Poetry Wednesday

W.H. Auden (1907-1973) was born in England and in later life became a US citizen. (I don't know why - I'd do it the other way around.) Critics have praised his technical virtuosity and ability to write poems in nearly every imaginable verse form. His work incorporated popular culture and current events. His poetry frequently recounts, a journey or quest. In 1948, he won a Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Anxiety.

Here are 2 poems by Auden. The first, In Memory of W.B. Yeats, is the 2nd part of a fairly long poem - it is the part I like best so I decided to post it. If you want to read the entire poem, click on the title.


In Memory of W.B. Yeats

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.



Epitaph on a Tyrant

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.