The Auden poems I like best are the ones about other writers. His poem about the old Herman Melville is a beautiful and perceptive thing: ‘he sailed at the end into an extraordinary mildness’…

“Make this night loveable,
Moon, and with eye single
Looking down from up there
Bless me, One especial,
And friends everywhere.

…Parted by circumstance,
Grant each your indulgence
That we may meet in dreams
For talk, for dalliance…”

So far, so good; it’s practically Po Chu-i. The guy’s good: look, he can make “there/where” sound like a downright original rhyme, through sheer craft, honest feeling, and good taste. Whew! Then it takes a curious, rather disturbing turn, which I won’t quote here. Just goes to show he could do it when he felt like it, and I’m not being a total knocker.

Dr. Cat, I’m still pondering your remark about “social and political” poets. In a lot of ways, Auden was a special case, considering the strange collision of his gifts, his perceptive conscience, and the noisy claims of his generation. Fenton says this about him…

“Auden was a rhetorician. He knew himself to be a rhetorician of the highest powers, and, when he saw the power that he had, he recoiled from it in deep horror. And as he recoiled, he filled his followers with dismay, since they could not see the furies that he saw. …he tried to suppress in himself the urge to create a stirring rhetoric which would move men or classes to action. It is no exaggeration to say that the horror he felt at his own powers… was, though in differing degree, the same kind of horror with which he observed the power of Hitler.”

An interesting case, to be sure. Considering the question in a more general sense (social and political poets vs. “romantic, fractured emotional style”), I think the deeper cases are the ones that involve some sort of complex oscillation between the poles, often in a way that is not self-evident. I don’t have much time, f’rinstance, for Robert Lowell’s hand-wringing and nervous breakdowns; and I find his “political” stance generally rather self-serving and myopic. But Plath is a deeply political poet whether she thinks so or not. The tragedy of Plath of course also reverberates off the historical and gender-politics setting, which sets her work in relief against a vast area of study — as opposed to Berryman, quite as tragic, but curiously hermetic, and of an interest that is equally “curious”. Even more interesting, to me, than either of them, from a social/political viewpoint, is Frank O’Hara’s *refusal* to have a nervous breakdown in the face of the troubles of his time (though he certainly had his bouts of depression and hysteria). Politics is where you look for it, in poetry; and is sometimes most strong when it doesn’t seem to be there.

When Whitman says something simple and generous and mildly funny, like

“The boatmen and clam-diggers arose early and stopped for me,
I tucked my trouser-ends in my boots and went and had a good time,
You should have been with us that day round the chowder-kettle.”

then I start to listen a lot more carefully to what he says about the Civil War. That to me is the beginning of a political and social poetry of importance. (I’m not leaving Auden out of all that, here, just addressing the general question.) There’s also, w/r/t Auden, the sociological question of what it meant to a man of his generation to be an Oxford-educated Englishman who had a social role as poet which had a pre-existing shape, and a set of expectations which Auden courageously examined and sort of defied. Another matter for a May morning.

And he would agree with all the reasons Tim gave. That was nicely put indeed.

No drama, either? No Eugene O’Neill? An interesting thing to try, if you’re dealing with issues of postmodernism, would be to assign O’Neill’s “The Emperor Jones,” and then afterwards make the students watch the Wooster Group’s avant-garde Kabuki-like deconstruction of the play (I think maybe you can get a tape of the performance from their site.) That would make for some interesting compare/contrast conversations!

On the other hand, sounds like you’ve got a cool reading list!

wbb — Ack! You’ve got me totally pegged! Now that my agenda has been found out, I must flee, back to the planet Z’gargax-9, to give my full report.

Well, that’s a little reductive. (Haven’t done much talking sports in yr time, have ye?) First off, I don’t think I’m pissing on Auden, just looking at him from all sides and angles. (“Great sculpture has no boring views” — Frank O’Hara) Plus it would be a little boring to just elicit encomia; I brought up Auden because a) he was on my mind, I’ve been reading about him, and b) I find him, among the great, to be interesting yet highly problematic (Eliot’s that way for other reasons). Plus anyway it’s just talk, not making an academic point; one of the purposes of talk is plain old fun. You don’t like what I’m saying, great. Prove me wrong.

“If I’m going to ‘argue’ with you, I must take up a contrary position.” — John Cleese

“[Auden's] very big on using long and grammatically complicated sentences. That didn’t make me think he was essay-writing; that made me think he had a lot in common with John Donne.”

A *lot* in common? See, that would make me think he had *one thing* in common with Donne (viz., long complicated sentences).

“You’re applying criteria… that you seem to assume are universal…but those are very vague hazy criteria.”

Of course they are. I’m just a reader, not a professor of this stuff. It’s not my job to prove anything about it, just make use of it, and have some fun. What’s your favorite song in The Wizard of Oz? Defend your position by correctly applying the quadratic equation.

“Are you seriously claiming that poets who engage habitually with the social and political are by definition lesser poets?”

No, of course not. Though the innards of that proposition would make for a pretty interesting discussion in its own right.

And if you want a *really* bad poet, try Jem Casey!

http://www.news.com.au/perthnow/story/0,21598,21443766-949,00.html

AUSTRALIANS aged in their 50s will be able to join the military, in a Dad’s Army-style proposal to boost numbers.

Defence Minister Brendan Nelson yesterday announced the Federal Government would increase the Australian Defence Force recruitment age from 51 to 56.

The compulsory retirement age will also be lifted from 55 to 60.

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too

Henry Lawson threw up on better verse.

Are you seriously claiming that poets who engage habitually with the social and political are by definition lesser poets?

It wouldn’t surprise me, Pavlov’s Cat, if j_p_z indeed held to such a view. His loathing of the explicitly political even extends to forms such as LP commentary.

His refuge is the book. And he despises them who would pollute his tower with tawdry news of the world.

That’s not a bad poet … this is a bad poet!

Fiasco — I had a bit of a look at that site. I don’t think John Whateverhisnameis understands what Auden was doing — but I would say that, wouldn’t I.