As I noted earlier this week, W.H. Auden died fifty years ago today. Thinking about how important he was to generations of readers in the twentieth century — and how he still finds readers now — sent me back to an essay I wrote for Poetry Review in 2019. It’s no longer online, so today’s post is an edited, illustrated version. The original title was “Boring Auden”, for reasons that will become clear; really, it’s about how much I still like the early “English” Auden, and hear echoes of his strange, wry, subversive voice in other poets, such as John Ashbery, Denise Riley, and Holly Pester.
Are we bored of W.H. Auden? As Auden himself said, to ask the hard question is simple — and the answer to this one almost certainly depends on who “we” are. For readers of my generation (b.1978) Wystan Hugh Auden (b. 1907–d.1973) was definitely still a Big Poet; and the further one went back in the twentieth century, the larger he loomed. “God, god, the stature of the man”, wrote Sylvia Plath in her journal from 1953; Derek Walcott read Auden during his teenage years in 1940s St. Lucia, finding him “far more adventurous” than Eliot or Pound; and the critic Richard Hoggart, who was ten years old when Auden published his first pamphlet, Poems (1928), wrote that:
Many of us who began our adult reading during the thirties in England will always think of W.H. Auden with a particular warmth, with the family sense we reserve for those writers who place their fingers on the pulse of a crucial period.
For young English readers between the wars, Thirties Auden was the Eighties Morrissey of his day: a not-obviously-heterosexual, charismatic loner who applied his wit to a sinister post-industrial landscape (Auden poem or Smiths lyric? “Where the Sunday lads come talking motor-bicycle and girl, / Smoking cigarettes in chains until their heads are in a whirl”). The remarkable thing is that Auden continued to repeat this trick with readers long after his first fame.
When Auden’s cabaret song “Funeral Blues” (“Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone”) was chosen by screenwriter Richard Curtis as the funeral reading in Four Weddings and Funeral (1994), it prompted his publisher, Faber, to produce a short selection of his love poems that sold over quarter of a million copies. The context of the film was important — James Hannah reads the lyric in memory of his older lover, played by Simon Callow — as was Auden’s reputation as a gay poet, retrospectively acknowledged. As James Fenton, one of the many twentieth-century poets whose work is unimaginable without Auden’s example, remarked at the time: “A large number of people, since the AIDS epidemic, have become familiar with the experience of funerals at which a devastated boyfriend has to pay tribute to his prematurely dead lover. […] The emotional scene […] gains force from those memories”.
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