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This is KZSU Stanford.
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Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
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And we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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Let's start by listening to the voice of the poet.
During the 30s, you were very strongly influenced by Marx and Freud, weren't you?
Yes. And your poetry is fantastic.
It's that truth.
I'm always done.
I'm an able-to-school master.
But it still is.
It's different than I'm for their reasons.
But basically, I think of myself as a comedy poet.
Basically, there's always a hope for a comic under ten.
But that's not for me to say a father, people say.
I don't think it was particularly more of true, so more than I think of what I write now.
But there, again, of course, that's a thing one can't tell.
I think any point the things about is, well, at my age, what should I write?
I mean, you can get an idea, I should have heard them, and you have to turn it down for one or two reasons.
I'm sorry, no longer.
I'm sorry, not yet.
This decision, of course, not to write an autobiography or not to authorize the biography by somebody else.
You seem to be very dead.
I'm very much against it because artists are not in the reaction that people make things.
Therefore, what is important is what they make.
Now, it's true that obviously everything all times, in some sense, are derived from the poet's personal experience.
But it becomes transmuted and nothing you could find out about his personal life will help you to understand the poems, my opinion.
They are public objects.
There's this period that people like George Steiner are always talking about of post-culture, a sort of disappointment
when they suddenly realize that the arts didn't really have a stabilizing influence.
Well, they've always known this, I think.
It seems like, by the reality, political and social history of Europe would be what it has been.
If down to Shakespeare, a good Mozart Michael Angel, made him whoever you like, hadn't lived, we should miss an awful lot of fun.
But you can say that political history would be different.
And I guess, Jerry said, think they've ever thought so.
The worst fun has often occurred in published interviews with you.
Things should be fun.
It should be fun to write poetry.
It should be.
By the hell should you do it, which is because obviously it isn't that financially, who ought to.
Do you see anything else in the arts beyond heightened pleasure, would you give?
Well, there are two things I would say about it.
One is what Dr. Johnson said.
The aim of writing is to enable readers a little better to enjoy life, or a little better to endure it.
Then the other side of the arts is that they are a chief method of communicating with the dead.
And I think without communication with the dead, a fully human life is not possible.
But her and my dad, his health is not, it's vanished.
But but it still gets something out of the edit.
This needs to be an almost available.
That was an interview.
The English poet, W.H. Auden, gave to Kevin Byrne in October 1971.
A couple of years before Auden himself joined the vast host of the dead,
with whom we communicate through the orphism of poetry,
which, if we believe Auden, allows us to descend into the underworld,
and hold converse with those who came before,
those who have seen it all before,
and those who, in their time,
endured the same habit-forming pain, mismanagement, and grief,
which we, in turn, are destined to endure in ours.
We must suffer them all again, right, Zodden.
Why?
Because for all his clairvoyance, through ciddedies, holds no sway over the compulsive repetition of calamity,
and human self-destruction.
Auden reiterates this conviction in the interview we just heard,
when he declares that political and social history would be what it has been,
had the great artists not existed.
Art speaks to us from beyond the grave, about its powerlessness,
to save history from its own worst impulses.
The same naked conviction is even more nakedly expressed in Auden's poem,
in memory of WB Yates, where addressing Yates, Auden writes,
"Poetry makes nothing happen."
This, despite the fact that mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
In this regard, among many others,
WH Auden was a true heir of WB Yates.
For Auden, too, was hurt into poetry by history,
even if he did not believe that poetry could influence history,
guide its outcomes, or forestall its nightmares.
Perhaps this powerlessness of poetry to dictate history
is the necessary counterpart of poetry's power to communicate with the dead.
Without which, Auden says, "A fully human life is not possible."
Welcome to our Auden show, friends.
Many of you have been requesting one, and I'm here to oblige.
We have a lot to cover in the next hour.
So without further delay, let me introduce Stanford Professor Nick Jenkins,
Nicholas Jenkins, who is a friend and colleague from the English department,
joining me in the studio today.
Professor Nicholas Jenkins recently finished a highly anticipated book on Auden,
called The Island, WH Auden, and the Regeneration of England,
which will be appearing this coming spring with both favor and favor,
as well as Harvard University Press.
And this book, I'm sure, will consolidate his reputation
as one of the world's leading scholars of Auden.
Nicholas, welcome to the program.
I'm delighted you could join us today to talk about Auden.
Thanks very much, Robert. I'm delighted to be here.
So the interviewer I played there at the start of the show is about three minutes long,
and we could easily spend three whole hours discussing some of those statements
that Auden makes in it, dissecting the weird ambiguities or contradictions
and qualifications they contain, especially with regard to his rather bewildering
statement that he is a fundamentally comic poet.
We'll talk about that claim later in the show, I hope, but first,
I gather that your book on Auden deals quite extensively with Auden's life,
as well as the sociopolitical context of his time.
So let me quote something that he says in the interview and asks you to respond to it.
We heard the Auden say that artists are not men of action,
hence their biographies are irrelevant to their work, or in his words,
nothing you could find out about the poet's personal life will help you understand the poetry.
How do you react to that?
I react in a spirit of bemused skepticism, I think.
I'd say, first of all, that Auden was a little bit right and largely wrong.
And I think there are a number of quite complicated reasons why he thought that it was irrelevant
or wanted to believe that it was irrelevant to know anything about an artist's life,
but it seems to me, self-evidently, the case that certain kinds of knowledge
about the experiences that are processed through language and represented in language
can be very helpful in understanding what a writer is doing.
You know, as a devoted listener of entitled opinions, I've often meditated on the fact
that there's a difference between the face and the voice of any individual.
And the face seems like a relatively ahistorical quantity,
whereas the voice is profoundly weighted with a historical moment, with an identity.
And listening to Auden's voice there, I think we can tell from its rich plumbiness,
its senorial overtones that Auden belonged to a different era from our own.
That's a historical character speaking.
And so when Auden was alive, I did no more than kick a soccer ball around and watch a lot of television.
And I don't feel obliged to agree with the biographical Auden about the meaning of his poems.
However, having said that, I do think that some of the events that occurred in his life help us to understand his poetry.
And the bottom line is still the same, that we want to understand his poetry,
and thought through the tunnel, working through, moving through the tunnel of his life,
sometimes there are things that become more evident in the poetry than if we were to imagine that we could come pristine to a reading of his work.
Craig, let me ask a question about the three minutes that we heard, the voice.
We were talking about the voice, how it's laden with many things.
Could one also infer from the voice that he belonged to a certain class in England?
And would it be relevant? I was struck by the fact that after some 30 years of living in the United States,
his accent is as British as it probably was when he left England, which is very often not the case with people who have spent decades here in America.
Would that have been a resolute stubborn clinging to his... is the leaves of the England?
Or can we make anything of that?
I think we can make something of it.
I think you put your finger on something that's very important.
Orden left England in 1939 and came to live in the States, indeed, within a few years he'd become a naturalized American citizen.
But that didn't mean that Orden had attempted to become either an American if there is any real meaning to a category so enormous as that,
or that he tried to disguise where he came from.
So you can hear an Orden's voice and for any English person.
These are facts that cause pain as well as joy.
Our identities are written in our throats.
And Orden's belonging to a certain class, upper middle class, coming from a certain period with certain idioms, are very important facts that feed into our understanding of his poetry.
Orden was an upper middle class Englishman who de-rassinated himself.
And there are just a hints of that de-rassination in that voice too.
Orden, I don't think he used the word in the clip that we played, but Orden said grass, not grass.
So there were a few changed vowel sounds.
But Orden wasn't trying to disguise anything about himself or adopt generic personality.
He was trying to live out his homelessness in a new context, having left England for a number of reasons some of which we might discuss later on.
Yes, we certainly want to discuss that.
Maybe getting into it, we can use your title.
You can clarify for our listeners what that means.
The island and the regeneration of England.
It sounds like it's very emphasis on the Englishness of Orden's poetry.
Right, this is a volume about Orden and his relation to the modern condition of being English, of Englishness, as you said.
And one of the archetypal mythographic iconic figures for England, the place, the nation, is the island.
It crops up again and again in poetry, in popular discourse, in visual representations of England, that England is the island.
A kind of self-enclosed space, unique and sufficient unto itself.
And the drive of my book, I suppose, is that for the first ten years or so of Orden's life, Orden saw himself not as many people conventionally believe as a kind of dissident, left wing or liberal writer, but as a kind of spirit of benign lyrical nationalism of Englishness and its modern incarnation.
And it was in reaction against that identification of his work with Englishness, that he decided that he had to become an exile across my polyt, and I think he became the most uprooted, exilic English language writer since Byron probably.
And a second book, which I've actually written a draft of as well, is going to focus on the Cosmopolitan Orden as opposed to this first one which focuses on the English order.
So this book focuses on the Orden prior to 1939. Exactly.
So you said in the first decade of his writing life, he was more of a lyric, but he was more isolated.
He was a lyric isolation, if you want to pun on the word island, where his concern was not particularly political social or in any way other oriented, but more self-immored.
And we're talking now about the 20s, I suppose, the late 20s and the 30s.
But then in the 30s he becomes a hugely important national figure in England who raised his voice on behalf of the nation and was probably the most heard of voices against Nazism and what was happening in Germany with Hitlerism.
And all this was far from the lyric isolation. That's true. Orden began as a very hematic poet.
And as the pressure of public events began to impinge on everyone, not just poets, not just politicians, but everyone living through that time in Europe, he began to acquire a more instrumental idea about what poetry should do.
And the poems from the 30s, as you rightly say, Robert, are those most famous ones anyway that try to use poetry to provide a kind of regenerative force for English culture at a time when it's being threatened from the outside.
So that's where the second part of my title or the subtitle, The Regeneration of England comes from. That Orden wanted to regenerate Englishness.
But in doing so, there's a kind of fighting fire with fire going on too because the premises of the unique monolithic, self-enclosed culture which might also have been part of Nazi ideology became part of the ideology of the resistance to Nazism too.
That England was going to remain an island and in fact if you look at any of Winston Churchill's famous speeches from the Second World War, the figure of the island is absolutely central to Churchill's imagination of what England is somewhere cut off from the rest of the world.
So Orden's social role as a poet in the 30s was to insist on the creation in his writing of a kind of unique privilege space in which this Englishness could continue to exist against the depredations and the hostilities of the world outside, including of course the threat as the 30s went on of Germany and Nazi invasion.
What did the regeneration of England mean to him more specifically? What character would it have, especially given the imperial history of this island? Because when you become an empire, that island now is the center of a broad reach across the world.
So what was this regeneration as he would have desired it or conceived it?
You know, I think that Orden was in many ways what we could call a little England.
That is that he was a fundamentally anti-imperial. He never became a kind of propagandist or never offered any excuses for Britain's imperial role.
But on the other hand, he believed in Englishness as a kind of rural, rural based, pseudo-mithic identity in which small enclaves of right-minded people could live together in social harmony.
One of the characteristics that I think has been vastly overstressed in preceding decades has been his urbanism, his metropolitanism.
And to me, one of the primary and fundamental characteristics of Orden's work is that he comes out of provincial culture.
And the kind of England that Orden imagined or wanted to reimagine and regenerate was a culture set in the countryside based on the land in which small groups of people could begin to regrow again the virtues of tolerance and decency that the empire itself had corroded.
And if I may, I just redo a few lines from a poem in which he talks about this. This is a poem written in 1932.
And he's addressing a couple of pseudo-mithic entities called the Lords of Limit and he prays to them or petitions them.
Permit our town here to continue small. What cities vast emotional cartel could our few acres satisfy or rival in intensity the field of five or six, the English cell. Orden wanted a world of fields of five and six people living together in the countryside as English that adjective has a really strong weight for him and English cell.
Well, there are, as you alluded to, one could even misinterpret, I guess, this is having a deep sort of affiliations with a certain Nazi ideology of the Germans, of the German people and the small communities where everyone shares the same land and blood and so forth.
But I gather that Oden was never attracted by the more militant nationalist policies of someone like Mosley during the 30s as I am I correct.
I think you're absolutely right about that. Oh, and on the contrary, he went to the left on the other side.
He went to the left on specific political issues. Usually when he was speaking out of the, as it were, left corner of his mouth, not out of the poetic corner of his mouth. But in his poetry, there's a drift again and again towards something like the imagination of an English folk.
So, like many writers, like most people perhaps, Oden was dialectical, self-conflicted, contradictory, trying to work out things that he could believe in and at the same time being driven by forces which he was only partially in control of and perhaps didn't fully comprehend, which of us knows ourselves accurately.
Like Nietzsche said, where a stranger to ourselves and Oden was a stranger to himself too, so that those, as it were, prose political opinions were contradicted very often by the kinds of messages that his poetry was sending.
On his poetry, for better for a war, he became a very important public voice in England and when he did move to the United States, this was taken by many back at home in England as a betrayal of the homeland and was not forgiven for a very long time.
And in fact, he spent the war in America and this added a certain poignancy to the idea that he had been such a spokesman for a called "arms" which his nation had responded to and that he was not there when the bullets started flying.
And I believe that there is evidence enough to support the suspicion that he suffered from these accusations and even said that people were at full rights to that opinion of him.
I don't know that I'd go that far and say that he thought that people had a right to their opinion about him. I think he felt that his historical role was to live out the articulation, the de-articulation, the de-linking of a poetry from national belonging.
And of course, as you're saying, one of the great ironies of the situation was that Orden had been the voice of England during the 1930s.
But he certainly hasn't hesitated to put himself even during the 1930s in a place where the bullets were flying. He'd done that far before many of his countrymen had decided to make an encounter with a bullet.
Orden had traveled very widely in the 1930s. He went to Spain, which was an extremely dangerous place after the Spanish Civil War started. He didn't have to go there, but he wanted to see for himself.
He also traveled with Christopher Ashwood to the China to report on the sign of Japanese war there. And he was machine gun from the air while he was there.
So I think just on a personal level, the idea that Orden was scared of fighting or was running away from anything is really captures and misinformed.
But Orden saw that if he'd been summoned back to England, he would have been forced into the role of an official propagandist poet precisely because his fame was already so well established in England.
So he stayed in the States. He did everything that he was asked to do to participate in the war effort, including since he'd already taken out his citizenship papers, becoming, getting drafted.
He was turned down for the American Army, but nevertheless he was perfectly happy or as happy as anyone could be to be drafted.
And he in the end actually went to Germany with the United States Air Force during the last six months of the war. So Orden never shied away from danger and controversy, but he did suffer a great drop in reputation in England.
And perhaps as you're implying, it still continues to some extent to this day because Orden had decided that he wasn't interested after his flirtations with a kind of nationalist ideology in the 1930s.
Orden had decided that he wasn't interested in simply shoring up people's sense of their own national belonging.
And so he became this derassinated, exilic figure because he thought that was the most archetypal model for a poet to have in the contemporary world.
I think that every poet, every great poet needs a great gesture. And to me, the de-linking or the severing of poetic voice from national authentication is what makes Orden such a significant poet.
That's good. And that raises two other, actually three other elements of his biography, which we're probably spending too much time on given his remark, but nevertheless, and we're going to turn to the poetry as soon as possible.
But there's three elements which I think be lie his statement that biographies are irrelevant. One is his homosexuality.
The other is his converting, let's say, return to Christianity, which I think plays an important role there.
And then the third one is, slip my mind at the moment.
But let's let's maybe turn a minute to the homosexuality and expatriation because I've been told by a person who knew Orden that when he came to the states, he fell in love in a very intense personal way for maybe the first time in his life, he experienced what love in its most intense form could be.
And he just was not going to return to England really primarily because of this experience in his life, not so much as you're suggesting this grand gesture of de-linking poetry from homeland is something in that suggestion that rings true to you.
Well, I think that it's certainly true that when Orden got to the states, he fell in love with a young man at the time whose name was Chester Coleman. Chester Coleman was 18 when Orden met him. Orden was 32.
And it was absolutely a cuda food for Orden and he wanted to do everything he could to sustain the relationship. On the other hand, Orden and Coleman, just because life was so unsettled for both of them and for everybody during the war, spent large amounts of time apart.
And I would say that Orden would have been willing, and in fact, he himself said he would have been willing to come back to England if he'd actually been asked by anybody official to do that, but nobody official ever did ask him.
So, yeah, there's a complex play of the historical, the literary and the personal going on in Orden's decision to stay in the states. But after all, once the war had ended, Orden could very easily have come back to England with Chester Coleman. In fact, he could have come back during the war if what he really wanted to do was only not to be separated from Coleman.
So, I think that the testimony of Orden's friends needs to be treated with some circumspection, very rightly, they're focused on the person they knew and their allegiances to the kind of things that to the person who was living and suffering.
And as I said, I was just kicking a soccer ball around when Orden was alive, and personally he doesn't mean anything to me. I am absorbed by his poetry and I see reasons there that to me anyway go beyond, you know, a simple idea that he didn't want to be separated from his partner because if he really wanted not to be separated, there would have been ways of working it out.
Something else was a state. So, before we talk about the Christianity, which I believe might have something to do with the delinking of poetry and let's say history.
On the homosexuality, how does that homosexuality find its way into the poetry if at all? In other words, is there something, it would often be right when he suggests that nothing that we can find out about a poet's biography in the past.
In this case, his homosexuality helps us understand the poems. Would that not be quite true when it comes to this part of his biography?
You know, I think it's one of those diffused aromas that permeates almost everywhere in his work, but it's very difficult to put your finger on something that's absolutely unequivocally homosexual, gay,
and say, you know, this couldn't have been written by a straight person. But if you listen to the tone of voice in the poetry,
Orton himself was very daring about introducing the kinds of intonations and phrases and double meanings that could very easily be interpreted by people who wanted to interpret them as having a kind of gesture towards his own sexuality.
On the other hand, of course, we're dealing with a time when homosexuality was illegal. It was a crime.
And it may seem a startling fact when you think about the sexual history of the British upper classes to think that homosexuality was a crime.
But nevertheless, it was officially still something that nobody was legally allowed to practice.
And that's what happened in the past, and that's what happened in the past.
And that's what happened in the past.
Not a whisper, not a thought, not a kiss, nor look, be lost.
Beauty, midnight, vision dies.
Let the winds of dawn that blow softly round your dreaming head.
Such a day of sweetness show, I and knocking heart may bless.
Find the mortal world enough.
Nunes of dryness, see you fed by the involuntary powers.
Nights of insult let you pass watched by every human love.
This is one of Haudenos.
That's known poems, isn't it?
It is.
Yeah.
I don't know what you think of it.
I think it's deservedly so probably.
I like it.
I like it as well.
And Hannah Arendt, who was a very good friend of Haudenos,
knew him quite well late in both of their lives.
I think they died about two years apart from each other.
In a essay she wrote about remembering Auden, she said that,
"That line lay your sleeping head, my love, human on my faithless arm."
I represented a kind of perfection that is very rare.
I'm reading here that we find it in some of the greatest of girth's poems.
And it must exist in some of Pushkins as well because their hallmark is that they are untranslatable.
And then she goes on to say that the moment poems of this kind are wrenched
from their original abode, they disappear in a cloud of banality.
That's what's so riskful about these kind of poems is that the distance that separates them from banality is very, very small.
But here she says that everything in such a poem depends on the fluent gestures that elevate facts
from the prosaic to the poetic, such that where this fluency is achieved as it is in this poem,
we are magically convinced that everyday speech is latently poetic.
Is that something that you can go along with?
I think it's a beautiful observation because I think that when she talks about something being raised from the everyday world,
she's also not suggesting that it's merely transcended.
The ordinary world isn't transcended or abandoned but is subsumed into this higher spirit.
And there are many examples in this poem that one could choose to bear out Hannah Arendt's point.
But I think the wonderful poetic use of the prosaic or the banal term is the index of the deep poetry that lies inside the ordinary.
In fact, Orton uses that word "ordinary" in a daring and very highly exploratory spirit, I would say, in their ordinary swoon.
It talks about things that are pedantic and boring.
All this infusion of solid language into a new linguistic context where it gets raised to the point,
where it's latent poetry can emerge.
I think it's a sign of a true poet.
I agree.
And of course, there's something very cool.
There's not cold, but I guess true to his Englishness.
He's not going to get too hot about something like that.
And there can be a lot of pathos without there being a lot of melodrama associated with it.
I think that's really true.
And just speaking, if I may, on behalf of displaced Englishmen everywhere,
and I would say that it may be true that there's a certain coolness in the English exterior,
but the coolness is there to hide the heat.
Absolutely.
At the same time, there is, in my reading of Auden's corpus corpus,
when I say that, it sounds like I know the whole corpus, which I don't,
not as someone like you does for sure.
However, my sense of the mood that Oroma has used that word that pervades so much of it is one of a subtle melancholy,
or depression would be too, much too strong a word,
but a certain dispiritedness that is at odds with itself,
because it is subtended by a passion.
But it's a passion that is somehow forsaken its hope in many cases of flourishing.
And the net result being a certain spirit of, if not resignation,
then renunciation of the grand gesture of passion.
And this undertone of melancholy, for me, makes it very difficult to accept,
or to make sense of what he says in that interview about the fact that he is fundamentally a comic poet.
I mean, what in the hell does he mean by that?
I find very little comedy in most of these poems for which he's best known.
Yeah, I think that there's an elegy that Orden wrote for Freud in 1939.
And he tries to do with some of these questions about Freud's opinions and more utter ideas.
And this is part of what he says.
If something of the autocratic pose, the paternal strictness he distrusted still clung to his utterance and features,
it was a protective imitation for one who had lived among enemies so long.
And I think that Orden's insistence on fun is in its own way a kind of protective imitation or coloration,
that when he was talking to people whom, after all, he was talking to a BBC interviewer there late in his life,
and he was still a very controversial figure in England.
When he was trying to explain his literary project in context that weren't necessarily friendly or amenable at all,
he often reached for ideas that were the opposite of the truth.
So I really second what you say about the sort of self-evident oddness of Orden describing what he writes as fun.
I think it's true to say he was a very witty poet sometimes, but not somebody who was into the glib and the jolly for its own sake.
So I would agree with you that Orden had a very different character in his poetry from the character that he projected to other people.
In fact, you know, you might also almost say that it was a necessary condition for him,
as it is, I think for many writers, to misunderstand what they were doing.
Orger says in one of his short stories that fame is a form of incompervention, perhaps the worst.
And I think that Orden's fame, which was considerable by the end of his life, and in which he in many ways collaborated,
was a whole series of misunderstandings of exactly what was going on in his poetry and what he was doing.
Any poet has to go beyond their own conscious intentions, and Orden as much as anybody else did that.
So that's where that aroma of melancholy that you're describing comes in.
Orden was living at a time when the kind of histrionic grand gestures that were just about permissible for a generation of writers who'd come before Orden had become categorized as grotesque or perhaps even verging towards the morally criminal
in the times in which Orden was living in.
And so that spirit of renunciation of the idea that poetry could play an instrumental role in the ordering and regenerating of the world,
which is an illusion that he entered into fully in the 1930s, but then dismissed,
and he participated and also participated in the
most well-known, and he participated in the most well-known, and he participated in the most well-known,
and he participated in the most well-known, and he participated in the most well-known,
and that one of the most authentic forms of witnessing the condition of the modern world for
Orton is to register its absence of the absence of the sacred in the modern world,
that the lack of meaning is about the most meaningful gesture you can make.
So both in terms of the poet's role, as well as in terms of the conditions of life in the bureaucratised disenchanted world of modernity,
Orton is finding himself and trying to typify, represent an experience that is a very widespread one.
And that brings us to that second aspect of the biography, which is the Christianity, where he...
Well, I'm going to have recourse to Hannah Arendt again, where she says that in the forties,
and this happened in Orton's case in the forties, she said in the forties,
there were many who turned against their old beliefs, but there were very few who understood
what had been wrong with those beliefs.
Far from giving up their belief in history and success, namely their belief that the good ends up triumphing in the long run in history and through history.
So rather than giving up that belief in history and success, they simply changed trains,
as it were, the train of socialism and communism had been wrong, and they changed to the train of capitalism or Freudianism or some refined Marxism,
or a sophisticated mixture of all three, Orton instead became a Christian.
That is, he left the train of history altogether.
That might be an overstatement of the fact that he did not believe that poetry, or he as a poet or any poet, would have the power to shape history.
That he also believed, I think in one of his poems, he said that history is made by the criminal in us, but goodness is eternal.
No, absolutely.
That goodness does not belong to history, that history is made by the criminal.
So this disenchantment with history, I think is another grand gesture, and it does completely sever the poetic endeavor from, let's say, the prophetic.
The prophetic voice of the nationalist or the reformer.
And this year in 1939 was hugely important.
He writes that Memorial to Marx, he writes in memory of Marx.
He writes this beautiful, famous poem in memory of W.B. Yates in '39, and also this very famous poem of his September 1, 1939,
which is, you know, the invasion of Poland by Hitler, and it's one of his most famous poems.
Very interesting, enough, however, was repudiated by Auden, late in his life, and Auden did not include it in his collected poems, for reasons that we might want to discuss, but perhaps we could look a little bit at that poem.
September 1, 1939, I had plenty of illusions to it in my opening monologue, and maybe we could discuss this relationship between poetry in the broad sense.
I mean, through cities, I take to be a poet in this case, so poetry and history.
Maybe we don't have time for the whole poem, but the first two or three stanzas and the end, or perhaps you could read from that.
I'd be happy to, Robert, I think that this must be the first poem of the Second World War, which gives it a historical significance as well.
It was begun on September 1, 1939, the day that German troops marched or drove into Poland, and it was finished before England itself entered the war, which was on the 3rd of September.
So here's this extraordinary and quite long poem, which was also something that was almost imbued with the spirit of journalistic report from the front lines.
This was coffee filed in a hurry at the very highest level of the poetic imagination.
So let me read you just the first two stanzas and maybe the last stanza, just to try and give a shape to the poem.
I sit in one of the dives on 52nd Street uncertain and afraid as the clever hopes expire of a low dishonest decade.
Waves of anger and fear circulate over the bright and dark and lands of the earth, obsessing our private lives, the unmentionable odor of death, offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can unearth the whole offense from Luther until now that has driven a culture mad, found, find what occurred at Lince, what huge, amargo made a psychopathic god.
I and the schoolchildren know what all schoolchildren learn, those to whom evil is done, do evil in return.
All I have is a voice to undo the folded lie, the romantic lie in the brain of the sensual man in the street, and the lie of authority whose buildings grope the sky.
There is no such thing as the state, and no one exists alone, hunger allows no choice to the citizen or the police.
We must love one another or die.
Defenseless under the night our world in stupor lies, yet dotted everywhere ironic points of light, flash out wherever the just exchanged their messages, may I, compose like them of Eros and of dust, beleaguered by the same negation and despair, show an affirming flame.
Joseph Brozky, the great Russian poet, thought that this was a beautiful, magnificent triumphant poem, and he has a long essay on it, as one of the great poems.
I got somewhere in between his assessment and audons.
I understand why Auden wanted to exclude it from the, and I admire Auden for his reasons for wanting to exclude it.
First, I think it can read as very derivative of Yeats.
There are very many ticks, Yeatsian ticks that I think that he might have just wanted to reject at a certain point when he had a distance from it.
The other is that Auden was one of the most honest poets or honest men whose law ultimately, the first law was honesty, and he felt that he had to exturpate those poems which were somehow dishonest from the collected poems, which did not express what he was feeling at the time or thinking at the time, and he thought that this was one of them.
While this poem is brilliant in not dividing the world between the good and the bad, the angels and the devil, and putting Hitler on the side of the devil, and we on the side of the angels, there's a sense that we are all responsible, all of us.
On either side, the international wrong, as he calls it, is one that all nations are responsible for what was done to Germany after the First World War for the ignorance and neglect and so forth, that everyone has a share in the guilt of this calamity which is about to befall the world again.
And yet at the end of the poem, there's this easy sort of return to this easy moralism that among the unjust, there are these islands of just people who will love one another, and who, as he says there at the end, that let me like them show an affirming flame and not despair and so forth.
I think that he probably thought this was dishonest, and that it didn't correspond to the true insight of the poem. I don't know how you feel about that, but I would be sorry if we didn't have this poem, but nevertheless.
So I think you put a lot of points on the table there and the really good ones. Orton knew very well when he cut this poem out of his complete works that the poem was not going to disappear.
And he probably realized that it was going to be one that was central to his posthumous reputation. So he was able to make a kind of strike against it without trying to, in any kind of Stalinist way, airbrush the poem out of history because that that couldn't be done.
I think that you're absolutely right to say that there are very many ventral equalizations of Yates in the poem. And that's one of the things that Orton reacted strongly against, particularly odd because Orton had just, as you mentioned a few months earlier, completed an elegy for Yates that should also have been the moment when the Yatesian was energized from Orton's poetry.
So I'm back to came back with renewed vigor and ingenuity in this poem. I think it's also true that the ending of the poem reaches for a set of gestures, rhetorical gestures that are a little bit
and very useful and yampon song. And that I guess my feeling about it is that this is the tax that we have to pay in order for the good of the poem, the most of the poem to exist. That Orton's, you talked about the
in your introduction, Robert of the poet. And I think that the descent into the underworld is an incredibly important figure for Orton. And the descent into the darkness of unknowing and exploration is one that's a beautiful metaphor for what goes on in the making of a poem.
And the descent into the darkness of writing about, for example, the experience of fear and guilt in this poem demands some kind of conclusive return to the light at the end of the poem.
The poem is almost pushing him to make those affirming statements at the end, as he said, may I show an affirming flame. But in order for him to have been able to write about being beleaguered by negation and despair, there had to be something else in the economy of the poem that was thrown into counterbalance that.
And those are those rather flat gestures are. But really, I think we got more than we paid for in this poem. So if there are some moments in the poem where he turns to a didactic and rather self-conscious voice, those are a small fee when you think about the larger structure of the whole poem.
And to me, you know, it's a historically enormously important poem for some of the reasons that you've described, but also because it marks another facet of Orton's career as a writer and in the meaning of his work, which is that here is somebody sitting in a bar in the middle of Manhattan, confessing to fear and isolation.
And if you look at an earlier generation of writers in English from the 20th century, the experience of fear is a very, very occluded emotion.
And what's going on here in this poem amongst many other things is that that diagnostic, our Noldian, didactic voice is being abandoned by a writer whose beginning to reconceive of the poem as something not where the writer from a position of magisterial isolation and power tells other people what the world is like, but begins to experience history.
In their own person and confesses to fear, despair, and all of those other screened out emotions that English poetry or Anglo American poetry in its more kind of brawlingly masculineist phase had been eager to force wear.
So I just feel like it's true that the poem is not perfect and that it does have these flat moments at the end, but the things that Orton was doing in the poem are so important that it's a small price to pay.
Yeah, I agree. And I have, well, the thing I wanted to say is that perhaps the earlier generation of poets had not fully assimilated what the calamity of World War I represented.
And also perhaps in Orton's case, this fear that you're talking about that he talks about may well just be the consequence of an extreme lucidity of a lucidity with regards to history and of what can happen again of a second World War, quite prophetic because the second World War was more horrible in many ways than the first World War.
And I hate to be quoting Hanah, all right, all the time, but she does say in that same essay that there was nothing more admirable in Orton than his complete sanity and his firm belief in sanity.
And in his eyes, all kinds of madness were a lack of discipline. So this idea of sanity could be the source of this fear and he was giving expression to that.
Absolutely. And so the poem is located in a very specific time and place, but I think it's a poem that people have returned to again and again because it does articulate in such striking and memorable terms, experiences that recur in history.
And it's no accident that this was one of the poems that so many people found a kind of solace or comfort in after September the 11th, 2001.
And there are some uncanny, eerie similarities between the experiences that Orton seems to be writing about in his poem and what people experienced on September the 11th in New York and in Washington, DC.
But the sanity of knowing that all of his meteuristic hopes for the world were going up in flames and that this was catastrophe that he was facing is an experience that surely most people have to come to terms with at some point or another in their lives.
And that's one of the things that really makes gives the poem a kind of prehensile grip on the imagination and gives it a mood of terror, kind of quiet terror.
So as usual, and because we've only scratched the surface as often happens in title opinions, but I might just conclude this by recalling again, Hannah Arendt who told a friend of mine surely has heard the novelist who has been a guest on this show before when they were talking after Orton's death and before her and her death about his decision.
His decision to not include this poem in the collected works and why that would be. And because, as Shirley said, he believed that it was somehow not representative of what he was thinking and feeling at the time.
And Hannah Arendt said, it remains to be seen whether such inspired words could have been insincere.
I think history has given the answer to that question.
Thanks a lot for coming on. It's been a pleasure.
Thank you very much for having me, Robert.
Next time. Bye bye.
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