{"id":6198,"date":"2007-04-01T08:45:18","date_gmt":"2007-04-01T12:45:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=6198"},"modified":"2022-10-12T16:01:42","modified_gmt":"2022-10-12T20:01:42","slug":"national-poetry-month-w-h-auden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=6198","title":{"rendered":"National Poetry Month: W.H. Auden"},"content":{"rendered":"

April is National Poetry Month<\/a>. I’ll lead off here with my favorite poem, one I come back to again and again and again …It’s even been a bit of a life raft at times<\/a>. A bit<\/i>? How about completely? Below the poem I’ve posted a compilation of quotes about and by Auden. This is why one keeps a “commonplace book” – so you can grab quotes easily when you need them.<\/p>\n

But first, the most important thing.<\/p>\n

The poem. And happy April. And happy Poetry Month.<\/p>\n

The More Loving One<\/b> by WH Auden<\/p>\n

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
\nThat, for all they care, I can go to hell,
\nBut on earth indifference is the least
\nWe have to dread from man or beast.<\/p>\n

How should we like it were stars to burn
\nWith a passion for us we could not return?
\nIf equal affection cannot be,
\nLet the more loving one be me.<\/p>\n

Admirer as I am
\nOf stars that do not give a damn,
\nI cannot, now I see them, say
\nI missed one terribly all day.<\/p>\n

Were all stars to disappear or die,
\nI should learn to look at an empty sky
\nAnd feel its total dark sublime,
\nThough this might take me a little time.<\/p>\n

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\nW.H. Auden<\/i><\/p>\n

“The subject of his poetry is the struggle, but the struggle seen, as it were, by someone who whilst living in one camp, sympathises with the other; a struggle in fact which while existing externally is also taking place within the mind of the poet himself, who remains a bourgeois.” – Edgell Rickword, “Auden and Politics”<\/i><\/p>\n

“I think of Mr. Auden’s poetry as a hygiene, a knowledge and practice, based on a brilliantly prejudiced analysis of contemporary disorders, relating to the preservation and promotion of health, a sanitary science and a flusher of melancholia. I sometimes think of his poetry as a great war, admire intensely the mature, religious, and logical fighter, and deprecate the boy bushranger.” — Dylan Thomas<\/i><\/p>\n

“One Sunday afternoon in March 1922, a friend suggested that I should [write poetry]: the thought had never occurred to me.” — WH Auden<\/i><\/p>\n

“For more than a year I read no one else.” — WH Auden – on Thomas Hardy<\/i><\/p>\n

“Never write from your head, write from your cock.” — WH Auden, in a letter to a friend<\/i><\/p>\n

“The need to find an expression for his homosexuality was the first technical obstacle to check the torrential course of Auden’s unprecedented facility. A born master of directness was obliged straightaway to find a language for indirection, thus becoming immediately involved with the drama that was to continue for the rest of his life – a drama in which the living presence of technique is the antagonist.” — Clive James<\/i><\/p>\n

“Auden: great poet or great representative poet? A poet or a ‘classic of our prose’? He overhsadows the poets of his generation. He is Chaucer to the Gower of Betjeman and the Langland of MacNeice.” — Michael Schmidt, “Lives of the Poets<\/a>\"\"“<\/i><\/p>\n

“Then, in June 1933, Auden experienced what he later called a ‘Vision of Agape’. He was sitting on a lawn with three colleagues from the school where he was teaching, when, he wrote, ‘quite suddenly and unexpectedly, something happened. I felt myself invaded by a power which, though I consented to it, was irresistible and certainly not mine. For the first time in my life I knew exactly – because, thanks to the power, I was doing it – what it meant to love one’s neighbor as oneself.” Before this, his poems had only been able to celebrate moments of impersonal erotic intensity, which he called ‘love’. Now, in the poem ‘Out on the lawn I lie in bed,’ prompted by his vision, he had praise for everything around him.” — Edward Mendelson<\/i><\/p>\n

More information on Auden here.<\/a><\/p>\n

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