Here's something about the taxonomy of twentieth-century poetry that I don't get. Why does T.S. Eliot, who was born in St Louis and educated at Harvard before spending most of his adult years working for a London publishing house, earn a spot in anthologies of both English and American literature, while W.H. Auden, who grew up in the English Midlands and attended Oxford before emigrating to New York and taking American citizenship in his 30s, is considered a strictly English poet?
And is there something about poets that makes them ashamed of the names their parents gave them? I have to say that going by your initials must surely reinforce a prejudice that many people have against poets and poetry. You know what I mean. It's like what John Berryman said about "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," that there is something reductive in the very title since the name of the person singing the "love song" takes away something from our conception of a love song: he sounds too well dressed.
Auden is the subject of this essay in the current New York Review. If you love reading and books, it's natural to be interested in the lives of authors, and often a disappointment to discover the familiar blots. I kind of regret how little we know about Shakespeare the man and also that the things we do know include the fact that on a couple of occasions he used the courts to enforce the payment of relatively small debts owed to him. Joyce seems to have been under the impression that, being a genius, everyone he knew should pitch in to support him. Taking up this general topic, the critic Malcolm Cowley could think of no better defense than to claim, "No complete son of a bitch ever wrote a good English sentence." I think I agree with that, though it is arguably just a disguised cliche. ("It's possible," say mothers, "to find something good to say about anyone.")
Anyway, it is gratifying to learn that Auden was a real prince of a man. Though it may embarrass some of the big-thinking wingnuts of his adopted land, he was an uncloseted homosexual and a Christian gentleman (and left-wing in his politics). It is striking how many--Auden was one--of the leading lights of twentieth-century Christian practice have been all keen on Kierkegaard and Reinhold Niebuhr. Maybe I should read them, but I think I will put it off till diagnosed with something dreadful.
My favorite among Auden's poems that are taught in college courses is "Musee des Beaux Arts," and my favorite among those that aren't goes like this:
The Marquis de Sade and Genet
Are most highly thought of to-day;
But torture and treachery
Are not my sort of lechery,
So I've given my copies away.
But doesn't the penultimate line have one too many syllables--a flaw, if it is a flaw, that could easily have been corrected with the contraction "Aren't," which is to be preferred anyway on account of an informality that fits the context?
I am sure I know better than Auden what recommends a limerick.
