... W.H. Auden: Saviour and scapegoat. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
So Seamus Heaney thinks Auden is "a writer of perfect light verse."
I'd like to see what Heaney has written comparable to this: "Who stands the crux left of the watershed, / On the wet road between the chafing grass".
Can't say I have any knowledge of either poet really, but a fw words taken inisolation can be made asay virtually anything. Heaney could, for instance, have said, "Auden could write geat poetry of rare depth, while also being a writer of perfect light verse." Then again, perhaps he simply considered him a writer of perfect light verse, which is presumably faint praise. Without a wider knowledge of his views, those few words in themselves are, however, rather than a devastating put-down, quite a compliment.
ReplyDeleteHi Andrew:
ReplyDeleteA good point, though I suspect Sansom thinks Heaney's remark representative of his view of Auden. So far, I haven't been able to find much of what Heaney has had to say about Auden.
Hi Frank-Did a little rummaging myself, Frank, for a mere couple of minutes admittedly & didn't find anything. Maybe tis representative of Heaney's views but then again.
ReplyDeleteOops, excessive use of Frank.
ReplyDeleteDon't know why a non-poetry reading pleb such as myself has spent the last ten minutes delving this issue, and it yielded not a whole lot but that Heaney described Auden as being able to subjugate "all the traditional poetic means to his own purposes."
ReplyDeleteHe also wrote a poem, "A Stove-Pipe for Auden", which is seemingly something of a homage. And also an essay, or not sure... perhaps a collection of essays, Sounding Auden, where he says, "Auden constantly returned to the double-nature of poetry. On the one hand...magical incantation, fundamentally a matter of sound and its power(sic)....on the other, poetry is a matter of making wise and true meanings, of commanding our emotional assent etc."
Here, perhaps, is that quotation of Seamus Heaney in context:
ReplyDelete"Auden was an epoch-making poet on public themes, the register of a new sensibility, a great sonneteer, a writer of perfect light verse, a prospector of language at its most illiterate roots and a dandy of lexicography at its most extravagant reaches. There is a Victorian bulk to this book that contains his confident, abundant, peremptory, insouciant opus. A hundred years from now Auden's work will certainly be in permanent and outstanding profile, and for all one's niggardly withholdings, in the end one assents with a 'yes' as pleasured and whole-hearted as Molly Bloom's."
Well, Dave, I think you've settled it: Heaney was taken out of context. He may cavil a bit, but he does seem to give Auden his due.
ReplyDelete