tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29676463.post7971420343298837316..comments2024-03-29T07:33:59.039+13:00Comments on The Imaginary Museum: Why W. H. Auden?Dr Jack Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01805945600952222957noreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29676463.post-90422268278866884092014-08-02T20:55:05.279+12:002014-08-02T20:55:05.279+12:00Yes I agree re Pound. His Cantos is so vast.
I t...Yes I agree re Pound. His Cantos is so vast. <br /><br />I think a good take on that though is via Charles Bernstein's 'A Poetic' which has an essay (Bernstein makes his 'prose' essays sometimes into a kind of poem form.) called 'Pounding Fascism' which I think, especially as he is Jewish-American, is to the point: that Pound in his poetics was innovative, using fragmentation and simulaneity of time thru history, the sudden (beautiful poetic) revelation arising from all the dry politics etc...but at the same time his move towards fascism is in part due to his great embrace of the opposite: somewhat The Great Tradition which contradicts that process...but I read that some time ago. I think it might be interesting for some students, or others to read. <br /><br />We haven't dragged Celan or WCW's into it all yet! I'm still mulling over, struggling with Celan...what about Geoffrey Hill.<br /><br />Possibly old fussy Harold Bloom has a few things to say on the issue, as I know Sontag does (I dont know if she wrote on poetry though).... Richardhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10272507198753290435noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29676463.post-14540990949609975912014-08-02T20:46:16.918+12:002014-08-02T20:46:16.918+12:00You probably have this, i.e. John Fuller's boo...You probably have this, i.e. John Fuller's book about Auden's poems.<br />On p. 259 in my Thames & Hudson edition:<br /><br /> For the error bred in the bone<br /> Of each woman and each man <br /> Craves what it cannot have,<br /> Not universal love<br /> But to be loved alone.<br /><br />[Already the poem raises complex social, political, cultural issues and echoes 'The Fall' concept or 'reality', for I think Auden was aware of the impossibility of certainty in these ideas of right and wrong...(my comment)]<br /> <br />'Auden borrowed these last two lines from Nijinsky: "Some politicians are hypocrites like Diaghilev, who does not want universal love, but to be loved alone. I want universal love.' (The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky, 1937, p.44). The immediate evidence of this 'error' could be traced ub theory by psychoanalytic investigations of Hitler's earliest experiences ('what occured at Linz,/ what huge imago made/A psychopathic god') of by a historical study of German nationalsim ('the whole offence/From Luther until now/That has driven a culture mad'), but there is a simpler answerm with a strongly Christian flavour: 'Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return.')...[Fuller suggests he is in this poem not only suggesting the 'cause' is Hitler's early life but the enlightenment, Lutherism, Descartes (I think Auden misunderstands the latter) etc (Auden suggests as much somewhere)...[As a poem or poem sequence this is indeed great poetry though, for sure.]' (Fuller.) <br /><br />But, in fact, I once read a book by an OSS Psychoanalyst who analysed Hitler. But I think that Auden is cutting into the core of the whole thing: we can talk about say, all the wonderful things about the first world war, the dubious heroics, but what caused it? How did / does it all arise? Why might the 'necessary murder' be necessary? Was (as I semi-satirically suggest - Hitler's mother to blame for it all? Poor woman. 'Poor man.' in my 'The Secret of Being Unpopular'). <br /><br />So: in simple turns evil was done to Hitler and say John Gray. We need to know more about such people. Hence perhaps Joyce Carol Oates attempt in her novel about a serial killer (from his point of view 'he read Wittgenstein'!!), and so on. <br /><br /> Richardhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10272507198753290435noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29676463.post-64830868050360946582014-08-02T12:44:14.721+12:002014-08-02T12:44:14.721+12:00Dear Richard,
To be honest, I don't really kn...Dear Richard,<br /><br />To be honest, I don't really know what mad Nijinsky wrote about Diaghilev. I presume (in context) he accused him of wanting "not universal love, but to be loved alone."<br /><br />I have read Nijinksy's diary, but it was a long time ago, and I never found the precise passage Auden had in mind (since then there's been a new, fuller translation of it).<br /><br />I like the way you sneak in Pound there at the end -- that's a whole different story! Certainly in political terms, at any rate. While I think there's much to be said for the questions Pound asked, the answers he found (in the 30s and 40s) were rather less satisfactory -- or that's what I think, anyway.<br />Dr Jack Rosshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01805945600952222957noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29676463.post-32987677145373587972014-08-02T10:32:21.336+12:002014-08-02T10:32:21.336+12:00Jack, sorry to hog the comments. but what did mad ...Jack, sorry to hog the comments. but what did mad Nijinsky write about Diagelief. He was paranoic? I recall something of that. <br /><br />Auden had a wide learning, and was proficient also in all the poetic forms. <br /><br />I can concur re Eliot but I do give the thumbs up to Auden, Yeats and Pound. Richardhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10272507198753290435noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29676463.post-85348336576090808832014-08-01T11:15:55.084+12:002014-08-01T11:15:55.084+12:00Eliot's choices, yes perhaps, but not his poet...Eliot's choices, yes perhaps, but not his poetry. <br /><br />(Eliot like a kind of High Priest of lit. whereas Auden and Yeats are still wrestling with their art etc and cant avoid 'politics' or (more or less) the real, however defined...<br /><br />It sounds as though it will be an interesting discussion as long as the students are actually interested in poetry etc not like some who are simply riding through on the way to a law degree or something...not that it's not good they have SOME exposure to lit., but you surely want the more focused more literarily focused strudents? Richardhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10272507198753290435noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29676463.post-18419801387535551342014-08-01T11:11:11.630+12:002014-08-01T11:11:11.630+12:00That (re Yeats) is, I would argue, is because of t...That (re Yeats) is, I would argue, is because of the strange (and ingenious) nature of Yeat's system which (most people) cant make head nor tail of: but as well as having a structure (just as Eliot had his - perhaps equally eccentric it seems nowadays) based on Royalty in politics, his religion (as you say), his obsession that civilization (for him it is almost an inhuman concept, he's not really interested in the First World War as he writes The Waste Land, nor was the Second World War really the deal, they are as Cynthia Ozick speculates, really energised by his personal relationships (breakown, his first wife, his psych-spiritual [existential?] concerns. I think, given his use of the 'objective correlative' (I disagree with Ozick on this part of an essay she wrote about him, as I think that that technique is what makes Eliot's poems so great for me): so I feel, that real as his religion and his beliefs were (as I am sure Pound really believed in a way that the Greek gods were 'real' (they were to him, as was I think, the 'simultaneity of History' - some of that must have affected Eliot), as Yeats convinced himself of his system of historical gyres etc): I think that Eliot's poetry still stands up as it is closer to say Mallarme or Baudelaire of course with some of La Forgue's satire [who else ever began a poem with 'Polyphiloprogenitive'?] and his sensitivity-intensity means that he (like Yeats,whose 'system' almost no one who reads him takes much interest in, but it acted as a kind of total frame for him, as one thinks of Eliots bones that sing in the desert, his yellow smog or fog, even 'the Jew' is important (so many connotations, remember he wrote most of that stuff before WW2): so his poetry is poetry, in essence, it transforms or transcends. <br /><br />But I see Auden wrestling with his soul: I think that Yeats, as he was in a place where his 'patrician' views were offset by his closeness (e.g. to those who were killed by the British in 1916 or to news or experience of violence and 'drunken soldiery' of all kinds, and turmoil): I mean wherever he was, Joyce stayed well clear of Ireland for good reasons as far as he was concerned, I mean he was afraid of thunder and dogs! <br />Auden at least WENT to Spain, if he didn't do much there.<br /><br />But for me, Eliot, Auden, Yeats are the main movers in England. Soon the great German, and other European writers would be faced with the terrible dilemmas of Nazism which by and large they couldn't be "forgetful" of. <br /><br />But I dont feel Eliot is ever childish, it is just that now we feel it is (almost) a game called art. But by continuing to write, there is affirmation, as Auden implies in his great poem about Yeats. <br /><br />When I was at University (1990s) the Modernists were: Frost, Yeats, Marianne Moore, (and I suppose Stein by extension as well as Bishop), William Carlos Williams (to counter Pope Eliot!)...but no Auden or Eliot! But that was a starting point I suppose. <br /><br />Auden's later 'Thank You Fog' is still great or good poetry but not for me as intense as The Letter etc or Yeat's great poems. I still cannot free myself from Eliot's voice however.<br /><br />If you want a touch of almost mad reality take a pew at say Keith Douglas (or the earlier WWI poets) or Richard Taylor's 'The Secret of Being Unpopular' where the old mad man of Panmure resorts to invoking Auden:<br /><br />Is it blamable on the bloody big biblical Big Bang? “What was the matter with the matter?”<br /><br />'It’s like this. I’ll put Bach and Pergolesi at one end and such as Sid Vicious and Stockhausen at the other, with a dash of Jazz and some Charles Ives,<br />or even Stevens in the Nigger Graveyard, not to mention poor old Pound…and <br />Charles Bernstein’s ‘Pounding Fascism’. It’s all in the mixmess. Auden was the man for this sort of thing. Lately I’ve been reading, post Ashbery and Berryman, Carol Ann Duffy, and bits of others, including the Manhire of children dying…'<br /> Richardhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10272507198753290435noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29676463.post-79431518337834954212014-08-01T09:44:49.383+12:002014-08-01T09:44:49.383+12:00Those Yeats poems "Easter 1916" and &quo...Those Yeats poems "Easter 1916" and "Meditations in Time of Civil War" are another endless point of return, though, I would say. Auden was obsessed by Yeats -- drawn by the sheer power of his language, repelled by the apparent ease with which he negotiated his role as poet and spokesperson for Ireland.<br /><br />Yeats's choices have not grown less interesting over time, though, unlike (I would say) Eliot's -- who was Auden's other great influence in the 30s. All that Anglo-catholic maundering just sounds a bit childish now, I think.<br />Dr Jack Rosshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01805945600952222957noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29676463.post-78440055629338337582014-08-01T01:08:11.707+12:002014-08-01T01:08:11.707+12:00That poem 'The Letter' was one that haunte...That poem 'The Letter' was one that haunted me as a teenage from the mid sixties. I concur on this: Auden is great for the attempt to reconcile these 'dark issues'. He also tries to tackle it in 'The Orators'. Yeats seems to simply, or perhaps not simply: but he rejects any solution as in his poem 'The Vision' which moves away from the human so to speak. <br /><br />But "Mad Ireland hurt him into poetry..." and poetry "survives in the valley of its making". Yes, he could never resolve the contradictions. And nor should he: Eliot was always contradiction. It was a kind of musical/emotional logic - which Auden attains at his best (even in 'Spain'). His nursery rhyme morality of 'social-political logic' is just right. He had already revised 'the necessary murder' before Orwell wrote his criticism of that line: but that O had fought in Spain is no excuse: Auden was simply a great poet and Orwell's critique is naive. But Auden knew that every statement implies a contradiction. <br /><br />That 'poetry makes nothing happen' has been misunderstood as has William Carlos Williams 'No ideas but in things.' Williams included that in a book where he also talks about imagination and much else (he also wrote a kind of surrealist prose work). These things are sometimes taken unreflectingly out of context. But his "all he has is a word" to "undo the folded lie" and that implies that potent of the poetic.<br /><br />Auden's poetry is constantly thinking.<br /><br />This is very informative re Auden and the times. Richardhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10272507198753290435noreply@blogger.com