lotsa pinblog pinging about Auden today, here &.

I like much about Auden's poetry & criticism. Brilliant in the extreme, engaged. I'm bored sometimes by the Average Man approach. Auden had science/engineering background, & it shows, in that reflexive lot measurement. The rhetoric of the 18th-cent. Restoration : always calculating toward the statistical mean. It gets depressing, like row houses, PBS series, (some of) Larkin... Probably has (ironically) a class basis : in order to address the Common Man, the genteel Oxbridgian scholar feels compelled to apply the dumbed-down statistical patter of the poll-taker, the survey man...

sociological, analytical... doesn't grip down to the coils of individual experience, but puts same in context of the Average. definitely disenchanting, in ways good & bad.

some might want to let the sociologists & novelists carry that load.

speaking of harmony, & Larkin, this Larkin poem was quoted by James Wood in latest New Yorker, in his very fine, beautiful review of Adam Nicolson's new book on the making of the King James Bible, God's Secretaries:


CUT GRASS


Cut grass lies frail:
Brief is the breath
Mown stalks exhale.
Long, long the death

It dies in the white hours
Of young-leafed June
With chestnut flowers,
With hedges snowlike strewn,

White lilac bowed,
Lost lanes of Queen Anne's lace,
And that high-builded cloud
Moving at summer's pace.



Wood's review is a mini-tour of English literary tradition, showing how influential was the music of the King James Bible. I hear Whitman too in these lines, another offshoot of Biblical music. (& had stopped to notice a white lilac earlier in the day)

I like the quietude of this elegiac mowing.