Pome of the day. Auden. W. H. Auden is an English poet, born in 1907, and died in 1973. (I find it difficult to talk about poets in the past tense). He is probably the greatest 20th Century English poet, Ted Hughes notwithstanding. Auden was immensely erudite, and in his reading habits formed highly intense relationships with thinkers like Freud and Kierkegaard. His intelligence was aquisitive and not misdirected by morbid drives to self-expression, but applied to a wider understanding of society and his place within it, both as a poet and as a citizen. This civic sense lends authority to his poetry and is not an affectation, but an inheritance: he was robustly middle-class, the son of an eminent medical doctor whose chosen field was public health. He attended boarding school before reading English at Oxford. His reading encompassed the Classics, Greek and Roman, but also Icelandic literature. His fascination with Icelandic literature also helps explain one of the sources of his authority, its similarities with Old English showing an influence on his earlier poetry. In common with Hughes, who he is otherwise very different from, Auden had a sense of the English language as an incipient thing, a sense of its Germanic wellsprings. The topic of Auden’s relationship with the English language is a fascinating one, and his example stands almost as a rebuke to Daemonic theories of poetic inspiration that invoke a dark underside as their source of authority. Heidegger, the German thinker, said that man (and woman, of course) speaks only insofar as he (or she) concurs with the greater energies of Language itself. Language has an independent existence, its own economy. It cannot exist without us but can exist far beyond us. If we connect with it properly, our resources are greatly expanded. Shakespeare, for example, connected with the English language at some fundamental level, hence his greatness. Auden’s authority, also, seems at times to come from a supra-personal source. It is the authority of the language itself. Add to this an additional feature that most great poets seem to possess: an ability to distil a simple, resonant template out of the flux of experience and language. Most great poets are simultaneously simple and complex. The easiest example that I’ve so far quoted is Pilinsky’s ‘Fable’. A childlike folktale that has numerous complex resonances. Great scientists also possess this ability to discern simple laws in the midst of complex phenomena. Auden’s authority stems from this clear sightedness, which seems to expand under extended consideration. In his longer pieces, this effect is further supplemented by the spectacle of a great intelligence fully immersed in the 20th century and trying to engage its deepest issues. If you want ‘news’, in the sense of what is really important and what counts, go to a great poet. What to choose from his poetry? He was a technically accomplished and innovative sonnet writer, combining novelistic elements with Old English flourishes of gnomic wisdom and at his cumulative best in that form in sequences such as ‘In Time Of War’. His poems tend to be long, so I’ll take the time to type in a famous one, written just after Germany invaded Poland, and hence started World War 2.
(September 1, 1939)

Miroslav Holub. Holub is a Czechloslavakian poet, born in 1923. He died in 1998. He was an important scientist as well as a great poet. His field was immunology. His science informs his poetry on many levels. He has a characteristic maneouvre of ‘breaking down’ an object or situation into more complex parts. In science this is often referred to, sometimes pejoratively, as reductionism. With the simple but crucial difference that, in science, the parts are simpler than the whole. Holub subverts this. Consequently,  when Holub engages in this procedure it usually becomes surrealist and strange, the ‘parts’ animated by goals and agendas different from the whole. There is a famous essay of his on the death of a Muskrat, called ‘Shedding Life’. In it, he describes a Muskrat’s death, but on many different levels: at the immunological, hormonal, intracellular, etc. He observes that, even as the Muskrat lies cooling, components of it’s immune system are mounting a chemical defence on it’s behalf against the concrete it has been smashed onto. He mixes grotesque and disturbing but factual observation from science with Greek myth and episodes from history. Sometimes the former are radically at odds with the general meaning of the latter, the precision of scientific observation dissolves the bigger picture into a collection of little facts. He is not, however, nihilistic or pessimistic about the human endeavour. Science is, after all, a human invention and discipline. But Holub also nods towards another order of truth that he cannot fully relinquish while continuing to be a poet. Holub sometimes brings these two truths together, and simply lays them side by side, making no attempt to reconcile them. I don’t think they can be reconciled, ultimately. There’s a famous admission made by George Steiner (of all people), that you cannot ‘prove’ the greatness of Shakespeare. It’s not like mathematics or a problem in physics, where truth can be demonstrated by objective procedures. Wittgenstein and Tolstoy, for example, were both dissidents from Shakespeare. And Steiner could not think of any thing or way that would prove them wrong. Holub toys with the truths of science in a subversive way, often with political overtones, but still writes like the great poet he is.

(Zito the Magician)


Tomas Transtromer. Transtromer is a Swedish poet, born in 1931. By profession, he is a Psychologist. His profession tinges his poetry only slightly, as he largely avoids using any psychological terminology or any of its concepts and categories. He is, however, interested in dreams, boundaries, and the transition from one state to another. Twilight, dawn, shifts in the weather, the threshold between inner and outer, sleep and waking, wellness and Illness, houses and sky, all feature in his poetry, but not in a psychoanalytic way. Poetry is more precise than psychology. Apparently, his poems carry over well in translation. There is a visual clarity in his poetry, an unpressured use of language characteristic of a moderate man. His poems are not driven, either by outside terrors, political or otherwise, or by inner demons and neuroses. But he is open to the occasional quiet epiphany. Good man. We all need the door to swing open slightly now and then in our lives. The poem I’ve chosen is an experience I can relate to, as the same weird panic happened once to me on waking. But I was a teenager then, and doing drugs a lot more exotic than just this legal alcohol crap I’ve been reduced to now. Oh, and the other reason I like this is that it is such a psychological conception of the utmost Hell. Traditional theology links the state of Hell to a knowledge of the Self as a thing separate from God. That is precisely the burden of knowledge, the loss of innocence, what happens to you when you eat a Kerr’s Pink offered by some woman in league with the serpent. Utmost Hell is to be damned, and then to lose the one thing you clinged onto in your damnation: your Self. Whoa.. maybe this dude really is a psychologist! Or a psychotheologist! WTF? God, how did you and your dad get on? That was a whole different creation, dude. Not relevant.
[The Name]

Paul Celan…I doubt I’m up to the task of ‘explaining’ anything by Paul Celan. He was brought up in a German speaking Jewish family in Bukovina. Both of his parents died in forced labour camps during World War 2. He was multilingual, fluent in German, Romanian, French, and able also to speak Hebrew and understand Yiddish. But he regarded German as his mother Tongue, and it is in German that he wrote the vast majority of his poems. But German was also the language of the Nazis, and his relationship with the language was anything but simple. I defy anyone to give a definitive interpretation of any poem by Celan, and I suspect that he did not compose with a single end in view. Instead, I believe he composed within something like a charged field of possibilities, a third space equidistant between word and world where both could meet and refract meaning in new ways, the way light and image are refracted by the planes of a crystal. Housed within that crystal are the redemptive efforts of the German language to re-engage the world, after…well, after all the horrors perpetrated in the name of National Socialism. Hence the neologisms, the fractured syntax. His precisions are different from the simple fidelities of description. He rarely makes big statements. He rarely writes long rythmic lines, unbroken by caesuras and subclauses. Big statements and rythmic, rising crescendos are the stuff of speeches, and hadn’t the Germans had enough of speeches? Then there is his deep interest in Jewish mysticism, apophatic approaches to a God who would not intervene on behalf of His Chosen People in their darkest hour. And this, I think, highlights one of the most interesting features of modern poetry in the second half of the 20th Century, it’s often demonstrated refusal to simply walk away. Instead, it attempts to set up relationships with the unanswering void, as if even emptiness can be cultivated to yield meaning. Celan’s poetry may always be on the verge of silence, because of the ever greater need to listen.

(DO NOT WORK AHEAD)