(HOST) Tomorrow, February 21, is the hundredth birthday of one of the great literary figures of the twentieth century. And commentator Peter Gilbert thinks it’s an event worth celebrating.
(GILBERT) W. H. Auden lies now in Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey in London, but he was born in 1907, 100 years ago tomorrow – in York, England. He attended Oxford, but met with little academic success there; he did, however, become associated with a group of young English writers who were seen as the most promising authors of the new generation, including Christopher Isherwood and poets Stephen Spender and C. Day Lewis, who, by the way, was the actor Daniel Day Lewis’s father.
Auden immigrated to the United States in 1939 and became an American citizen in 1946. He visited Vermont, teaching at Breadloaf Writers’ Conference and Bennington College and giving a public reading at the University of Vermont. When Auden was young, his work often reflected leftist political concerns, but later in life, it focused more on ethical issues, in part due to his reconnecting with the Anglican Church of his youth.
One of Auden’s most popular poems is “Funeral Blues,” which is read in the funeral scene in the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral. The poem is enormously powerful and expresses excruciating grief. It begins,
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone.
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone.
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939” (which is the date that Hitler invaded Poland and started World War II) was widely read in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Set in New York City, the poem refers to New York’s “blind skyscrapers.” Early in the poem he writes,
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
And that’s just a few of the lines that resonate in the post 9/11 context.
My favorite Auden poem, however, was inspired by a Renaissance painting by Pieter Brueghel The Elder. The poem’s entitled “Musee des Beaux Arts,” after the museum in Brussels where Auden saw the painting. Don’t be intimidated by its French title. The poem explores how human suffering [quote] “takes place/While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.” [unquote] Auden reminds us that suffering is all around us – all the time – while we go about our ordinary, every-day activities. We know that we can’t always be grieving because somewhere someone is in pain or dying. But we need not be indifferent, and we should not turn away. And so the poem asks us implicitly that if we cannot comfort the suffering, that we at least be witness to it.
Peter Gilbert is executive director of the Vermont Humanities Council.