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)