Up Late: Poems

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Auden’s move to America prompted some rancor in the literary world. He was recruited to the Morale Division of the US Strategic Bombing Survey in Germany, 5 where he interviewed German citizens about the war and “got no answers that we didn’t expect.” He returned briefly to London in 1945, and Robert Graves’s attitude seems not untypical: “Ha ha about Auden: the rats return to the unsunk ship.” Picture books are intimate texts, read in the soft light of bedtime, and not all were meant for the public gaze. James Joyce’s The Cats of Copenhagen was found in a letter to his grandson, written in 1936. The story was published in 2012 to the wrath of the letter’s guardians, the Zurich James Joyce Foundation, who called its revealing an “outrage”.

F6, with Isherwood, and he published the collection Look, Stranger! (published in the US the following year as On This Island), which contains some of his loveliest lyrics (“Out on the lawn I lie in bed”) and shows signs of Auden accepting his sexuality. The military metaphors are reprised, for example, in poem XXVI, but it turns out the passes do not need to be controlled: Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York in 1907, the youngest of three boys. (His brothers became a farmer and a geologist.) When he was a year old, his father, George Auden, became the school medical officer for Birmingham, and the family moved there. Dr. Auden served in the Royal Army Medical Corps in Gallipoli, Egypt, and France during World War I. Auden boarded at St. Edmund’s prep school in Surrey, where he met Christopher Isherwood, who became his lifelong friend, his collaborator, and in the late 1920s and 1930s, his lover. Between 1920 and 1925 Auden boarded at Gresham’s School in Holt, Norfolk, and at the suggestion of a fellow pupil, Robert Medley, with whom he was in love, began to write poetry. Astonishingly fluent, Auden could write poems of immense power that take their subject matter head-on. When it came to love poems, more circumspection was needed, but using the second-person pronoun licensed a direct approach of sorts: “Lay your sleeping head, my love.” Though he later became famous for lines that have the feel of diagnostic epigrams (“We must love one another or die”) or generalizing maxims (“About suffering they were never wrong,/The Old Masters”), the early poems are necessarily oblique, and this vital hedging and coding gives rise to a new style. “Audenesque” came to mean minatory, knowing, allusive, densely enigmatic. Behind that approach lies also a very English irony, a refusal to stand entirely foursquare behind the thing being said, a tone that allows some play within it. And play, for Auden, created a space where he could exist in his complexities. But Auden introduced, or tried to, a certain kind of irony into American poetry, even as America was teaching him the revelations of a more puritan, more direct way of being, or of reporting being. (In The Sea and the Mirror, his long poem-as-commentary on The Tempest, he has Prospero ask, “Can I learn to suffer/Without saying something ironic or funny/On suffering?”) As he told a Time interviewer in 1947:Auden witnessed the worst of nationalism and felt it his moral obligation to be alienated from the crowd, the mob. Did he succeed in uncoupling nationalism from poetry? Eliot, in “The Social Function of Poetry,” wrote that “no art is more stubbornly national than poetry,” and Yeats’s entire project was to create a nation, a unifying myth for Ireland—from the Celtic twilight poems and Cathleen ni Houlihan to one of his final poems, “Cuchulain Comforted.” He wanted “an Ireland/The poets have imagined.”

The poem is structured around Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and takes in references as varied as to a school friend killed in the Troubles; Willie John McBride, the Irish captain of the 1974 British Lions rugby team; and Body Shop lip balm. Mendelson has been studying, explicating, and collating Auden’s work for more than fifty years, since Auden asked him, around 1970, when Mendelson was a young teacher at Yale, to help organize his uncollected essays into what became Forewords and Afterwords (1973). Mendelson, recalling the selection process to another biographer of Auden’s, Richard Davenport-Hines, said the poet His attraction to the country was partly about escape from the old certainties: he told Robert Fitzgerald that “America is the place because nationalities don’t mean anything here, there are only human beings, and that’s how the future must be.” Auden found new subjects and concerns in the United States—early on he befriended the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who was influential in his return to Christianity, which is, according to Auden, “a way, not a state, and a Christian is never something one is, only something one can pray to become.” Kallman’s Jewishness provided him, however, with access to a different set of references, and Kallman also got him interested in grand opera. They collaborated on libretti, including Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress (1951). The Forward Arts Foundation, which runs the awards, also announced that next year’s judging panels will be chaired by Bernardine Evaristo and Joelle Taylor. Evaristo will chair the panel judging the collection length entries, while Taylor will chair the panel focusing on best single poem and a new category for best single poem – performed.By Him is dispelled the darkness wherein the fallen will cannot distinguish between temptation and sin, for in Him we become fully conscious of Necessity as our freedom to be tempted, and of Freedom as our Necessity to have faith… Being an inveterate schematizer, 3 Auden cannot resist a further categorization when it comes to Berlin, who takes his two classes of thinkers from Archilochus. Auden, in response, goes to Lewis Carroll: all men, he insists, may be divided into Alices and Mabels. (Mabel is one of Alice’s friends, who “knows such a very little.”) Auden’s elaboration is slightly nonsensical—he decides that a Mabel is an “intellectual with weak nerves and a timid heart, who is so appalled at discovering that life is not sweetly and softly pretty that he takes a grotesquely tough, grotesquely ‘realist’ attitude,” and he puts Donne, Schopenhauer, Joyce, and Wagner in the Mabel column—but it’s typical of Auden to steer the argument to childhood. While at school Laird won national poetry competitions but was set to study law at Cambridge before changing to English. "As is fairly usual for any small town, if you were regarded as having half a brain it was assumed you should become a doctor or a lawyer. So while changing was obviously the right decision for me, it was a big thing to give up a vocational course for something more abstract."

I find this classification entertaining and illuminating, but I think it needs elaboration. Are there not artists, for example, who, precisely because they can perceive no unifying hedgehog principle governing the flux of experience, are aesthetically all the more hedgehog, imposing in their art the unity they cannot find in life? The Wild Iris is a lasting achievement, a beautifully weighted collection of human strangeness and human suffering. The “words washed clean” (William Carlos Williams) and the acute truths meet in a cycle of poems that stand with the best of anyone’s work. The Murderess” contrasts lust (“I tell you men/were leering to themselves”) with the historical violence done to the female (“the sun/opens to consume the Virgin on the fifteenth day”). Any deities present are also complicit. After the virgin has been sacrificed (“It was like slitting fish”), the reader learns that “God presided at her body.” Take the fifteenth poem (they are numbered rather than titled) of the thirty in his first collection: Her greatness—and she is one of the finest poets writing today—is due, in no small part, to her intransigence. Many of her poems are great in the same way. The child’s anger and resentment at his parents in, say, Firstborn and Ararat becomes Telemachus’ anger and resentment against Penelope and Odysseus in Meadowlands. The poems are franked with the distinct impress of a personality.D. No, I have discovered the origin of life. Fourteen months I hesitated before I concluded this diagnosis. I received the morning star for this. My head will be left at death for clever medical analysis. The laugh will be gone and the microbe in command. Shortlisted alongside Sy-Quia were Rifqa by Mohammed El-Kurd, The English Summer by Holly Hopkins, Some Integrity by Padraig Regan, and Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head by Warsan Shire. Lucy Macnab, co-executive director of the Forward Arts Foundation, said: “We view this partnership as a significant step toward our future strategic vision: to move away from the dominance of London in the UK’s creative and cultural life; a drive toward working more inclusively with young people, emerging voices, and diverse audiences, putting them at the centre of our practice; and working with partners that put poetry at the heart of their creative offer.” The full shortlists

The Age of Anxiety is virtuosic in places, full of verbal energy and rhythm and documentary details (“Near-sighted scholars on canal paths/Defined their terms”) but is overextended, and all four characters sound both a lot like Auden and, thanks to the insistent Anglo-Saxon alliteration, like no one who’s ever lived. (“Muster no monsters, I’ll meeken my own…./You may wish till you waste, I’ll want here…./Too blank the blink of these blind heavens.”) The unnaturalness of the language begins to grate.He also teaches, most recently at Princeton and Barnard in the US, where their daughter is in school and where their next child will be born, after which they intend to spend more time in London. Everywhere, the relationship of “male and female” is “thrust and ache” (“Palais des Art”). It is men who have agency, the option to leave. In “The Apple Trees” her son sleeps and “already on his hand the map appears…the dead fields, women rooted to the river.” Auden is, I think, 31. I am 23. I don’t know Auden, but I think he sounds bad: the heavy, jocular prefect, the boy bushranger, the school wag, the 6th form debater, the homosexual clique-joker. I think he sometimes writes with great power: “O Love, the interest itself in thoughtless heaven, Make simpler daily the beating of man’s heart.” I can’t agree he’s as bad as [Archibald] MacLeish. He’s overpraised of course. I’ve added my own little dollop of praise in a number of New Verse devoted entirely, with albino portrait and manuscript, to gush and pomp about him. He’s exactly what the English literary public think a modern English poet should be. He’s perfectly educated (& expensively) but still delightfully eccentric…. He’s just what he should be: let him rant his old communism, it’s only a young man’s natural rebelliousness, (& besides, it doesn’t convert anybody: the awarding of conservative prizes to anti-conservatives who are found to be socially harmless is a fine, soothing palliative, & a shrewd gesture. And, incidentally too, the rich minority can always calm down a crier of “Equality for All” by giving him individual equality with themselves). Adult readers may enjoy seeing a different side to some of our finest writers, but for children, this is irrelevant; they just want great stories, brilliantly told. With these three new books, that’s exactly what they’ve got.