W.H.Auden

Selected Poems.

Revisited edition by Edward Mendelson.

343 p.

A future review

I  first read Auden indirectly by approaching to T.S. Eliot Four quartets and the seminal The Waste Land. Without intention, you always draw a line joining the two poets of the same period, especially if they met each other, you may think there is a link among them,  although there is nothing in common. Aesthetically, I mean.

The second time I read Auden was when I found his essays about ancient greek gods. The knowledge is so vast and so precisely conveyed that he lets you think that it is easy to write about something you don´t have a clue. It´s just a delusion. His writings are mesmerising, full of  mythological references, explaining the unseen in naked eye. He translates the ancient world, the mediterranean blue into a misty language of  medieval resonance.

Auden is not only the learned poet educated at Oxford, whose political commitment drove him to Spain during the civil war (1936-1939), at the same time, a young Eric Blair (George Orwell) was fighting in the front, not far from where Auden was helping as a ambulance driver, when he wrote the well known poem "Spain". 

 He married, despite the homosexuality of both members, Erika Mann, the daughter of Thomas Mann, the german writer author of The Magic Mountain. But the marriage was only a bogus union to help Erika to get the British nationality before nazis came to power.

He always considered poetry as a game of knowledge. From the initial commitment for the left, he never wanted to be the archetypical left wing poet and tried to open widely the range of influence of his compositions, getting into classical pattern the form of his poetic thinking. 

At the same time, he left Modernism far behind. Modernism as a label is a common place to be trapped on, and Auden was smart enough to realise that enclosure is not the right place to be when you want to deal with inmortality.

His first poems are solid for someone who is only 22 years old. Deep philosophical thinking developing concepts such as guilt, forgiveness, the natural element in which men are observed by the young and sharp eye of a future scholar and poet. Everything is within the scope of interest of young Auden. Everything must be said. He soon realised that poetry is more than a room with a view, but a personal idiomatic use of a great language. 

The ferocius necessity of naming all he perceives around him.

Soneto XIV

Sí, destinados a sufrir ahora, el cielo

se inflama como la frente febril, este dolor real.

Las luces a tientas de repente revelan

las pequeñas naturalezas que nos harán llorar.

El que nunca creyó que podríamos ser

en donde nosotros no estábamos. Nos cogieron por sorpresa

como recuerdos olvidados hace tiempo,

como una conciencia a prueba de balas.

Detrás de cada simpático ojo casero,

privados holocaustos tienen lugar:

mujeres, judíos, pudientes, la raza humana.

Los montes no podrán juzgarnos cuando muramos,

habitamos sobre la tierra, mientras obedece

al mal y a la inteligencia hasta la muerte.