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.

Poetry Wednesday

It was supposed to be Tuesday but I've decided to make Wednesday poetry day. Today's poem is by Billy Collins, former Poet Laureate of the US.


Man in Space

All you have to do is listen to the way a man

sometimes talks to his wife at a table of people

and notice how intent he is on making his point

even though her lower lip is beginning to quiver,

and you will know why the women in science

fiction movies who inhabit a planet of their own

are not pictured making a salad or reading a magazine

when the men from earth arrive in their rocket,

why they are always standing in a semicircle

with their arms folded, their bare legs set apart,

their breasts protected by hard metal disks.