I wish Ivy would give a fuller account of the Auden September discussion she
had with students. Mine here in outer Melbourne (La Trobe Univ) only
yesterday had already last week heard from my colleague a one-hour
introduction to Auden and the 1930s. But my two-hour session with them
floundered over their less than lively sense of how poets might engage with
a developing series of crises culminating in September 1st 1939. Six weeks
ago we'd spent two sessions on Yeats and given 'Easter 1916' a good go.
All I have is a voice / To undo the folded lie...
...We must love one another or die.
This year's students though not all very young have heard very little about
twentieth-century history. Two yesterday had a sense of Orwell and a couple
of his books, and of Franco and Spain. One knew of Koestler's 'Darkness at
Noon'.
I stepped back a fraction and asked what they knew about the Great War and
its poems and poets. Little. And I was a fool to have hoped for more. A fool
to have thought I could skate so rapidly through a century's poets linking
them to their times. Next week I shall botch Lowell, 'For the Union Dead',
and 'Waking Early...'
Auden briefly seems to have had that rare confidence that his poems were
being instantly read and pondered by many, and that his simple
feeling-thought was being echoed and confirmed in a million bosoms...
But the same year he wrote his Yeats elegy, and 'Poetry makes nothing
happen...'
Max Richards at Cooee, Melbourne
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