousts.
I'm saying this to tell you who's the rage,
And not to loose a sneer from my interior.
Because there's snobbery in every age,
Because some names are loved by the superior,
It does not follow that they're the least inferior…
–"Letter to Lord Byron"
There were also many more references to sex and the dramas of sex than I expected. Auden is very saucy.
"When Laura lay on her ledger side
And nicely threw her north cheek up,
How pleasing the plight of her promising grove
And how rich the random I reached with a rise."
–"Three Songs from The Age of Anxiety"
But he was a curmudgeon in the end. From "Doggerel by a Senior Citizen:"
"The Speech was mannerly, an Art,
Like learning not to belch or fart:
I cannot settle which is worse,
The Anti-Novel or Free Verse."
Ah…those crazy gadgets kids are into: free verse poems!
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