Was he the last poet we learned by heart?

"He traveled in Germany during the rise of Nazism. 'For the first time,' he later recalled, 'I felt the earth move.'"

Easter weekend this year was a wonderful opportunity for Stanford authors – the annual “Company of Authors” event on Saturday, April 20, presenting new books by the Stanford community. You can read about it here. I was panel chair for the session titled “Imagination,” with writer Zach Williams discussing his award-winning debut collection Beautiful Days: Stories and lawyer Wendy Salkin, who gave a riveting talk on Speaking for Others: The Ethics of Informal Political Representation, focusing on unelected people who become the voice for many – think of Greta Thunberg or Martin Luther King.

But the best part for me was Stanford English Prof. Nicholas Jenkins signing my new copy of The Island, his massive biography of W.H. Auden’s early years. Edward Mendelson, author of Early Auden and Later Auden, called it “a Copernican Revolution in Auden studies.” On the title page, he inscribed for me Auden’s words: "The poet fetches out the images that hurt and connect.” Where did it come from?

Timothy Foote, writing in Time Magazine about the “Sage of Anxiety” half a century ago described the poet’s labor this way: “Rummaging into his living the poet fetches out the images that hurt and connect.” (And I agree with Foote’s contention that “In Praise of Limestone” is Auden’s finest poem. I memorized large swaths of it for my university class with Joseph Brodsky.) Foote continues,”Yet he came to regard poetry as a kind of graceful, skillful game (which sometimes required the spectator’s use of the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary, not to mention the King James Version of the .Bible, to enjoy fully).”

“The later Auden, in fact, swam in light verse like a seal in surf: ‘Paul Valery/ Earned a meager salary/ Walking through the Bois/ Observing his Moi.’ When people called him frivolous, Auden replied, “When you are labeled ‘serious’ in the U.S., you are expected to wear a long face all the time. I don’t agree.” He was fond of adding in defense of craftsmanship, “Every high C accurately struck demolishes the theory that we are irresponsible puppets of fate and charm.”

“In 1939, in one of his most famous poems, ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats,’ Auden wrote: “For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives”:

In the valley of its saying where executives
Would never want to tamper; it flows south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth …

According to Foote, “This absolute standard, both passive and timeless, is correct enough for describing the handful of poems created by any poet that finally come to rest in the collective mind, heart and memory as the permanent possession of an age. Auden has written his share. But his work is also fascinating because it traces the course of a notably determined and characteristically 20th century quest.

“That quest began for Auden with the belief that through science and poetry, man and society could be known and shown for what they are—and both vastly improved. When this happened, what he called ‘the just city’ might be established. The hope was hopelessly ambiguous from the start.

Auden was born in 1907 in Yorkshire and grew up near Birmingham. His father, who served as Birmingham’s school medical officer, used to stud his lectures on such public-health needs as flush toilets with quotations from Virgil, a blending of the classical and clinical that often marked Auden’s verse. But the elder Auden used to confide in his son that doctors never know why their patients get well. At Oxford, from which he graduated in the late ’20s, already a poet, Auden studied Freud and preached that poets must be “clinically minded.” He liked to explain his own nail biting and chain smoking as “insufficient weaning.”

Later, he traveled in Germany during the rise of Nazism. “For the first time,” he later recalled, “I felt the earth move.” He went home to find Britain (“This country of ours where nobody is well”) full of the Depression and indifference…

"Though Auden published his finest single poem in 1962 (“In Praise of Limestone”) and for the past twenty years poured out accomplished verse, as well as streams of essays, prefaces, and translations and libretti, the easy generalization has been endured that later Auden is a poor, doddering shadow of early Auden. History may reverse the judgment.

“For the late Auden, who spent his summers in Austria and his winters in a cluttered Greenwich Village apartment, was a graceful poet full of wisdom and knowledge, an awareness of human frailty, a persistent but not shrill hope, if not of heaven, at least of Judgment Day. He was also civilized, witty and endlessly inventive. He could write of himself without being a bore, recording “Thoughts of his own death/ like the distant roll/ of thunder at a picnic,” wryly admitting that “Gluttony and Sloth have often protected him from Lust and Anger,” and boasting gently that he was not vain “except about his knowledge of metre and his friends.”

The easy generalization has been endured that later Auden is a poor, doddering shadow of early Auden. History may reverse the judgment.

“In 1966, long before his death, Auden’s best epitaph was written by British Critic Cyril Connolly: ‘Auden was for many of us the last poet we learnt by heart.’” That was some years ago. Who are the candidates today?