W. H. Auden died fifty years ago today, and I’ve written a brief reflection, with many links.
Auden, fifty years later
W. H. Auden died fifty years ago today.
He is the single most important writer and thinker in my life, and has been ever since, in my very last class in graduate school, I read his collection of essays The Dyer’s Hand. (Though it’s more than a collection of essays: it’s Auden’s Ars Poetica or Biographia Literaria.) The prose led me to the poetry and then there was no going back.
I wrote my first book (a book that had a peculiar route to publication) about Auden, featured him as one of the central figures in my The Year of Our Lord 1943, and have now produced three critical editions of his books: The Age of Anxiety, For the Time Being, and (forthcoming) The Shield of Achilles.
Some of my essays and reviews about Auden available online:
- “Auden and the Dream of Public Poetry”
- “The Poet’s Prose”
- “Auden and the Limits of Poetry”
- “Sandfield Road” (an imaginary conversation)
- “The Love Feast” (a review of the Complete Poems)
- There are many posts on Auden here on this blog — see the tag at the bottom of this post — but this is one of the more important ones.
He was, shall we say, quite a character, and the anecdotes about him — about his titanic messiness and equally exceptional kindness — may readily be found. I do wish I had known him personally, but his work is so filled with his distinctive personality that I always feel that I do.
Auden has done more than anyone else to help me understand what it means to be a Christian in my own moment — one neither hankering after a vague Utopia or pining for an illusory lost Arcadia. In poetry and prose alike, he has given me great pleasure and inexhaustible food for thought. One of the great themes of his work is the necessity and the blessing of gratitude, and thus he has been my primary instructor in how to be grateful. Today, especially, I am grateful for him.
For me (though I am sure others will disagree!), the artistic power of the Kelmscott Chaucer is in the harmonious balance that is achieved between Burne-Jones’ illustrations and Morris’ frames, borders, typography and the visually striking double-page spreads. And users can investigate each of these aspects individually in turn on the website. The decision to make it a primarily visual experience is both practical and editorial. Practically, it just would not be worth the time and effort to digitize nearly 600 pages, especially when the complete works of Chaucer are available for anyone to read almost everywhere and for very cheap. Even if this aim was desirable and could have been achieved efficiently, it would have changed the very nature of the project, bloating it out into a project where the focus became so broad that the visual aspects would have become, if not diluted, then certainly more obscured amongst a sea of similar-looking text-based pages.
It took me a long time to find a WordPress theme that (with a few minor tweaks) made my big blog look the way I want it to look, but I finally did.
Had I known about this passage from Dorothy Day’s diary, it would have been really useful to me for The Year of Our Lord 1943 and Breaking Bread With the Dead.
Looks like there’s a gator on the Brazos, Ma.
This is magnificent: The Kelmscott Chaucer online.
A phrase like “streaming movie” or “theatrical release” or “documentary podcast” communicates what, where and why with far more precision than gibberish like “content,” and if you want to put everything under one tent, “entertainment” is right there. But studio and streaming executives, who are perhaps the primary users and abusers of the term, love to talk about “content” because it’s so wildly diminutive. It’s a quick and easy way to minimize what writers, directors and actors do, to act as though entertainment (or, dare I say it, art) is simply churned out — and could be churned out by anyone, sentient or not. It’s just content, it’s just widgets, it’s all grist for the mill.
We got new windows in our house today, modern double-glazed windows to relace the single-pane ones that were original to the house (built in 1956). The most immediately noticeable thing: how much quieter the house is now.
Brad East on AI sermons is just outstanding: “Study and writing aren’t a mere means to an end—unfortunate but unavoidable. Both entail a crucial spiritual and intellectual process that should not be circumvented.”
department of corrections
danah boyd: “Over the last two years, I’ve been intentionally purchasing and reading books that are banned.” The problem here is that none, literally not one, of the books on the list boyd links to have been banned. Neither have they been “censored,” which is what the article linked to says. That’s why boyd can buy and read them: because they’ve been neither banned nor censored.
What has happened is this: Some parents want school libraries to remove from their shelves books that they (the parents) think are inappropriate for their children to read. You may think that such behavior is mean-spirited or otherwise misconceived — very often it is! — but has nothing to do with either banning or censorship.
But, of course, the American Library Association has been quite effective in redefining the words “banning” and “censorship” to include actions that are far less drastic — less drastic and not especially common: as Micah Mattix has documented here and here, there simply is no widespread movement to keep books off school library shelves.
In a sane world, the term “ban” would be reserved for books whose sale and circulation are illegal in some given place, and “censorship” would refer to the removal, by some legal or commercial authority, of certain portions of a text or film or recording. (I say “commercial” authority because sometimes companies that own the rights to works of art decide, without legal pressure, to delete some lyrics in a song or change certain words in a book.) But thanks to people who want to smear their RCOs, it is now common to use precisely the same words to describe (a) what the nation of Iran did to Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and (b) a polite letter from a parent to a school librarian asking that books that offer anatomically detailed descriptions of sexual practices not be readily available to third graders. Of course, many concerned parents are not polite, but polite letters on this topic still count, for the ALA, as a “challenge,” and the organization defines a challenge as an attempt at censorship or banning.
This failure to make elementary distinctions is neither politically nor intellectually healthy.
I sometimes wonder whether this kerfuffle isn’t something of a smokescreen, intended to distract our attention from more serious and troubling attempts at what George Orwell called “the prevention of literature” — for instance, removing books from sale altogether, pulping offensive books, or ensuring that they aren’t published at all. (In some cases that means that the authors aren’t published at all.) You can buy books that some parents have protested; you can’t buy books that, because of political pressure, have never seen the light of day. So you know what I’m craving today? A little perspective.
Wes Anderson: “If you work with people at different ages and you’re giving them a lot to do, you can see how it really is so much easier when you’re young: On ‘Moonrise Kingdom,’ we had a lot of people who were 12 and they knew every word of the whole script. It was like we had 11 script supervisors on set.”
Today Angus took his first selfie (with my son). We’re all so proud.
If you’re a Chicagoan, and probably only if you’re a Chicagoan, you’ll appreciate Anders Erickson’s video on Malört — a liqueur that John Hodgman quite accurately describes as tasting like “pencil shavings and heartbreak.”
SO GLAD to see that Francis Spufford’s Cahokia Jazz is out in the UK. I had the privilege of reading drafts, one chapter at a time, and even in that form found it utterly thrilling. Everyone should read it!
I posted a small piece of autobiography from a book I wrote 15 years ago.
What happens when you shoot a 50-year-old roll of film.