This month sees the centenary of Auden's birth (21 February). Here's the conclusion to a piece by James Fenton in today's Guardian:
That he was a great public poet, despite his misgivings about the role, has always been acknowledged. But he was also a great lyrical poet, his achievement in love poetry being without equal in the century.
He worked through every poetic form he could find, rejecting only a few he found too trivial. He tried counting syllables. He tried counting the number of words in the line. He invented (as far as English was concerned) a discursive style that could accommodate the language of prose and the concern of science. He wrote many song lyrics. He always bounced off poetic influences, and he felt wretched when he couldn't find the next influence. In 1968, for instance, he was listening to the Beatles (he liked "She's Leaving Home", or was it "Eleanor Rigby"?) in search of something to be influenced by.
He appears to have felt (he says something to this effect), on completing a poem, that he would never be able to write another. And that must have been a nightmare to him, since he was always moving on to the next task, suffering failure sometimes, and aware of a widespread rejection of his later work, knowing himself often attacked, and unwilling to speak up in his own defence. He had a private, even secret, generosity to match the public generosity, the copiousness of his achievement. An enviable gift, then, although not always an enviable life - unless we say that in some cases the gift is indeed the life, and that the suffering is all part of the gift.
The W H Auden Society has a listing of events scheduled to mark the centenary (here) and links from its main page to Wikipedia:
A highly accurate, thoroughly revised version of the Wikipedia.org entry on Auden was posted in 2007. This site strongly recommends that online researchers make reference to this specific archived version of the page rather than to current versions, which may be less accurate or may be subject to vandalism.
(The non-archived Wikipedia Auden page is here!)
Back in October last year, the Independent reported on the failure to prepare properly for this anniversary. It's great, then, to see that Melvyn Bragg is remembering the writer on The South Bank Show (11 now 18 February, ITV, 11.10pm):
It's been suggested that the centenary of the birth of W.H. Auden is in danger of passing without notice but not as far as the South Bank Show is concerned. Melvyn Bragg visits Hadrian's Wall, the northern boundary of the land betweenSwaledale and Northumberland, which Auden wrote of as his "great good place." He will examine the paradox of the Auden who fled to America in 1939 saying "No God willing I never want to see England again" and the ‘English Auden' who was never able to sever himself from his roots. Auden's words continue to reverberate around us from the Stop the Clocks sequence in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral, and the way his September 1st 1939 became the mourning song of New York after the terrorist attacks in 2001.
Contributors include: Alan Bennett, Shirley Williams and Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, with Auden's verse read by John Woodvine.
And I'm delighted to find that the Stephen Spender Memorial Trust and the British Library are holding 'An evening of poetry with James Fenton, John Fuller, Grey Gowrie, Richard Howard, Andrew Motion, Sean O'Brien and Peter Porter' to celebrate the centenary:
Wednesday 21 February 2007 marks the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Wystan Hugh Auden, one of the most significant — and prolific — poets and writers of the twentieth century. The Stephen Spender Memorial Trust and the British Library celebrate Auden's centenary with an evening of poetry readings that reflect the enormous breadth and wonderful technical variety of Auden's published output, including poems from the 1930s that chart 'a low dishonest decade', and his later work published while resident in the United States.
Natasha Spender writes:
This tribute to Auden on the anniversary of his birth is offered by younger poets whom he encouraged and who became his lifelong friends: Andrew Motion, the present Poet Laureate, who as an Oxford undergraduate knew him; the American Richard Howard, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize by him; Grey Gowrie, who knew him through Auden's niece, Anita; and Peter Porter, John Fuller and James Fenton, who saw him on his annual London visits for Poetry International. Only Sean O'Brien, 20 when Auden died in 1973, did not know him.He used to stay with us or his brother John, and to all the children — Anita and Rita Auden, Matthew and Lizzie Spender — he was a beloved bachelor uncle who invented games and shared their passions for Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, introducing a benevolent bossiness into our liberal households.
There are other events going on (see the Auden Society page), but it's not at all what should have been done for Auden. Essentially, this looks like a rescue job by friends and (close) admirers.
