Posts Tagged W. H. Auden

As an avid collector of quotes and lines of poetry, I often find myself with unattributed lines and mis-attributed quotes. The internet, though efficient in locating and aggregating information, is not, of course, of much help in clearing up issues of accurate attribution.

But to be honest with you, if the quote is good, I really do not care. What matters to me is that the line is good. And so on hump-day of the first full week of May, here are some quotes I have collected from various sources over the years.

Let me know if there are any you especially like… or that you know are indeed misattributed. Thanks.

In the meantime, enjoy!

“Know what you are talking about.”  ~John Paul II

“Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all.” ~Abraham Lincoln

“Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.”  ~Ezra Pound

“Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can; all of them make me laugh.”  ~W.H. Auden

“The more we study, the more we discover our ignorance” ~P.B. Shelley

“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same” ~Thomas Merton

“The desire to write grows with writing.” ~Erasmus

“Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.”  ~Henry James

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.” ~Ernest Hemingway

“Artistic talent is a gift from God and whoever discovers it in himself has a certain obligation: to know that he cannot waste this talent, but must develop it.”  ~John Paul II

“The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.”  ~Samuel Johnson

“A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard — by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off.” ~Archibald MacLeish

“Don’t ask a writer what he’s working on. It’s like asking someone with cancer on the progress of his disease.”  ~Amy Lowell

“Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite.”  ~Ezra Pound

“Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.” ~G.K. Chesterton

“Your library is your paradise.”  ~Erasmus

“I can’t think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people’s understanding of what’s going on in the world.” ~Seamus Heaney

“We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.” ~Henry James

“There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience, and that is not learning from experience.” ~Archibald MacLeish

“The first draft of anything is shit.” ~Ernest Hemingway

“Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.”  ~W.H. Auden

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”  ~Marcel Proust

“There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.” ~G.K. Chesterton

“Debate doesn’t really change things. It gets you bogged in deeper. If you can address or reopen the subject with something new, something from a different angle, then there is some hope…. That’s something poetry can do for you, it can entrance you for a moment above the pool of your own consciousness and your own possibilities.” ~Seamus Heaney

“Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.” ~G.K. Chesterton

“I don’t want everyone to like me; I should think less of myself if some people did.” ~Henry James

“The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in.”  ~W.H. Auden

“Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer’s work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader’s recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book’s truth.” ~Marcel Proust

“The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man”  ~T.S. Eliot

“Stupidity is also a gift of God, but one mustn’t misuse it.”  ~John Paul II

____

April is National Poetry Month. In honor of National Poetry Month, MontanaWriter will be featuring poems about poets, poetry, and writing poetry.

W.H. Auden

Today’s poems is one that has been featured once before at MontanaWriter, over a year ago. I feel justified in re-posting it here again because:

1. it is personal favorite
2. it is written by one of the greatest poets of the 20th Century
3. it is written about the greatest poet of the 20th Century
4. it is one of the best poems about poetry and poets ever written

In the poem, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” we see Auden wrestling with the meaning of poetic and artistic immortality and what exactly that kind of immortality means: for the poet, for those who read the poems, and for the world/culture at large. For National Poetry Month, there can be no better discussion than this: Does poetry matter? And if so why?

For Auden this was not, of course, a merely academic question. It is not for any poet. To dedicate so much time and energy to something, to put so much of your self into something, you must believe – on some level – that it has some kind of larger meaning or purpose. That is really does matter.

Is poetry catharsis? Do poets write and readers read, to release emotional tension? There are poetry writing classes taught to cancer survivors, and victims of crime, to those battling addiction or abuse or loneliness. Is that what poetry is: a way to understand, express, and release emotions in a creative and constructive way, to aid ourselves and others?

Is poetry thought-formation? Do poets write and readers read, to have their mindsets re-ordered? There are Christian poets, and feminist poets. There are gay and lesbian poets? There are right-wing poets and left-wing poets? Is that what poetry is: a way to change outlooks politically, socially, and religiously?

Is poetry entertainment? Do poets write and readers read, to be entertained? Is a poem the same as a sitcom or movie, as a sporting event or some popular song on the radio? Is that what poetry is: a leisurely diversion that gives us a few moments of pleasure in an uncertain world?

Is poetry some part of all of these? Do poets write and readers read, for all of these reasons?

Is poetry something else altogether?

In Memory of W.B. Yeats

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

III

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

Listening with a pencil and my ear, these are the lines I marked:

Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

To pick a few lines out of a poem you have had memorized for decades… a poem you frequently recite parts of to yourself… is really quite difficult. On another day, I would no doubt pick different lines to highlight than these. But for National Poetry Month, they seem like the perfect lines to get the discussion started: Does poetry matter? And if so why?

____

This month, MontanaWriter is featuring poems about the month of March. For more March poems, click here.

I rely on the “internets” for quick searches and indexes of poems when I am trying to find poems with certain themes (poems about birds, stars, the month of March). Primarily I use these searches to refresh my memory. It is an efficient way to find things, but it is fraught with all the usual perils of internet searching.

Today’s poem is an example. The poem itself is quite familiar to me. But on several sites, this Richard Wilbur poem is entitled “March 26, 1974″ (indicating that it was directly written in honor of Robert Frost’s 100th birthday). While on a number of other – and admittedly more reliable – sites the same poem is entitled “April 5th, 1974.”

Since I cannot find my own paperback copy of Wilbur’s poems to verify this for myself, and since I think that even if it was not written for Frost’s birthday it should have been, and since my hectic work schedule has meant that I have not posted for awhile, I am going with the “March 26th” title for now. BUT will follow-up with the definitive title in a subsequent post.

Richard Wilbur is known as both a translator and poet. His poetry shows the influence of Frost and also, I think, W.H. Auden. It would have been difficult for a poet of his time not to be influenced by both those poets.

Wilbur was a “traditionalist” in rhyme and meter. That is one of the reasons that he is not read as much these days. His translations though remain quite popular.

Whether intentionally written in honor of Frost’s birthday or not, this seems like a perfect March 26th poem.

Enjoy!

April 5th, 1974

The air was soft, the ground still cold.
In wet dull pastures where I strolled
Was something I could not believe.
Dead grass appeared to slide and heave,
Though still too frozen-flat to stir,
And rocks to twitch, and all to blur.
What was this rippling of the land?
Was matter getting out of hand
And making free with natural law?
I stopped and blinked, and then I saw
A fact as eerie as a dream.
There was a subtle flood of stream
Moving upon the face of things.
It came from standing pools and springs
And what of snow was still around;
It came of winter’s giving ground
So that the freeze was coming out,
As when a set mind, blessed by doubt,
Relaxes into mother-wit.
Flowers, I said, will come of it.

Listening with a pencil and my ear, these are the lines I marked:

What was this rippling of the land?
Was matter getting out of hand
And making free with natural law?

The Catholic in me cannot resist the reference to “natural law” anymore than I can resist the obvious reference to “Mending Wall.” The references to familiar Frost poems are many in this poem: pasture, stone, snow. Lines and images from Frost tumble about in our head as we read this poem.

____

W.B. Yeats chose a completely different direction for his “escapist” fiction: American westerns. I have always liked the image of the great Irish poet, writer of “The Second Coming” and “Leda and the Swan,” sitting in a chair in the evenings reading stories about gunslingers shooting it out in dusty cow-towns in fictional Montana or Colorado.

The kind of “bad prose” Hall detested would certainly have predominated in the westerns that Yeats would have been reading in the 1910s-30s, dime westerns and Zane Grey. While many modern westerns continue to suffer the same malady, by any objective measure, bad prose seems no more prevalent today in westerns or mysteries than in any other kind of fiction. Certainly a case can easily be made that some of the best writers and stylists of the English language  continue to work along the margins of fiction, that is, in the genres of Sci.Fi, Mysteries, and, of course, Westerns.

Working along the margins of an art allows the artist greater latitude in experimenting and trying new things. Cormac McCarthy is a good example of this. In Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses he experiments with the western. In No Country for Old Men with the mystery. In The Road with science fiction. The only genre he has not yet tackled is the romance novel. Maybe that is next. What a Cormac McCarthy romance would be like, I cannot even begin to imagine.

Personally, I happen to like mysteries and westerns and sports. I can find merit in all three… and in sci.fi. and fantasy. As I have written several times over the years at MontanaWriter, in the end it is only quality that matters:

The distinction between literary and genre fictions (mysteries, westerns, fantasy, and sci.fi.) is largely an artificial one. Those who still insist on making anachronistic literary distinctions do it for the same reason that all snobs make such declarations, self-aggrandizing assholery.

The only distinctions that can legitimately be made in literature are between good writing and bad writing and good stories and bad stories. When a work of fiction takes hold of your imagination, when the language continually invites you to turn pages, the writer has done his or her job. When the book haunts you and you can remember it years and years later, the writer has written a masterpiece.

So in the evenings you may find me reading just about anything, with the exception of romances. Unless, of course,  McCarthy does try his hand at one after all.

I read for pleasure and escape and to learn. I read to feed a hungry spirit and a hungry mind. I read to stoke the fires of imagination and to be reminded again of my humanity.  And I watch and enjoy sports for many of the same reasons… for all the same reason.

_____

Winter Path (copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

It has been warm this December in the North Country, and dry. So dry in fact that there are fire restrictions across the state. The drought that plagued the Lone Star state this past summer seems like it is wintering here in the north.

Outside my living room window last year was a world of white. Snow heaped upon snow. Banks so high that we could not even see the street.

This year all is different. Every other morning now, I have seen crows in my front yard, fat and black on the brown grass. They at least seem to be making the most of the milder weather.

My writing routine has been much interrupted of late, the drain of a second job finally taking its toll. Writing, for me at least, requires down-time and reading-time. I have had little of either for the last four months. It is hard to complain though about the burdens of two jobs when so many do not have any.

I am fortunate that neither job requires the manipulation of words. Auden’s famous quote comes often to my mind:  “A poet has not only to educate himself as a poet, he has also to consider how he is going to earn a living. Ideally, he should have a job which does not in any way involve the manipulation of words.”

Most of my life, I worked as a writer or editor. I am happy to have the opportunity to do something so far removed from both. The economic price though is that I have to work two jobs… for now. There is also admittedly a pride cost as well. I never get to do, or show off, what I am best at… most passionate at.

Today’s poem is a more recent one. And fitting for this time of year, if not this particular year.

Enjoy!

Walking the Dog at Night

suburban houses
glimpsed through trees
seem like farm houses
seen across empty fields
or like cabins on a lonely lake

the last stands of civilization for miles

that is the way the mind works
in the near emptiness of darkness

A few lights glimpsed here and there

a window
un-curtained
an empty room where the television is still on
a basketball game transitioning to a commercial
a tropical beach
a woman in a blue bikini
a bottle of beer

another house and a smaller window
the head of a man
standing
at a kitchen sink
doing dishes
talking over his shoulder
to someone further into the house

the sound of snow crunching under our feet
disturbs no one
makes no one come to a window
to peer out
or to a door
to flip on a light

we move like phantoms through patches of light
swallowed again and again by the night
only dog-prints and foot-prints
show we have passed

____

Ghost Room (copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

For the past couple of months, I have felt like a wandering Aramean. A complicated series of furniture misadventures with more plot twists than a Robert Ludlum novel had meant that for awhile our living room –the place where I do most of my reading and writing– had been transformed into a sofa storage and staging area. I was displaced and lost.

A perfect place to read

At different times in my life it has been different places. I have read Auden in a tent by flashlight late at night on the Continental Divide Trail in the Anaconda-Pintler Wilderness in Montana and Hugh MacDiarmad on a battered Lazyboy in a dingy St. Paul studio apartment overrun with box-elder bugs. I read Ezra Pound at an Irish bar in Chicago and Ford Madox Ford on long city-bus rides going to and from a downtown editing job I never really liked. I read Paradise Lost in a hospital waiting room and Ted Kooser in a cabin on Lake Superior. On beaches in Florida I read Travis McGee and in a dimly lit apartment of borrowed furniture in Saginaw, Michigan, I read Kafka and Yeats.

For the past few years, I have done most of my reading… and writing… in the living room of our Bloomington home overlooking our less-than perfect front yard and our quite-perfect suburban street. Since I never close the shades on the big window that faces the sidewalk and street and routinely read late into the evening, I have heard that the neighbors are well aware of how I spend my evenings. Whether they approve or not… I cannot say.

With my Kindle app on my iPod, I now find I can read almost anywhere… and frequently do. Sitting in the car waiting for a daughter, sitting in some waiting room or at a desk waiting for a computer I am working on to reimage or update…. And yet in the end, I spent the past few months feeling homeless because my living room, lined with books, was in disarray… and in a house with many rooms I had no place to go.

I am in the northeast corner of my living room again which is in southwest corner of our house. The room is a long rectangle. In front of me, in the southeast corner, is one tall bookcase with westerns and chess books and books about Montana, and next to that another small four-sided bookcase that spins filled with Modern Library classics. In center of the wall is a big picture window looking south over a yard that needs to be raked again. On the western wall, is one bookcase, a piano, and two more bookcases with glass doors on top to protect older books.

On the coffee table in front of the couch I am sitting on is a chess board and a few piles of books in various states of being read, and more books on the coffee table’s lower shelf. I look around the room, at spines of books I have read and plan to read. On books of history, and theology, and poetry, and mysteries, and science fiction, and fantasy, and French Literature, and Russian Literature, and books that have changed my life, and books that may change my life in the future… and I am as content as I am hard-wired to be. I have my home back. I have a good place to read.

____

This is the seventh book review in the series “Poets on Poetry.” Reviews of books in this series can be found at “Poets on Poetry.”

More than any poet, I associate Auden with mountains because that is where I first seriously read him. I carried a volume of his selected poems into the Anaconda-Pintler Wilderness when I worked trail crew there for the United States Forest Service during summers in the early 1980s. At nights, after everyone else went to sleep, I would lay in my sleeping bag with a flashlight balanced on my shoulder and read his poems long into the cool, clear night.

Later I read this book, Dyer’s Hand – which I think I picked up at a used bookstore near the Toledo Art Museum – when I was living briefly back in Montana after I had decided to no longer be a Lutheran pastor. I read it while I was studying Irish Literature and fly tying.

As a poet, Auden is one of a handful of 20th century poets that can truly be called great. As a critic, Auden is inspiring, insightful, imaginative, and quotable as hell. There is no critic of poetry that I would recommend above Auden.

Opening now the battered paperback book I first read more than 25 years ago, I look at lines I underlined and margin notes I made in those long-gone mountain days. Flipping pages, I recognize themes and trajectories that have guided my reading and writing life. Themes quite familiar to regular readers of MontanaWriter.

There are so many fine quotes, I do not know where to stop. In the end, I include quotes from just a few essays here. Another time, down the road perhaps, I will look at a few more.

In the North Country, it is full Autumn now. The trees we see every day are turning or have already turned. The days are dry and the sky that vivid blue that only those of us who live in the land of four seasons will ever truly know. I sit on my deck reading Auden… and the long years melt away…. and the flat country I inhabit now melts away. I am in the mountains again.

“It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.” (cf. “Foreword”)

“To read is to translate, for no two persons’ experiences are the same.” (cf. essay “Reading”)

“In learning to read well, scholarship, valuable as it is, is less important than instinct….” (cf. essay “Reading”)

“A poet cannot read another poet, nor a novelist another novelist, without comparing their work to his own. His judgements as he reads are of this kind: My God! My Great Grandfather! My Uncle! My Enemy! My Brother! My imbecile Brother!” (cf. essay “Reading”)

“Pleasure is by no means an infallible critical guide, but it is the least fallible.” (cf. essay “Reading”)

“The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most part, they are manifestations of his debate with himself as to what he should do next and what he should avoid. Moreover, unlike a scientist, he is usually even more ignorant of what his colleagues are doing than is the general public. A poet over thirty may still be a voracious reader, but it is unlikely much of what he reads is modern poetry.” (cf. essay “Reading”)

“Every writer would rather be rich than poor, but no genuine writer cares about popularity as such. He needs approval of his work by others in order to be reassured that the vision of life he believes he has had is a true vision and not a self-delusion, but he can only be reassured by those whose judgement he respects.” (cf. essay “Writing”)

“Writers, poets especially, have an odd relation to the public because their medium, language, is not, like the paint of the painter or the notes of the composer, reserved for their use but is the common property of the linguistic group to which they belong.” (cf. essay “Writing”)

“The degree of excitement which a writer feels during the process of composition is as much an indication of the value of the final result as the excitement felt by a worshiper is an indication of the value of his devotions, that is to say, very little indication.” (cf. essay “Writing”)

“No writer can ever judge exactly how good or bad a work of his may be, but he can always know, not immediately perhaps, but certainly in a short while whether something he has written is authentic….” (cf. essay “Writing”)

“… whenever English poets have felt that the gap between poetic and ordinary speech was growing to wide, there has been a stylistic revolution to bring them closer again.” (cf. essay “Writing”)

“Nothing is worse than a bad poem which was intended to be great.” (cf. essay “Making, Knowing, and Judging”)

“In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.” (cf. essay “Making, Knowing, and Judging”)

“A young poet may be conceited about his good taste, but he is under no illusion about his ignorance. He is well aware of how much poetry there is that he would like but of which he has never heard, and that there are learned men who have read it. His problem is knowing which learned man to ask, for it is not just more good poetry that he wants to read, but more of the kind he likes. He judges a scholarly or critical book less by the text than by the quotations, and all his life, I think, when he reads a work of criticism, he will find himself trying to guess what taste lies behind the critic’s judgement.” (cf. essay “Making, Knowing, and Judging”)

“Whatever his defects, a poet at least thinks a poem more important than anything which can be said about it….” (cf. essay “Making, Knowing, and Judging”)

“…it is from the sacred encounters of his imagination that a poet’s impulse to write a poem arises.” (cf. essay “Making, Knowing, and Judging”)

“… unless the poet sacrifices his feelings completely to the poem so that they are no longer his but the poem’s, he fails.” (cf. essay “The Virgin & The Dynamo”)

“A poet has not only to educate himself as a poet, he has also to consider how he is going to earn a living. Ideally, he should have a job which does not in any way involve the manipulation of words.” (cf essay “The Poet & The City”)

“The poet cannot understand the function of money in modern society because for him there is no relation between subjective value and market value.” (cf essay “The Poet & The City”)

“… every artist feels himself at odds with modern civilization.” (cf essay “The Poet & The City”)

“In our age, the mere making of a work of art is itself a political act. So long as artists exist, making what they please and think they ought to make, even if it is not terribly good, even if it appeals to only a handful of people, they remind Management of something managers need to be reminded of, namely, that the managed are people with faces, not anonymous numbers, that Homo Laborans is also Homo Ludens.” (cf essay “The Poet & The City”)

“…every artist who happens also to be a Christian wishes he could be a polytheist….” (cf. essay “Postscript: Christianity and Art”)

“To the imagination, the sacred is self-evident.” (cf. essay “Postscript: Christianity and Art”)

“A poet who calls himself a Christian cannot but feel uncomfortable when he realizes that the New Testament contains no verse (except in the apocryphal, and gnostic, Acts of John), no prose….” (cf. essay “Postscript: Christianity and Art”)

“As Rudolf Kassner has pointed out: ‘The difficulty about the God-man for the poet lies in the Word being made Flesh. This means that reason and imagination are one. But does not Poetry, as such, live from their being a gulf between them?” (cf. essay “Postscript: Christianity and Art”)

_____

"Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" by Brueghel

On a recent weekend trip to Iowa, killing time waiting for Sue who was at her college band reunion, I was doing two things that I like best: browsing bookstores and samplings new beers. (I have often thought that in a perfect world there would be a combination used-books store and bar on every other corner. On the other corners there would be good, non-chain restaurants.)

In one bookstore a collection of William Carlos Williams caught my eye. It is one that I once owned myself but have misplaced over the years. A paperback copy, it was too beat-up and penciled-up to consider buying. But since I like flipping through books of poetry that others have already highlighted and marked-up to see what lines they may have liked or notes they may have made, I spent a few minutes with it anyway.

Turning pages I saw familiar and favorite poems and lines highlighted, notes made in a cramped and unfamiliar hand, and some poems that I had all but forgotten.

One unfamiliar poem in particular stood out, “Landscape with the Fall of Icaraus.” The previous owner had made no marks on the poem at all. That is why it originally caught my eye. Reading it I found myself amazed that I could I have read it all those years ago and forgotten it… not made the quick and lasting connection between it and Auden’s “Musee Des Beaux Art,” one of my favorite Auden poems… one of my favorite poems in general, and one I have reviewed here at MontanaWriter ( Auden’s “Musee Des Beaux Arts.”).

Both William Carlos Williams and W.H. Auden wrote poems based on one painting  “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” by Flemish painter Pieter Brueghel. The two poems are as different as the poets themselves. Williams the American poet. Auden ever the English one. Auden moving from larger ideas towards the painting itself. Williams beginning with the painting and transcending out. And yet in the end one common theme expressed in such different ways: tragedy going unnoticed.

On a beautiful Friday morning, I am thinking of poems I have read and forgotten. Of books and lines misplaced over time. I am thinking of the thousand connections we so easily miss. The way we miss so often what is most important as we go about our daily lives. I am thinking how glad I am that I picked up William Carlos Williams. How glad I am that a previous owner also missed the connection between Williams and Auden that I too had missed all those years ago. I am thinking how wonderful a thing poetry really is.

Enjoy!

And then read Auden again ( Auden’s “Musee Des Beaux Arts.”).

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings’ wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

_____

T. S. Eliot reading

One the many things I have collected over the years is quotes about poetry and poets. For years, I used to keep and record my favorite quotes about poetry in a leather-bound journal that I received as a gift. Now I keep and record them electronically. It is much easier to do it that way, though admittedly much less… romantic….

On the last “hump-day” in the longest February in memory, here are just a few of my favorites. I hope you find a few you like and maybe a few new ones for your own collection.

Quotes on Poetry and Poets

Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.  ~W.B. Yeats

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.  ~Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poetry should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.  ~John Keats

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.  ~Samuel Johnson

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.  ~Robert Frost

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.  ~T.S. Eliot

Poetry is life distilled.  ~Gwendolyn Brooks

I’ve written some poetry I don’t understand myself.  ~Carl Sandburg

There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money, either.
~Robert Graves

Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts.  ~Robinson Jeffers

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.  ~Wallace Stevens

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.  ~Paul Valéry

It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.  ~W.H. Auden

What is a Professor of Poetry?  How can poetry be professed?  ~W.H. Auden

To have great poets there must be great audiences too.  ~Walt Whitman

The true poet is all the time a visionary and whether with friends or not, as much alone as a man on his death bed.  ~W.B. Yeats

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I do not go to a lot of poetry readings. Seeing poets in person and hearing them read has just never struck me as a way I want to spend a free evening. I would much rather go to a baseball or basketball game to be entertained. For an evening of poetry, I prefer a quiet bookstore where I can read the poet myself while sitting in a comfortable chair in silent solitude.

A number of years ago, on a whim, I went to the Walker Art Museum in Minneapolis to hear James Merrill read. I must have read in the paper, or heard on the radio that he was going to be there… and Sue must have been otherwise engaged. For whatever reason, I went and listened to him read.

I do not remember if he was good at reading his work. I do not remember much about him at all: what he wore, what his voice sounded like, what poems he read that evening. I only remember feeling uncomfortable sitting amid so many outwardly “artsy” people in such an outwardly “artsy” place. I remember thinking that a modern art museum is no place for poetry to be read… I already knew that outwardly artsy people are not the kind of people I  want to spend an evening with.

I have always liked Merrill as a poet. He is admittedly difficult at times and has a tendency to make a number of obscure references. But I am fine with that. I have never felt compelled by any poet or writer to spend a great deal of time trying to chase down footnotes and references. If I fail to “get” some of the references, I am fine with that. I feel neither cheated nor diminished. I spend most of my life feeling like I am missing important references anyway.

I do not remember the first time I encountered “The Victor Dog.” It may very well have been the night I heard Merrill read at the Walker. But I suspect it was sometime before that.

“The Victor Dog” is a good example of Merrill’s poetic style and word play and the great intelligence he brings to his art. It is also, to my mind, an example of how W.H. Auden’s work influenced Merrill.

In “The Victor Dog” Merrill uses the familiar music company logo to think about music and the nature of art and artists.

Enjoy!

The Victor Dog

Bix to Buxtehude to Boulez,
The little white dog on the Victor label
Listens long and hard as he is able.
It’s all in a day’s work, whatever plays.

From judgment, it would seem, he has refrained.
He even listens earnestly to Bloch,
Then builds a church upon our acid rock.
He’s man’s–no–he’s the Leiermann’s best friend,

Or would be if hearing and listening were the same.
Does he hear?I fancy he rather smells
Those lemon-gold arpeggios in Ravel’s
“Les jets d’eau du palais de ceux qui s’aiment.”

He ponders the Schumann Concerto’s tall willow hit
By lightning, and stays put.When he surmises
Through one of Bach’s eternal boxwood mazes
The oboe pungent as a bitch in heat,

Or when the calypso decants its raw bay rum
Or the moon in Wozzeck reddens ripe for murder,
He doesn’t sneeze or howl; just listens harder.
Adamant needles bear down on him from

Whirling of outer space, too black, too near–
But he was taught as a puppy not to flinch,
Much less to imitate his bête noire Blanche
Who barked, fat foolish creature, at King Lear.

Still others fought in the road’s filth over Jezebel,
Slavered on hearths of horned and pelted barons.
His forebears lacked, to say the least, forebearance.
Can nature change in him? Nothing’s impossible.

The last chord fades.The night is cold and fine.
His master’s voice rasps through the grooves’ bare groves.
Obediently, in silence like the grave’s
He sleeps there on the still-warm gramophone

Only to dream he is at the première of a Handel
Opera long thought lost–Il Cane Minore.
Its allegorical subject is his story!
A little dog revolving round a spindle

Gives rise to harmonies beyond belief,
A cast of stars . . . . Is there in Victor’s heart
No honey for the vanquished? Art is art.
The life it asks of us is a dog’s life.

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