In Our Time - Auden

Episode Date: December 19, 2019

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and poetry of WH Auden (1907-1973) up to his departure from Europe for the USA in 1939. As well as his personal life, he addressed suffering and confusion, and the moral issues that affected the wider public in the 1930s and tried to unpick what was going wrong in society and to understand those times. He witnessed the rise of totalitarianism in the austerity of that decade, travelling through Germany to Berlin, seeing Spain in the Civil War and China during its wars with Japan, often collaborating with Christopher Isherwood. In his lifetime his work attracted high praise and intense criticism, and has found new audiences in the fifty years since his death, sometimes taking literally what he meant ironically. With Mark Ford Poet and Professor of English at University College LondonJanet Montefiore Professor Emerita of 20th Century English Literature at the University of KentAnd Jeremy Noel-Tod Senior Lecturer in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of East AngliaProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programs. Hello, W.H. Orden, 1907 to 1973, was a poet of Englishness in crisis, of threat and fear in the 1930s, which he called a low, dishonest decade.

The son of a doctor and a missionary nurse, he was drawn to diagnose his country's sickness and humanity's weaknesses, informed by his travels through the Weimar, Berlin, the Spanish Civil War, and the Sino-Japanese War. It was also a decade he spent searching for romantic love, leading to his relationship with Chester Kalman, an American poet, for whom he moved to New York as the war he'd expected began. With me to discuss Ordon and his poetry in the 1930s are Janet Montefiore, Professor Emerita of 20th Century English Literature at the University of Kent,

Jeremy Noel Todd, senior lecturer in literature and creative writing at the University of East Anglia, and Mark Ford, poet and professor of English at University College London. Mark Ford, what distinguished Orden's early days? You mentioned that his father was a doctor, and I think that's a kind of crucial aspect of what gets called the Ordinesque, and that is this diagnosis, again a phrase that you used, which his early poetry presents of England somehow, what he called, that this country where no one is well.

and his poetry of the 30s was very much offering almost a medical diagnosis of the ways in which England was failing. I think you can see him in that sense as the first post-imperial poet, that he is a poet writing after empire. But as well as the kind of diagnostic bit, what I think is interesting is that he's also quite prophetic. His paternal grandparents were both thickers. So you get this weird fusion of the scientific and the or the profanical. and almost a kind of religious understanding of the ways in which England is failing. But you also get it in this language which is very kind of medical

and derives from his reading of kind of Freud and Marx and all the other kind of great thinkers who he has thought. Can we stick with the earlier days and the scientific side of it all and the engineering side of all? Could you develop that? Yes. He loved disused works. He grew up in... He was born in York and brought up in Birmingham. He loved the north of England, those lead mines.

Yes, he was born in York, 1907, but the year after they moved to Solly Hull on the outskirts of Birmingham. And his sense of England was very much defined by the kind of penines and by visiting these disused ramshackle, decaying industrial works, these exhausted lead mining lead mines. And that they were his kind of romantic, mythological landscape. Why do you think that was? Temperament, I think. That's what he liked. It excited him in various ways. Does he give any clue as to why he'd that excited him rather than crumbling castles or extant cathedral? I think it was the mixture of the scientific and the poetic, and I think that's sort of what you get in an early order as well and made him so exciting, that the scientific is fused with the poetic and the shamanistic in some ways, that it becomes exciting and some kind of alchemy is going on.

Early on he goes to a prep school, then he goes to a public school, which he described as, gave him an experience of totalitarianism. Did you mean it or was that a poker fun? No, he was serious. I mean, the first school he went to, where Chris Richard also went, in fact, was, he described it as ruled by kind of malignant devils. And then he went to a prep school.

He went to Greshams, and he described that as kind of totalitarian. And he says he understands totalitarianism because of going to the English public schools, where the boy had no power whatsoever. He was completely at the mercy of what the masters told him to do. Was you an outstanding as cool boy in terms of his work? He was clever. He interestingly wasn't at all drawn to poetry until he was 15.

And then a friend of his called Robert Medley said, have you ever thought about writing poetry, Whiston? And he said, no, but that's absolutely what I want to spend the rest of my life doing. Was it as simple as that? That's what he tells us. We can never know. I do, actually. His life was one of these rather arbitrary extreme decisions

that he would move from one thing to another and having committed himself, he would stick to that line. And what happened to the lead mines then? Well, they come into his poetry. I mean, and that was his kind of ideal landscape. It was a kind of dream landscape of his childhood, which he saw in the kind of psychoanalytical terms as the kind of maternal landscape that he wanted to recover.

It's an edinic sense of this kind of lead mining landscape. So did he go away from bumping into this fellow pupil and start writing poetry almost immediately? He started reading poetry, particularly Thomas Hardy and Edward Thomas and Walter de la Mare. Hardy was the kind of the crucial poet for him. Can I turn to you, John Montefiore, about his reading. What took him to Hardy in the first place? Gosh, I should think probably an anthology. He speaks very warmly of Delamere's anthology.

come hither. And I think he would have come across Hardy there. But I think he was sort of somebody that, you know, once he got a clue, he read and read and read and read. And Hardy was important to him. Thomas was important to him. Also, old English poetry was very important to him. He studied it as a part of his English degree at Oxford. And Bear Wolf and other poems. and you can see its influence on the language of his early poems and the diction. And I suppose that's part of his attraction to northernness, which, I mean, he says when he was a little boy,

his favourite tale was Hans Anderson's Ice Maiden and he knew the Icelandic sagas, so those were important to him as well. His father was interested in the Icelandic saga, probably. Yes, yes. But the other thing about Ordenan, and it's just as important as the poets that he read, is the other reading that he did.

There's an early poem which invokes Lawrence Blake and Homer Lane, healers in our English land. And it's the D.H. Lawrence of the essays, not of the novels. And William Blake and Homer Lane was an educationist who believed in liberation. So these are all, one way and another, sort of profits of sort of psychic and bodily liberation. And behind them, of course, also. is Freud and Jung. He read those two and he read in the early 30s.

Anthropology was very important to him. But to keep the chronology going, and we're talking about university and just after university, is he reading Freud and Martin? He's reading Freud when he's at university, yes. Yes. And he's also, he's in the wash of the great wasteland, the Elliot, isn't he?

Indeed, yes. And how does it take to that? Well, he, of course, of course he read the wasteland. Of course it was important. him. He didn't try to be like Elliot. And Elliot was not the only modernist that he read, either. He was very excited by Gertrude Stein when he was an undergraduate. And he also read Laura Riding, who was a modernist poet not many people read. And Gerald Manning Hopkins? Oh yes, indeed. He did. But the Hopkins influence comes a bit

later in the 30s. And he reads Owen a bit. And you can see Owen's influence on the early Orden too. So at university he's reading poetry and then he begins to write poetry. He's writing poetry all the time he's at university, yes. What's it like? The early poems, poetry, well,

there's a volume of his juvenile, there's some that's pretty good. He really begins to hit his stride around 1928 and 1929. And Stephen Spender, who was then a fellow undergraduate, put together a book of early poems in 1929, 20 poems by W.A. Jordan. And, well, Stephen began setting them,

and it was actually finished by a professional printer. But that has quite a few of the poems that were in his first collection poems 1930, which made such a hit. He had begun to write his sort of rather riddling, dark, taught, sort of elusive early poetry. He had begun to do that. He was doing that already as an undergraduate. And he got a third. Were he being called a modernist?

Well... Or did he call himself a modernist, more importantly? I don't think that he did. I mean, there were modernist things about him. He has this sense very strongly of living in a present moment, which is cut off from the past, cut off by the Great War, in which the old pieties cannot be taken for granted,

and indeed he sends them up, and he starts sending up the old pieties, the public school pieties very early. And he knows about Freud, you know, that was very up to the minute. And his early poetry is compressed and obscure and elusive, and in all that way, those ways, it looked modernist. but he doesn't stay that way. In 1929, he is sort of prophesying revolution

in rather obscure terms, prophesying death of the old gang, would leave them in Southern Valley where he's made no friend, the hard bitch and the riding master, stiff underground, deep in Clear Lake, the lolling bridegroom, beautiful there. And you know, that is lovely, but it's all done by images. And it's obviously about the end of a ruling class, to which he belongs. But he's writing very differently, a few years on in a summer night.

So at the end of the 1920s, beginning in 1930s, and he's hitting his stride there. Can we just before we talk on about the career, Jeremy, Jeremy, now Todd, he wrote a lot about love, but the difficulty was that the love he wrote about was criminal, really, not to write about it, but to be a homosexual, was criminal, and so on. How did he get, how did he bypass that or cope with that? Well, in his early poetry, because as Jam was saying, it is very compressed and cryptic, it does reflect the influence of Elliot in that way, who had famously said in the 20s, that the poet must be difficult to reflect the difficulty of the society.

So it's quite hard to work out what's going on in Orden's poem, who's who, what's what. I mean, what you can say stepping back is, there aren't really many women in it. It's a very homosocial world, which, of course, reflects the world that he came out of at the public school and then Oxford. And he does mention the word love quite a lot.

And this gives him, I think, some of his kind of prophetic charisma with his contemporaries that he sounds as though he has big thoughts about love and he spends the rest of his life actually trying to have big thoughts about love. But it's also a very elusive word. It means many different things.

Mark was saying, you know, he had this double ancestry of the church and the sciences and medicine. So for Orden, sometimes love means that rather practical physical sense of sexual love. And he seems to have taken a very sort of frank and pragmatic approach, really, to sex. But what really interests him is love in, well, actually, the Christian sense later on when he went back to the church, that in 1933 he has this vision of what he calls Agapé. love for one's neighbour as oneself. So a non-sexual sense of being connected and loving towards everybody else. And he spends a lot of the decade trying to work that out.

But in terms of the love object or the person who was in love with, he didn't say he or she tended to use thou, didn't he? Yes, that's right. I mean, he does change things. You can see him sort of experimenting with how much he can say and how much he can get away with coding in his writing. So in the orators, which is this perhaps his most difficult, Carlton Modernist early work, the middle section is the journal of an airman who talks about

his love, who is just known by the initial E. And in the first version, E is gendered as female, but when he reprints it in 1934, he changes the gender to males. So he does sort of push at that. But he has this imaginative world where there are spy, secret agents. There is a poem where he talks about a spy, sort of dreaming of another in the nights, but not being able to connect. And there's obviously some sense of romantic frustration. And then right at the end, actually, he does something which, again, perhaps only a few people would have got at the time, but he actually quotes from an old English poem that he would have studied at Oxford, which is called Wolf and Eidwacha.

And this is the most mysterious poem in the old English canon, and it's about lovers who are separated on two islands. and it ends with a phrase which means one may easily part that which was never joined. And that's pretty much how he ends the sonnet. They would shoot, of course, parting easily who were never joined. He, just to be practical for him, and he didn't come from a money background. He had to earn a living, he had to live in a living by teaching. And then he went into, for a while.

And then he went into the GPO film unit. And then he sent his poems off to Faber. In Faber, they said, no, send some more. He sent some more and he got going. Can you just fill in that a bit more, please? Yeah, so he did. He had a bit of an income from his parents, who were probably disappointed,

the fact that he left Oxford with a third-class degree. He'd started in the sciences, and then he transferred to literature. But at the same time, you know, he'd become already somewhat of a legend among his contemporaries. And it was one. He was at Oxford that he began sending the poems to Elliot. So he established himself very early on.

but fame didn't pay all the wages that he needed and when his parents cut off that allowance after giving him a year in Berlin he went and taught at a couple of private schools one in Scotland, then down in Surrey and it was at Surrey sitting with colleagues out on the lawn one summer's night that he had this vision of universal love which was a mystical experience for him

so he was a school teacher for a few years which he quite enjoyed because he was a school teacher. an natural teacher. He was always lecturing people. And then he got a gig being a sort of kind of odd job man at the GPO film unit, which he also

wrote some material for. You're at the great nightmare. Exactly. Yes. One of his many, many changes of guys. He could write to commentary, film scripts, operas, on he went. This is it. He's a

he has this great facility for turning his hand to whatever needs to be done. I mean, this was there right from the start. His early poem showed that he can imitate many styles. Yes. Thank you. Mark, Mark Ford, one of his early successes was considered this in our time. Can you tell us why and how that works so well?

I think that's, it's one of the early poems which typify the vague sense of menace of some kind of crisis which is impending, but we never quite know what the nature of that crisis is, whether it's a psychological or a political crisis. Can you give us an idea? of that from what he wrote. Consider this and in our time as the hawk sees it or the helmeted airman. The clouds rift suddenly, look there at cigarette end, smouldering on a border at the first garden party of the year.

Pass on, admire the view of the massif through plate glass windows of the sport hotel, join there the insufficient units, dangerous, easy in furs, in uniform and constellated at reserved tables. supplied with feelings by an efficient band relayed elsewhere to farmers and their dogs sitting in kitchens in the stormy fens. So what's that telling us? It's telling us that something bad is about to happen, but we don't quite know what that bad thing is, but it creates a tremendous sense of an authoritative voice instructing us that crisis is impending.

Just a second. Why did it catch on? Why was it a success? That's very interesting. I think because of the the zeitgeist, the Spirit of the Times, there was a sense that Orden was for his readers, the guide to what was about to happen. There's a great line by a contemporary called Charles Madge, who founded Mass Observation. He writes,

They're waiting for me in the summer morning, Orden fiercely, I read, shuddered and knew. So the idea that Orden was an initiation into modernity and the modernity that was coming after T.S. Eliot, this was the build-up to the Second World War, so to speak. The 30s had started. with Orden's warnings that it is later than you think.

And a brilliant idea that he's looking for on the point of the hawk and the airman. You want to come in. Yeah, I think what's so spectacular about those lines, which are perhaps just my favourite piece of all of 30s, Orden, is how cinematic they are. You know, that second line, as the hawk sees it or the helmeted airman, there's a double exposure. It's a bit like the start of Kubrick's Space Odyssey,

when the bone goes up and it becomes the space station. Jan? Yes, and it's so cinematic as the way it cuts the close up of the cigarette ends on the border. But being cinematic make it good. Well, done this way, it's wonderful. I think it makes it thrilling. Not quite a fair question. Every line makes you see something different.

There's this compression of the hawk, the animal world, the ancient world and the Helmmer to the modern. Again, that's Old English, because in old English you get hawk and helmet alliterating this is a pair that goes together. Jan Montefiore, how did he develop his idea of what a poet should be in society? Well, he was more interested in the idea of what poetry should be

and what art should be rather than the poet himself as a shaman. I think he'd taken on enough of Elliot's doctrine of impersonality for that. And after all, if you think of consider this, it's not I see this. It's just sort of looking down. You're not interested in the person seeing it. But in the 30s, he seemed to sort of felt that poetry,

and I suppose the poet, should teach. He wrote that there have to be two kinds of art, escape art, which man needs as he needs food and deep sleep, and parable art, which will teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love. And in the poem to Christopher Isherwood, He diverts that a bit and says that the poet should make action urgent and its nature clear, which is a much more activist political notion of poetry. But he goes away from that in the elegy on Yates when he's saying poetry makes nothing help.

What do we get at this idea in his poetry, probably one of the most famous of his book, on the death of, in memory, of W.B. Yates. Well, it's a poem about what can poetry mean to us at this, well, at this moment, as he doesn't say in the poem of crisis and dismay, the day of his death was a dark, cold day that is repeated. And it takes on board the war which is about to come, the brokers roaring like beasts on the floor of the boasts. And what can a poet mean?

Yates was a public poet, and he was identified, of course, with Irish nationalism. and Orden is drawing away from being a public poet. So it's in the second half of that poem. That's when he writes that line. Poetry makes nothing happen. It lives in the valley of its saying where executives would never want to tamper.

And at the end of the poem, which is the most lyrical part of it, poetry is nonetheless offered as it's kind of redemptive that poetry can't change the world, but it can teach, it can perhaps teach or show people how to live in it. In the prison of his days, teach the free man how to praise.

That's on Poet's Corner, I think. Yeah, so it should be. So the elegy for Yates is the first poem that he writes when he has gone to America in 1939. And yeah, I think he's fascinated by Yates as somebody who did speak to the political situation of his time. He rather envies Yates in say something like Easter 1916,

which is about the 1916 rising, that Yates knew the people who were involved in that political moment, and Orden is preoccupied by this sense that the modern poet, it's very difficult actually to be directly connected to politics. But this phrase, poetry, makes nothing happen. Did that disturb his contemporaries?

And do you think it's right? It's there right from the start. There's a novel by Stephen Spender from 1929 called the Temples, where one of the things about Orden is that he turns up fictionalized in his friend's novels because he was such a character and he quotes this Orden figure who's called Wilmot as talking about the war poets about Sussune and Wilfred Owen and he says that Sassoon is wrong because he thinks that by saying make it stop in a poem you might actually make it stop and Wilmot the

Orden character talks in capital letters and he says emphatically a poet can't say that so he's He has this idea from the start, but I think he's particularly perhaps moved to say it because of the historical moment and because he's saying it about Yates, because Yates was preoccupied with the idea that he could make something happen in his poetry, both politically and also in his occult beliefs. Can I come to you for a moment, Mark? He spent time in war zones in Spain, China. What did he get out of those? In terms of your question to Jan, about the concept of the poet,

in that he saw the poet as much closer to the journalist in some ways than to the, certainly the Yatesian notion of the poet in the ivory tower that you get in early Yates. So Orden was a great traveller in the late 30s, went to Iceland with Louis MacNeice. And we haven't mentioned the kind of coterie in which he operated, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day Lewis, Christopher Isherwood and so on. These are his friends, and he often talks about his friends, and he travelled with his friends. and they would report back from these different places. And in Iceland, he had a terrible experience watching a whale being flayed,

and this convinced him of the evilness of humanity. So everywhere he went in terms of his travels, he would experience some's brutality which sensitized him and would give him, I think, a deeper or more so tragic vision. Obviously, Spain, Civil War, he wrote the wonderful poem, Spain, 1937, which in some ways looks like a kind of, it might be an adjutop poem today, the struggle and so on. But in fact, it's an extremely skillful and rhetorical performance,

which is, I find, very moving still. And what about his business to China? Well, he went there with Isherwood, and that was the beginning of the kind of Second World War, and he would report and make his readers aware of the extent to which some kind of calamity was impending. And maps can really point to places where life is, evil now, Nankin, Dachau. So his poems are encoding kind of journalistic bulletins in which the readers

are aware of the extent to which atrocities are being committed. John? All that's true, but he's also meditating on the human condition. I mean, sonnets from China is a long sequence, and it has a lot about the war, including those wonderful lines that you quoted. But it also sort of begins with the fall of man and it's a kind of, it's a sort of capsule history of the human race. How did we get, how did we get to this place? What's his position at the end of the 30s?

He's going to Spain, he's going to China, he's in Berlin, is with his coterie of people. He's already beginning to be thought of as a very famous, celebrated, admired poet. Couldn't you give us some idea of that, Jeremy?

Well, I think it's striking that even by the early 30s, I think the first parody of his, style called Ordenesque for an initiation by the poet Gavin Ewitt. That appears in 1933. Around the same time, there's a magazine which publishes all the new young poets called New Verse, and the editor of that says that he started it because of Orden. So Orden really kind of hits his contemporary as like an explosion. You know, this is the thing that's happening now. And then because he has to earn a living, you know, he does all these kind of freelance jobs. He

takes on travel book commissions essentially. But as Jan says, he's really pursuing the deeper themes that he's interested in. And he leaves England at the end of the 30s. He's certainly become recognized and famous. He's actually been awarded the King's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1937, which some of his more sort of left-wing radical friends and admirers thinks is a bit of an establishment sellout. So he really leaves England because he's, I think because he feels he's too famous. Well, let's come back to that in a moment. There's a way in which he makes light of serious things and serious of lighting. That's cliche,

but there's something in that. What do you say to it? Yeah. Very soon after the early poems, he discovers that, yes, he can write in a light verse mode, and again, that's something that he can do to her money. He writes Nightmail, which is essentially a piece of light verse, describing that journey up to Scotland. But it also becomes part of his...

program, part of his theory of what the poet needs to do, that he sees light verse as being a form that you can unite people. He's a particular admirer of the Victorian nonsense poets, and he has this theory that in Victorian society, you started to see the atomisation that he thinks is the modern condition, and it was people like Carol and Lear who could write something that would bring everybody together, and he compares this to what, say, Donald Duck or Popeye can do in the 30s. So he's very keen on the idea that the poet should remain in touch with a popular art. I think that's why he's fascinated by all the different forms that you can write in. He writes songs, which are set by Benjamin Britain. He writes plays, which he says draw on the pantomime. So he's experimenting

with this idea that the popular art can also be serious art. I think also in terms of the revolutionary aspect of the Ordin of the 30s, it often happens through a kind of light verse mode. The orator's, one of my kind of favourite all-time book of his. The revolution which is fermented happens with stink bombs and people stealing all the lavatory paper from the lavatories, and that's what signals the revolution.

It's a very English revolution. It's more like carry-on revolution than it is the French Revolution. And this is the kind of spoofy, public-schooled humour of Alden which permeates his kind of visions of kind of crisis, which makes him very funny, but at the same time,

he must seem in some ways quite lightweight in terms of as a revolution, thinker. And the extent to which he was actually in bed with the left in the 30s is really in dispute that while he was attracted to certain kind, was seen as the court poet of the left. He wasn't in fact as wedded to left-wing causes as was made out by many. Well, I was thinking about this in relation to letter to Lord Byron, which is this long sort of disquisition. He took Byron's poem John Juun to Iceland and it sort of inspired him to write a letter back in Rhyme Royal which is slightly easier than the Baron's stanza and there's a bit when he is

talking about what he calls the dragon and he often talks about dragons and ogres which are sort of folk you know folk images popular images but for for Orden they represent authoritarianism and here's a stanza from it banker or landlord booking clerk or pope whenever he's lost faith in choice and thought, when a man sees the future without hope, whenever he endorses Hobbes' report, the life of man is nasty, brutish, short. The dragon rises from his garden border

and promises to set up law and order. And, you know, you can see the illusions and the jockey rhyme. But he is also serious with it. He means it. Do we know, Jeremy, Jeremy, about the funeral blues. Do you take that as a completely serious piece?

Well, I think the history of that poem is interesting because many people will know it from four weddings and a funeral where it's a very... Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone. It's very movingly read by John Hanna at the funeral in that film as an elegiate reading for his lover. And in the 90s, Auden acquired a fame as a love poet, his publisher's favour issued this little pamphlet called

I Tell Me the Truth About Love, which is another of his lighter poems. And I think that's deserved because he does write very beautifully about romantic love. But he also is very satirical about it at the same time. And the original context of the funeral blues poem is one of his plays, where actually it's sending up the idea

of having an enormous state funeral just because one person died. I mean, there's a megalomania. of love in that poem, which is the let the traffic policeman wear black cotton gloves. Everybody has to mourn this person because I feel sad about it. So it tips from being what is actually one of his satires on heterosexual conventions into being perhaps a more straightforward love lyric, or that's how people have interpreted it. On the love poetry as well, often Orden's early rather cryptic landscapes,

and we think, what's this poem about? he actually wrote the initials of the lover who inspired it in the kind of edition which he gave to Chester Coleman later and so you can connect these early poems which don't seem to be about love were often inspired by young men that he'd fallen in love with so it's interesting that the gay love is often cryptic and encoded and it's the funeral blues

which is the one that becomes very popular Mark can you tell us something about September 1st 1939 which comes at the end of this low dissonous decade that we're more or less concentrating on. This was a poem, the crisis poem, the kind of Second World War crisis poem, the day that Germany invades Poland. And Orden had decided several months before

that he was going to live in America permanently. He'd met Chester, he'd fallen in love. And what the die... Let's suppose that for a second. He metchester, a poet, he allowed himself, well, he seems to be the first... You tell me and why they stayed together because there was a big old relationship.

Well, there aren't all relationships solved, but let's get past that one quickly. Yes, they did stay together roughly. They stopped having sex after the first year or so because they were sort of not particularly compatible in that way. And Chester would bring back his pickups to the flat, and it caused Auden enormous amounts of grief. Orden always wanted to be the more loving. So although he suffered enormously in the relationship. He was able to cope with it and he felt that suffering was good for him because it would somehow make him a better Christian and a better poet as well. But Chester did cause him enormous amounts of suffering and in other ways, Orden ruined Chester's life, which was a sad and disappointing one in lots of ways.

So it was a relationship. How did you do that? By being bossing him the whole time and Chester ended up not fulfilling his talent. So go back to this poem, September 1st, 1939. I sit in one of the dives on 52nd Street, uncertain and afraid, as the clever hopes expire of a low, dishonest decade, waves of anger and fear circulate over the bright and darkened lands of the earth, obsessing our private lives.

The unmentionable odour of death offends the September night. And that became emblematic for some people, Jan. I mean, later called this poem and others trash. I know. Why did you, first of all, why did he call them trash? He said, because he had felt, because he felt they were dishonest. Why did he feel that? Well, the first September 1939, what seems to have bothered him is the famous line,

we must love one another or die, which he decided, you know, this is stupid, we must die. anyway. And I think that in a sense, in that poem he was sort of, he was claiming to be a public poet in the way that Yates was a public poet. I've always thought that its title

must be an echo of people say September 1913, but I think sort of Eastern 1916, I think it's remembering that. And I think he thought that that poem says, all I have is a voice to undo the folded lie. I think he's

you know, he felt that this poem he was claiming that his art was claiming to do something that he couldn't really do. It isn't just this poem. It's several of the poems. Oh, indeed, but you asked about that. He actually made him famous, as it were. Indeed, but you asked. And he said they were trash. He was very direct about that. You, yes. I'm fine. I'm just asking you to generalise a bit more.

I'm sorry, yes, you asked about that one. No, no, no, please. He said because they were honest and also, of course, because he had rejected his politics. And the really famous one is Spain, which I agree with Mark. I think it's one of Orden's great, great poems. And in its sort of hawk looking down from a height, it is comparable to consider this. It begins yesterday all the past.

And sort of it looks at human history from the very beginnings through to and today the struggle. And it was printed as a pamphlet. And it was received by the least. left as the great poem of the Spanish War. And it was famously attacked by Orwell. I won't go into that. But the passage that Orwell attacked is not what Orton objected to. What he objected to was the last stanza of it when he says, the stars are dead, the animals will not look. We are left alone with our day and the time is short and history to the defeated may say alas, but cannot

help or pardon. And what he writes in his collected shorter poems, explaining why this poem is not in it, is that saying that, saying that the defeated can't be pardoned, is equating goodness with success. And he says it would be bad enough if I'd held this work of doctrine, but it's much worse that I said it because it sounded rhetorically effective. Thank you. Jeremy, why did it seem right for Orden to leave? Britain in 1939 causing a bit of a storm in small circles, most notably in war, but on it went? Well, yes, and there's the story about a question being asked in Parliament when war breaks out as to whether W.H. Auden, Christopher Ishwood, who he goes with to America, will return if summoned,

whether they have, as it were, deserted the country. But the minister who answered us gets confused with H.W. Austin, who's a tennis player, and says that he will. But anyway, they don't want Orden back, so he gets to stay there. but ironically he said that the reason he left Britain at that moment was because he didn't want to write any poems like September 1st, 1939, but there was a bit of a hangover there. And when he found himself on the eve of war, he had to respond to it. But I think he wanted to escape that sense that he would be expected to play a propagandist role.

Mark Ford, it seems that when he went to America, quite soon afterwards, his poetry changed. Is that right? did it change? It is. He wrote these enormously long poems. He writes New Year Letter, which is a very long rhyming couplets. He writes, The See in the Mirror, which is based on the tempest. He writes, the age of anxiety, which is

even longer than those poems. He's taking lots of benzodia at this time. He's treating his body like a machine, and he's almost kind of fueling himself and writing these long poems. He's extremely industrious, and it's part of his notion how the poet in America should be living without roots that you're not connected to your family

or to the place where you belong. You don't belong. It's out of not belonging, out of that kind of existential alienation that the poet can write the poetry that is needed for the post-war age, which is one of alienation, not belonging.

And he's extremely inventive, and those are not his favourite poems. The Sea in the Mirror in particular is a really glorious, fantastically inventive. What did this do to his reputation, though, Mark? In America, he was very popular, and he was seen as the great British poet by the Americans, and he influenced enormously the next generation of poets. John Ashbury, James Merrill, Elizabeth Bishop was a great fan, Adrian Rich,

and he chose for the Younger Poets Award, Anthony Hecht. It goes on and on. In England, he was never quite forgiven for having deserted the country in its hour of need. Louis MacNeice, for instance, was in America and came back. He didn't stay on, and he was contrasted favorably with Orden, who was there with Chester writing these long poems and somehow not being very patriotic. Jan?

I just wanted to say that there are British poets who have been influenced by Orden. I would nominate James Fenton and also John Fuller, who of course is an Orden scholar too, great Orden scholar. And Larkin, who said that Look Stranger, Auden's book of the mid-30s was one of the great books for him.

I think you can see that in something like Larkin's poem, The Wits and Weddings, where he takes the train journey down from Hull to London. And he thinks of London, he says, I thought of London spread out in the sun, its postal districts packed like squares of wheat. And that's an enormously ordnesque simile to take the pastoral, the organic, and to bring it into juxtaposition with the city and the administration of modern communications. What do we value about Orden now that was not valued about him at the time?

I don't know if there's anything really that has changed. I mean, it feels to me that Orden has endured, certainly the early Orden, as a poet who shows us how to write about modern life, that he's fascinated by living in the electric age, the car age. You know, Elliot in the wasteland, the most modern thing in the wasteland is probably the typist, the person whose job is connected to the machine,

but for Orden, he's sending telegrams. He is the person who's experiencing this machine age. I would agree. and to go back to Spain, 1937. So, Auden felt that it was insincere and dishonest. But I think myself, and I think, you know, the critic Frank Komode also said this, that that poem is not a marching song, it's not a rallying cry. It begins in vision and it ends up with expressing what it feels like to live in a moment of crisis.

And Orden did that superbly well. Mark. His diversity and his versatility, the extent to which his enormous corpus, which doesn't have a clear narrative in the way in which Eliot's poetry has a clear narrative that one can follow through from the beginning to the end. Orden would write about any subject, any time, any place. You didn't like it. Roll it up and throw it away. That's what he said to the GPO people. And that sense of being able to respond to the occasional, as well as to the tragic, is, I would say, the kind of concept of the modern poem poet these days. And I think it's the documentary aspect of Auden's work that has continued.

You know, Simon Armitage, and now the Poet Laureate, began by making TV films, Tony Harrison. Orden shows you how you can do that. You can take verse and you can use it to describe something set to pictures. Well, thank you very much. Jeremy Nell Todd, Mark Ford and Janet Montefiore. Next week, it's Tutankham and the discovery of his tomb in 1992. Undisturbed in the Valley of the King is for more than 3,000 years. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

I think Orden is such a fertile influence, sort of precisely because there isn't a dominant narrative. I mean, you know, sort of between us, we've sort of named about 10 or 12 poets who were creatively influenced by him. But they're none of them write like him. But they did in the 30s. In the 30s, they were terrific poor limitations of Orden, which kind of, you know, They did then. They did then. There's also J.H. Prinn, for example, the notoriously difficult avant-garde poet.

He has an early poem called The Glacial Question Unsolved, which is absolutely in the Orden mode of panorama. He imagines how the British Isles were formed during the Ice Age, but he imagines it as if someone were there to feel something about it. He talks about the eustatic rise of the heart, and your static rise is sea level rise, but of course you mistake it for X-static. And it's very much, you know,

Ordn's thing, this is what Ischwood said about him as a student, was he was always picking up these terms from scientific discourses and throwing them around. So the poem becomes a kind of map, doesn't it? I mean, it is a kind of map in print, for instance, and that is a kind of ordness notion. And he had a map, didn't he of Alston Moore, in his shack in Far Island in sort of, you know, 1947,

where, you know, the kind of center of homosexual, excitement. Do we know what he himself thought of his work? Well, yes, because he rewrote it so often. He kept kind of revising it in a way which rarely improved it and adding titles and reshaping it and reconfiguring it. So to an extent... Rarely improved it, I would say. Very rarely. I can think of a couple of poems that were improved, but mostly they weren't. And that's because it has that to the moment quality.

that it's difficult, I mean, he always said, you know, that a poem has never finished, it's only abandoned. But I think it's right that you have to abandon it at a certain point and it takes on the shape of its moment. But he was so guilty as well about what he'd done. I mean, he was racked by guilt. And he was unhappy, he was unhappy in lots of different ways. He's always going on about how poetry must praise.

By what you've done in poetry in his life? Both, that he was always, the notion of, particularly after you moved to America, the ethical questions kind of rear their heads all the time. and he's always condemning himself. Well, whether poetry such as Spain has sent people to Spain who then get killed. Yes.

And we were talking earlier about his love poetry. In his love poetry, there is always this awareness of how destructive people can be to each other. The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews. And one of his greatest poems in the 30s, I think, is one of it's the simplest, as I walked out one evening in which he hears a lover

who think that he will love forever and there is this voice that says oh no you won't you won't there'll be disappointment plunge your hands in water plunge them up to the wrist stare stare in the basin and wonder what you'd miss the pletia knocks in the cupboard

the desert sighs in the bed and the crack in the teacup opens a lane to the land of the dead not bad though not bad I'd be pleased if I'd written that. I think that's right. I mean, he does actually regard romantic love as being potentially quite a sinister force. It's the crux of September 1st 39.

For the era bred in the bone of each woman and each man craves what it cannot have, not universal love, but to be loved alone. And he sees romantic love as having this very sinister, dangerous side, which he also associates with fascism. This poem The Bride in the 1930, talks about the lover saying, be Hitler, be Mussolini, but be my good, daily, nightly. I don't care who you are.

I'll love you. And that was part of his whole attack on romanticism as well. His dislike of the romantic poets, particularly Shelley. He kind of loathed Shelley deep. But there's also this... Why did he loathe Shelley? Because of his political idealism, he thought he was foolish in that sense.

And he thought that was very dangerous, that kind of political idealism and also that romantic kind of excess, in Shelley was a kind of needed to be curbed. You met him twice, Janice, I understand. I did, yes. Do you want to tell us about that?

Well, my father, Hugh Montefiuri, was vicar of Great St Mary's Church in Cambridge, and he used to get people to come and preach and to read poems, and he invited Orden, and Orden came to read his poems in Great St Mary's twice. Both times were crowded, but the second time in 1968, it was absolutely packed.

There were sort of people and everywhere in the aisles sitting in the aisles my father had actually had to close the doors had to lock the doors to stop people getting in the man because he was afraid that it was getting to a point where it was dangerous

and sort of Orden he didn't, I was going to say read his poems from an hour he didn't, he recited them did it from memory did you have a did you bump into him Well, I shook hands, you know.

You know, I sat at the same table with him when he was having supper, but I didn't dare to say anything. Was it that formidable or were you that shy? I was in awe. You know, I had fallen in love with Orden's poetry when I was 15, and what can you say to somebody to whom you admire intensely? You just sort of, you know, they've heard from everybody, yes, you know, your poems are wonderful, you can't really well say that.

So, no, I can't remember. I think he was one of the last poets as rock stars in that sense. Well, I mean, he spent his professional life in America on the lecture circuit. So he went to all these colleges where he was paid handsomely to get up and sort of, you know, give some of his wisdom. Sylvia Plath met him when she was a student and wrote in her journal. God, the stature of the man, you know, sort of totally godsmacked. But also, you know, I've always felt that in the 30s, he's rather like people felt about Morrissey. in the 80s, you know, suddenly here comes along this rather mysterious person, you know,

what's his sexual orientation, what's his background, and he's singing these things about a sort of broken country, and he seems to have the answers, and people, you know, people idolize him for that. So I think that remained throughout his life. People thought, here is somebody who really had a vision. Well, Time magazine, we're going to have him on the cover in 1963, I think. Then they found out he was gay, and they pulled it. Yeah, well, I mean, there was quite a lot of homophobia. I mean, I mean, you know, George Orwell's criticism of him, you know, uses the word Nancy, it uses the word pansy. The reason F.R. Levis disliked him so intensely is coded homophobia.

Orden was always accused of not growing up, which was a kind of code word for being gay. Yeah. And in letters to Iceland, Ordnumann Nice write a last will and testament, and they bequeathed to Levis a sense of humour. We didn't say anything about his plays. always operate. Sorry? Well, I don't know. I mean, there's a wonderful poetry. They're not great drama, but there's wonderful

poetry in those choruses. That's what survives, isn't it? Yeah. Is he still, we're now in 2019 just is there a sense in which his star is fading? Or your three of you are dedicated to him, you're going to say no, but looking outside

little, do you think it's fading? Or he still thought it was a great poet who would go around a lecture circuit or pack a church and Oh, he wouldn't now? I would say he's not read as much as, say, in the 90s when I was reading him as a student. I don't get the impression that he is, as I felt he was, the poet that you still had to know. But what I do feel about him, which we've already said, I think, in different ways, is that there's so much variety there, there's a new order that you might discover. I still feel that the orators perhaps hasn't quite had its moment, because when you read the orators, you know, which was written in, as the pound was collapsing, the Labour government was collapsing.

it's about a country that I suspect young poets now could actually recognise in quite a lot of ways. He later said he was insane when he wrote it. Yeah, but it does. I agree the orators. I can't quite take it to misogynism. Well, I really can't. There's still not that much you have to apologise for

about Orden, in comparison with such as Pound and Elliot, is there? All of the women and most of the men shall work with their hands and not think again. Thank you, Chum. And the airman says there's something he doesn't like about women pilots. I mean, it's true. But he's a character, though. Well, I think what Orden seems to forget about his own work there

is that it is ironic, satirical, unstable, and then he judges it as having a particular point of view. And the orators is, you know, a lot of it is written in prose, and prose poetry is booming now. Oh, yes, you know. We could get a lot from going back to Orden for that. But in terms of friendships with women, like Elizabeth Mayer and with Rhoda Jaffey, who means...

He's not like Editha Wood, who really was a misogist. He was certainly capable of liking women, but some of his post-Lerentian attitudes, well, I can't take them. Interesting that issue would... Even however playful they are. It's your word just like women and one of his

most lasting work is about a woman. What do you mean in goodbye to Berlin? I'm not, yes. Indeed, although I have to say it is a complete caricature of its original. Anything more to say about Auden before we close accounts?

Read him. Yes, read him. Read it. I mean, I think you can get something out of them. I'm rereading them, as I did for this programme. It's amazing the kind of, you know, the line after line. Wow, that really hits the spot.

It's a bit like Amlitt is full of quotation. Yeah, I envy that. That's extraordinary that he could come with out. And don't just read the famous poems. Go back and read the collections. Because the famous poems are among those he disowned, but there's so much around the edges that is just, you know, unforgettable, electrifying.

Well, thank you very much. I hope you enjoyed it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I'd love a cup of tea.

Tea would be lovely, yeah, tea. Thank you, Simon. Yeah. Yes, I'll have a tea, yes. Yes, a cup of tea would be great. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Henry Akeley disappeared from his home on the edge of Wendlesham Forest somewhere around the end of June 2019. What we uncovered is a mystery that has sent us deep into England's past to an area steep.

steeped in witchcraft, the occult, secret government operations. Now we have multiple sites with a similar shape of property. And something that might indeed be altogether. Otherworldly. This is the whisperer in darkness. Available now on BBC Sounds.