Rediscovering W. H. Auden

For a thesis I wrote for my BA in Music, I wrote about Stravinsky's opera The Rake's Progress (based on the series of paintings and engravings by William Hogarth). In the process I became quite familiar with the thought and poetry of W.H. Auden, who wrote the libretto (the play in verse which provides the dramatic and poetic skeleton for Stravinsky's music).

Hoping for a chance to appropriately blog about Auden on his birthday soon, I googled his birthday and discovered that I'm about 4 months too late for the centenary of his birth (February 21, 1907). It's a good year for it anyway. Then I happened upon this homage in the New York Sun from Feb 21 of this year, which made me realize something of which I was dimly aware at the time when I became enamored of him back in the day: To wit, the Auden who was collaborating with Igor in the '40s was not the Auden who had been famous in the '30s for his visionary political verse. This was the Later Auden, dismissed by critics at the time as a lesser version of his earlier, ostensibly more genuine self, the Early Auden. One critic quoted in the Sun piece said, "Auden, never a pompous poet, has now become an unserious one."

My favorite book of his is a prose collection of criticism, The Dyer's Hand. I rediscovered why when I happened upon his page of quotations on Wikiquote. For a more copious collection of epigrammatic gems and insights, one need look no further than this extraordinary book as quoted at http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/W._H._Auden.

Just one example:

What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish. This is bad for everyone; the majority lose all genuine taste of their own, and the minority become cultural snobs. ["The Poet and the City", p. 83, The Dyer's Hand]

This underlines the concept that a developed taste is an essential part of 'Culture' as well as of one's unique identity, as in his remark, "The surest sign that a man[sic] has a taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it." I love that one, of course, being notoriously indecisive.... But it also has a great bearing on the discussion of the early vs. late Auden, since elsewhere in his writings (I think in The Dyer's Hand) I remember that he makes the argument that the life's work of a writer (or poet or 'Artist') is in one sense to discover his/her true and genuine identity: that, indeed, finding out exactly what one's taste is is precisely the important Work of the life of the Artist, since Genuineness is the ethical equivalent in the Artist to Truth for the Scientist. Which lends poignancy to the title of this remarkable book of his critical excerpts.

The title The Dyer's Hand comes from the 87th stanza (CXXXVII)of the 3rd Canto of Lord Byron's Don Juan (which you must pronounce, by the way, so that it rhymes with "true one" - ie, Don "JEW-en", see the first stanza of the poem), one of the greatest comic poems ever written. This is, I think one of the discoveries of Auden's, I'd guess, that transformed him from his early to his late self. Lord Byron (who as the narrator - as Auden tells it - is the actual hero of his epic of young Juan's exploits) has just quoted a song entitled "the Ilses of Greece" not as one that Juan DID sung, but one that he WOULD sing ("some sort of hymn like this"), after 16 full verses of which, he concludes:

Thus sung, or would, or could, or should have sung,
The modern Greek, in tolerable verse;
If not like Orpheus quite, when Greece was young,
Yet in these times he might have done much worse:
His strain display'd some feeling—right or wrong;
And feeling, in a poet, is the source
Of others' feeling; but they are such liars,
And take all colours—like the hands of dyers.

PS - Christopher Isherwood, pictured with Auden in the 30's, was the author of Goodbye to Berlin, the collection of short stories which was adapted by Isherwood to become a play, I Am a Camera, which was adapted to become the famous musical Cabaret. There is an earlier film adaptation of I am a Camera by the same name and starring Julie Harris and Lawrence Harvey which I like better as an adaptation of Isherwood, but it's not a musical. Another extraordinary view of Berlin of the '30s, including the rise of the Nazi's, is his Mr. Norris Changes Trains.