It is both the glory and shame of poetry that its medium is not its private property, that a poet cannot invent his words and that words are products, not of Nature, but of a human society which uses them for a thousand different purposes.If you helped Dijkstra with his treasure hunt during Count Reuven's Treasure, you can meet him back in his bathhouse office, and he agrees to send a small band of his men to help you with the ambush. He recalls the dilemma he expresses in The Dyers Hand: “‘My language is the universal whore whom I have to make into a virgin’ (Karl Krauss). Karl Kraus, who was an absolute master of German, said a marvellous thing: ‘The public doesn’t understand German, and in journalese I can’t tell them so.’” “It can only be done by personal example. But what could be better for a poet than to do what he wants to, and get paid for it?” Auden goes back to the point he feels is most important, the defence of language. I try to think I’m reading to one person. But there is a danger you may start to think of the audience, to go for the dramatic effect. It should be read aloud, even when you read it off the page. I ask about the revival of poetry readings – Auden read at this year’s Poetry International: “On one side I think these public readings are a good thing. It’s not very nice to feel that you have made capital out of writing about these things.” I don’t withdraw it, I’m just suspicious of it. It did not make a difference for a single Jew, or change one thing about the war. But what embarrasses me is the question ‘Who benefitted?’ And the answer is me. I don’t withdraw them or deny them, the things I wrote – about Hitler and so on. There are certain things in my history that rather embarrass me. Not art, in effect.”īut in his early work Auden had wanted direct change? “Yes, I think this is a reaction from my early experience. Otherwise there are only two courses to be taken over political and social evil: either direct political action, or a journalistic type of reportage. The fact of risking his life gives a moral authority to try and change things. I think that is only possible in a situation where there has been no freedom of the press, ever, like in Russia. It’s quite all right to write about politics as long as you don’t have the conceit to think you will change the course of history. The artist ceases to ask the personal question of ‘what is right for me to do?’ and instead asks ‘what is right for 1970?’ This slavery to the moment is infinitely more tyrannous than constrictions I can think of. This stability meant that the pressure they were under was an artistic pressure, not a political one. When they were growing up society was much as it had been in the nineteenth century. I’m sure that it is significant that the founders of modern art grew to manhood before 1914. You get this appalling thing of asking yourself all the time, ‘is this relevant to 1970?’ What now seems to happen is that people take political action as model for artistic creation. Plato tried to take artistic fabrication and use it as a model for society. We are making the reverse of Plato’s mistake. “Now this is something I’ve got alarmed about. Language is under dangerous pressure, but so are artists. My only duty as a poet is to defend the use of language. As a citizen obviously one has a host of political duties. ‘Speech is the mother of thought, not the hand-maiden.’ When it is corrupted, people lose faith in what they hear, and that leads to violence. To a question about the relation between politics and art, Auden answers emphatically: “As a poet – not as a citizen – there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one’s language from corruption. We’re all contemporaries, facing contemporary problems.” There’s a certain difference in memories, that’s all. Anyone walking this earth at this moment. “I don’t go along with all this talk of a generation gap. These things make him sound more estranged from today’s scene than he is. No movies, radio, or television.” It’s a surprising list for one who chooses to live in America, but all that he will say on record is that he finds England much more vulgar. Which referred to “useful gadgets but profane.” And in the The Dyers Hand he sketches out his own version of Eden: “Means of Transport: Horses and horse-drawn vehicles, narrow-gauge railways, canal barges, balloons. He recalls that Truman Capote was interviewed by a man whose tape recorder broke down, and when Capote offered to continue the man said, “But I’m not used to listening to the answers.” Auden crows with laughter, then says sharply: “Besides, if there’s anything memorable in what I say, you should remember it.”Īuden has written about “the earth in 1969 – not a world that I’d call mine,” The gargoyle face, the green baize blazer, the carpet slippers – WH Auden seems to shamble into the room.
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