Something the worst poets and the best poets have in common: you suspect you’re spending more time reading their work than they spent writing it. I’ve been dipping again into W.H. Auden’s Collected, and I’ll be damned. His facility is just unbelievable. Every poem (every poem written before 1950, anyway) is such a technical marvel, and so seemingly effortless. Every stanza delivers its good-natured gut punch, no less potent for arriving right on schedule.
He’s also, to my ear, the most permanently contemporary of poets, even when he’s packing his poems with expiration-dated references. Lines like these, from the seriocomic “Letter to Lord Byron,” are going to feel timely for a long time:
We’ve grown, you see, a lot more democratic,
And Fortune’s ladder is for all to climb;
Carnegie on this point was most emphatic.
A humble grandfather is not a crime,
At least, if father made enough in time!
To-day, thank God, we’ve got no snobbish feeling
Against the more efficient modes of stealing.
The poem is 159 of those stanzas, all apparently written between July and October of 1936. Where did this man come from, and how can I get there?
the poet in topeka 