Tuesday, June 10, 2008

The Auden perspective ...

... I have been reading from Princeton University Press's The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose. I have intention of reading the three volumes I have from start to finish. These books are made for dipping into. Of course, if you dip in once, you are certain to dip in again, and sooner rather than later. Dipping into these volumes quickly becomes a daily pleasure, likely to be indulged at any spare moment. I do intend, starting with this post, to report on my dipping.

There are events which arouse such simple and obvious emotions that and AP cable or a photograph in Life magazine are enough and poetic comment is impossible. If one reads through the mass of versified trash inspired, for instance, by the Lidice Massacre, one cannot avoid the conclusion that what was really bothering the versifiers was a feeling of guilt at not feeling horrorstruck enough. Could a good poem have been written on such a subject? Possibly. One that revealed this lack of feeling, that told how when he read the news, the poet, like you and I, dear reader, went on thinking about his fame or his lunch, and how glad he was that he was not one of the victims.
- From "Squares and Oblongs"

One work of art did come from a response to the Lidice Massacre: Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu's Memorial to Lidice, premiered, I believe, a year after the event. It is short, simple, and deeply moving.

In common with Burke, Hegel, and that great but bad man his father, [Matthew Arnold] thought of the state as a real entity, an organic growth, embracing and consummating all the individuals within it, a conception that may describe fairly well a tribal community with an undifferentiated economy, is less than half true of a feudal social system based on agriculture, and in a centralized and industrial society has no meaning whatever. ... Indeed, today, even the picture of the State as a strata of ruled and ruling classes is ceasing to be altogether adequate; it is becoming more and more, the united professional politicians and bureaucrats versus the disunited rest.

* * *

Matthew Arnold may have bee a prig, but he knew that there was a difference between right and wrong, and if democracy is not to be overwhelmed by an authoritarianism under which poetry will be impossible, it must listen not only to Whitman's congratulations but also to Arnold's cold accusing voice.


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