Auden

O plunge your hands in water
Plunge them up to the wrist.
Stare, stare at the basin
And wonder what you've missed.

Luv that bit, anyway.

I'm very fond of Auden, well the early left-intellectual 'English' Auden anyway.
I remember watching Nightmail as a kid and just loving those rhymes and rhythms beside the film's images. Also Britten's music. Didn't know what or who it was until much much later. Can hear/see it in my head now.
Spain is a fantastic militant poem, though he suppressed it.
In his best poems there's a kind of cold compression of speech coupled with a tough music which is very attractive. Not so mad about the Christian-Californian stuff.

Though I firmly blame 4 Weddings and an effin Funeral for the decline

This is from In Memory of WBY



In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

If it form the one landscape that we the inconstant ones are consitently homesick for this is chiefly because it dissolves in water...

auden is a fantastic poet... his awareness of what it takes to keep the muse amused is amazing (cf. his prose on the subject of poetry)... people probably object to his revisionism (trying to take control of his heritage) & his camp... but he is spectacularly important... taking over from the modernists & yeats... any denigration is presumably ignorance-led... not necessarily in k-punk terms (don't know the context), but paglia...!? what kind of anthology was it? probably couldn't find anything she understood... one of my favourite lines is 'thousands have lived without love, not one without water'... & he coined the phrase post-hegelian bishops... thumbs up from here anyway

Melmoth said:

I'm very fond of Auden, well the early left-intellectual 'English' Auden anyway.
I remember watching Nightmail as a kid and just loving those rhymes and rhythms beside the film's images. Also Britten's music. Didn't know what or who it was until much much later. Can hear/see it in my head now.
Spain is a fantastic militant poem, though he suppressed it.
In his best poems there's a kind of cold compression of speech coupled with a tough music which is very attractive. Not so mad about the Christian-Californian stuff.

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yeah, that's almost exactly my position on Auden- how i'd defend him to k-p anyhow, though i don't think i can do better than michael bracewell I like how connected he was to Europe (and especially Weimar Germany)-- along with v un-english political commitment, and his fetishising of industry, empty bleak landscapes, victorian detritus, harshness and austerity with a kind of suppressed warmth....his translation of Brecht/Weill's 'Seven Deadly Sins' is terrific too. i love the image of him and Isherwood, gay and ostentatiously seedy, going on communist marches in berlin, trying to wake england to what was happening in front of its face...(Isherwood's 'Christopher and his Kind' is excellent on their friendship)

wasn't 'Spain' (which i love too, very 'die massnahme' in its ambiguous revolutionary morality) suppressed in part because of orwell's critique of it? something like ''the necessary murder' is a phrase that only someone who only knew 'murder' as a word could write'. of course with the moscow trials and so forth it isn't too surprising that he drifted rightwards, though he could have become a trot instead yunno

also he (and isherwood) looked amazing, viz-

Was that photograph the one taken just before they skedaddled to America in the late thirties? Not sure if it is. They got a lot of flak (excuse pun) for that, deservedly so I think. The south african fascist poet Roy Campbell said that Spender was a 'stormtrooper pf the knife and fork brigade', and I think thts true in a way of Auden too.

Owen yeah it was in reaction to Orwell. Basically Auden argued for the necessity of execution in Spain and Orwell said he was a dilettante who didn't know what he was talking about.

Know what you mean about the melancholy industrial landscapes. The Pylon Poets, as him Spender and MacN. were called.

And yeah Jenks, MacN. is underrated. Autumn Journal is big, as the yout say.

Oh yeah, and weirdly, about 3 hours after I wrote that first post above I saw that Scottish fucker who recites the Auden poem in 4 weddings and a Funeral walking along Richmond High street.

He reads in such a tortured thesp way.

but if you look at the poem its incredibly camp and ironic.

jenks said:

of course he ended up with a face like a sow's arse

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poor sow... his face was much worse than her arse... he was a 60-80 a day man apparently... which is how a teacher at school used to explain it

that was orwell (who also described Auden as 'a kind of gutless kipling' tho changed his mind later), and it was 50- he was nearing his 50th when he wrote it, but died first. it's not in a book, it's from a notebook he wrote on his tb ridden deathbed

the pic is actually from when they were off to cover the sino-japanese war, before they buggered off to the US (Isherwood is v good on california, tho auden just seemed to totally lose it, oh well)

i actually think auden looked great when his face had gone all pruney and manky. beckett similarly

Beckett's face in no way went "pruney and manky"! Perhaps he ended up looking like a cross between an Indian Chieftain and a porcupine. But manky? Pah!

there was an article in the grauniad yesterday about poetry... the sweetest sound of all & a great picture (on the internet, wasn't in the printed version) of his pruneyness (wha not beckett)... it's not rude about auden either... just to disprove jenks' tentative theory

mankiness disputable, pruniness undeniable. just cos he's on the cover of yr book

i'm not sure if this auden pic is even real it's so terrifying-

Owen yeah it was in reaction to Orwell. Basically Auden argued for the necessity of execution in Spain and Orwell said he was a dilettante who didn't know what he was talking about.

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he used the line 'the necessary murders', ie that to make war, even in a just cause, you must murder people. in other words he humanized the enemy. orwell could be an awful numbnuts.

of course with the moscow trials and so forth it isn't too surprising that he drifted rightwards, though he could have become a trot instead yunno

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hmm, great! i dunno, abandoning stalinism isn't a 'rightwards move' imo. and becoming a trot sure as shit ain't going left.

henrymiller said:

hmm, great! i dunno, abandoning stalinism isn't a 'rightwards move' imo. and becoming a trot sure as shit ain't going left.

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heheheh! i was being just a little facetious there.

surely tho he abandoned stalinism when it became obvious that stalinism existed, as it were. and what i was suggesting was that this realisation doesn't necessarily entail becoming a miserly godbothering reactionary.

do elaborate though on what you consider to be 'left' on the spectrum, you've got me intrigued. anyone would think you were an anarchist or summat