Life, art, and times …

 … A Poet’s Politics. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… while Auden was widely seen at the time as a leader of the literary Left, he was never a Communist, and he soon regretted the implication of those lines. George Orwell, who fought in the Spanish Civil War and took a bullet in the neck, was infuriated by “Spain,” writing that Auden’s line “could only be written by a person to whom murder is at most a word. Personally I would not speak so lightly of murder. . . . Mr. Auden’s amoralism is only possible if you are the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled.” The way Auden rewrote the lines, calling death “inevitable” rather than “deliberate” and refusing to say that murder is “necessary,” suggests that he took this criticism to heart