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.