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it's Wystan's birthday centennial
Feb. 21st, 2007 11:37 amW.H. Auden was born 100 years ago today, in York, but he grew up mostly in Birmingham. His father was an antiquarian who named him after an obscure Mercian prince. Wystan Auden "said he would be 'furious' if he ever met another Wystan," writes his biographer.
Many people know Auden for the poem that was read in Four Weddings and a Funeral. Others know him for the poem that was assigned reading in my school English classes, every year, like clockwork. And in recent years, the poem that seemed to predict 9/11.
But there's more to Auden than this, great as it is. His later poetry, which tends to be discounted by critics because it has regular meter and it rhymes and terrible things like that, has some little-known delights, poems on subjects that great poems rarely discuss, though they should.
Like this one on the joys of having a good sht in the morning.
Or, from the same book, this little squib explaining the concept of personal space:
Apart from a few encounters at school (see above), my introduction to Auden was the fact that he was one of the few figures of literary repute of the day who really took to J.R.R. Tolkien's fiction. He reviewed The Lord of the Rings, quite favorably, in The New York Times; he wrote a couple articles about Tolkien and was all set to publish what would have been the first book about Tolkien's work when Tolkien, who hated being written about, asked him not to. The manuscript, whatever there was of it, was destroyed. Pity: it would have been a lot better than William Ready or Lin Carter.
Auden's fondness for Tolkien had a long history: as an undergraduate at Oxford in the 1920s he'd attended Tolkien's lectures on Anglo-Saxon and been enraptured. In a lecture years later, when he himself had become Professor of Poetry at Oxford, Auden said of Tolkien's lectures, "I do not remember a single word he said but at a certain point he recited, and magnificently, a long passage of Beowulf. I was spellbound. This poetry, I knew, was going to be my dish."
This attitude did not sit well with Auden's fellow students, who were aghast that he "really admired the boring Anglo-Saxon poets." But Auden persevered: Anglo-Saxonry permeated his work - he's one of the few 20th century poets, besides Tolkien himself, to have tried writing modern English alliterative verse - and his defense of Tolkien's fiction was defiant. "If anyone dislikes [The Lord of the Rings]," he said on the radio, "I shall never trust their literary judgement about anything again," a remark a little strong even for me (or for Tolkien). Despite a chill after Auden was quoted saying that Tolkien lived in a hideous house, they remained friends and even wrote celebratory verses on each other. (I can't find Auden's online: it was called "A Short Ode to a Philologist" and was published in a festschrift for Tolkien in 1962.)
The late Humphrey Carpenter, who'd written Tolkien's biography, went on to write Auden's. It's his best book, a glorious portrait of a very individual man whom you'd surely want to meet but not have as a houseguest. Of the many colorful anecdotes, this bit from the account of Auden's rather spotty career as a schoolteacher is my favorite:
Many people know Auden for the poem that was read in Four Weddings and a Funeral. Others know him for the poem that was assigned reading in my school English classes, every year, like clockwork. And in recent years, the poem that seemed to predict 9/11.
But there's more to Auden than this, great as it is. His later poetry, which tends to be discounted by critics because it has regular meter and it rhymes and terrible things like that, has some little-known delights, poems on subjects that great poems rarely discuss, though they should.
Like this one on the joys of having a good sht in the morning.
Or, from the same book, this little squib explaining the concept of personal space:
Some thirty inches from my nose
The frontier of my Person goes,
And all the untilled air between
Is private pagus or demesne.
Stranger, unless with bedroom eyes
I beckon you to fraternize,
Beware of rudely crossing it:
I have no gun, but I can spit.
Apart from a few encounters at school (see above), my introduction to Auden was the fact that he was one of the few figures of literary repute of the day who really took to J.R.R. Tolkien's fiction. He reviewed The Lord of the Rings, quite favorably, in The New York Times; he wrote a couple articles about Tolkien and was all set to publish what would have been the first book about Tolkien's work when Tolkien, who hated being written about, asked him not to. The manuscript, whatever there was of it, was destroyed. Pity: it would have been a lot better than William Ready or Lin Carter.
Auden's fondness for Tolkien had a long history: as an undergraduate at Oxford in the 1920s he'd attended Tolkien's lectures on Anglo-Saxon and been enraptured. In a lecture years later, when he himself had become Professor of Poetry at Oxford, Auden said of Tolkien's lectures, "I do not remember a single word he said but at a certain point he recited, and magnificently, a long passage of Beowulf. I was spellbound. This poetry, I knew, was going to be my dish."
This attitude did not sit well with Auden's fellow students, who were aghast that he "really admired the boring Anglo-Saxon poets." But Auden persevered: Anglo-Saxonry permeated his work - he's one of the few 20th century poets, besides Tolkien himself, to have tried writing modern English alliterative verse - and his defense of Tolkien's fiction was defiant. "If anyone dislikes [The Lord of the Rings]," he said on the radio, "I shall never trust their literary judgement about anything again," a remark a little strong even for me (or for Tolkien). Despite a chill after Auden was quoted saying that Tolkien lived in a hideous house, they remained friends and even wrote celebratory verses on each other. (I can't find Auden's online: it was called "A Short Ode to a Philologist" and was published in a festschrift for Tolkien in 1962.)
The late Humphrey Carpenter, who'd written Tolkien's biography, went on to write Auden's. It's his best book, a glorious portrait of a very individual man whom you'd surely want to meet but not have as a houseguest. Of the many colorful anecdotes, this bit from the account of Auden's rather spotty career as a schoolteacher is my favorite:
It was perhaps because he lacked a real rapport with the boys that Auden kept order in class partly by means of clowning. ... On one occasion when he had trouble with discipline he told Gabriel Carritt he had threatened "to cut my prick off" if the boys continued to fool about. He bought a suitable piece of meat from the butcher, and, next time a hullabaloo broke out in class, opened his fly, brought out this meat, and appeared to be actually carrying out the threat with a sharp knife - to horrified cries of "No, sir! Don't do it!"
