W H Auden is a difficult poet. He is at times hard to read, and I wouldn't personally like to plough through his entire Collected Poems. But in his prose writings there are sharp-edged observations about what's going on, and about the state of cultural health. The above was written in 1932, (quoted in Charles Osborne's biography of Auden) – and long before the current blogging outbreak of literary loneliness! I have a feeling this least indulgent of poets would have fulminated against this "everybody thinks their opinion is worth hearing" social game we call blogging. So is blogging popular now, as Auden thought mass publications were in 1932, because of "our sense of increasing loneliness", and evidence "that our lives are going to pot"?
As a writer Auden seems to be wanting some form of quality control in the dangerous and exciting marketplace of ideas, not only over the ideas themselves, but over the literary artistry (or lack thereof) with which they are communicated. And any of us familiar with the blogosphere know only too well that everything from mediocrity and tedium, and from malice and terrorism, to narissistic trivia and embarrassingly detailed confession, can now be aired on a blog. Yes, but. Some of the most creative, funny, informative, artistically inventive, theologically humane and intellectually satisfying conversation and discussion can also be found in responsible blogs. What impresses me about Auden in the above quote, though, is his willingness to attempt diagnosis, to seek explanation, to understand what in his day was a phenomenal rise in the publication of ideas and self-expressed concerns. And that as a poet he felt it his duty to ask the human question underlying social changes and phenomena – as he did in 1945 when he defined the zeitgeist as The Age of Anxiety.
Makes me wonder who are the contemporary poets who are ruminating, probing, engaged in diagnostic reflection and articulating the current cultural mood.
……………………………………
And because I can't resist. I've just been reading Crossing the Snowline, the latest collection of poems by Pauline Stainer.
Immense grief and family sadness explain her silence for over five years. This volume of poetry breaks that silence. More about this later.
But here's a poem about Emmaus, a story that I am living with just now.
River Landscape to Emmaus
Three men walking,
dippers working the water,
the river
writing its monograph
on mosses
Later,
the two disciples
watch him break bread,
lightfingered,
backlit.
Not nonchalant exactly –
for love is nothing
if not improvised,
wounds troubling the light
the art of extremity
Leave a Reply