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Robert Volpicelli on W. H. Auden ("In Memory of W. B. Yeats")
2.2k Plays8 months ago
"Poetry," according to this episode's poem, "makes nothing happen." But as our guest, Robert Volpicelli, makes clear, that poem, W. H. Auden's "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," offers that statement not as diminishment of poetry but instead as a way of valuing it for the right reasons.
Robert Volpicelli is an associate professor of English at Randolph-Macon College and the author of Transatlantic Modernism and the US Lecture Tour (Oxford UP, 2021). That book, which won the Modernist Studies Association's first book prize, will be out in paperback in April 2024. Bob's articles have appeared in journals like PMLA, NOVEL, Modernism/modernity, Textual Practice, and Twentieth-Century Literature. He and I co-edited and wrote a brief introduction for "Poetry Networks," a special issue of the journal College Literature (a journal for which Bob has since become an associate editor).
As ever, if you like what you hear, please follow the podcast and leave a rating and review. Share an episode with a friend! And subscribe to my Substack, where you'll get very occasional updates on the pod and my writing.
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Transcript
Introduction of Podcast and Guest
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Close Readings. I'm your host, Kamran Javedizadeh, and I am very happy today to be bringing to you my friend, the scholar Robert Volpicelli, who has very graciously agreed to come on the podcast and who offered much to my excitement when he did so the poem.
00:00:23
Speaker
in memory of W.B. Yeats by the poet W.H. Auden. So a lot of first middle name initials in that. But the poet here today is Auden, the poet whose elegy we'll be reading, and it is an elegy of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats.
00:00:42
Speaker
much more, of course, about Auden and perhaps some about Yeats in the time to come, but first let me tell you more about Robert Fulpicelli.
Modernism and the Lecture Circuit
00:00:52
Speaker
Bob, as he's known to me, is an associate professor of English at Randolph-Macon College, and he's the author of one monograph, a book called Transatlantic Modernism,
00:01:05
Speaker
and the US Lecture Tour, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2021. And very excitingly, there is a paperback edition of that book coming out, depending on when this episode gets published.
00:01:24
Speaker
this month, next month, in April in any case. So a slightly less cruel month with the arrival of paperback edition of Transatlantic Modernism in the US lecture tour. That book was the winner of the Modernist Studies Association first book prize, which is a significant and much deserved honor for it. And it argues
00:01:47
Speaker
that modernism was first encountered by many people, not as a page-based phenomenon, but instead in person on the lecture circuit.
00:02:04
Speaker
He offers new appraisals of several prominent modernist writers, a diverse array of modernist writers, including the two that will be, to a greater or lesser extent, will be encountering in our discussion today.
00:02:20
Speaker
And Bob in this book argues that the lecture circuit did a couple of things to the way we might think about modernism. So one thing it does is to make commodities of the writers and
00:02:43
Speaker
and the poets and writers whom he takes up. But also because of the heterogeneity of the scenes that lectures conjure or bring together, think about the different kinds of settings where a lecture like one by, say, W.H. Auden might have taken place.
00:03:07
Speaker
in the mid-century United States, the different kinds of audiences that would have been composed for those lectures, the different kinds of institutional settings that would have sponsored and promoted those lectures and so forth.
Poetry Networks and Collaboration
00:03:23
Speaker
We have these heterogeneous scenes. It sort of forced these modernists to take on new models of authorial flexibility.
00:03:33
Speaker
And in doing so, Bob is sort of revising one standard account of modernism, which takes it to be a literary phenomenon, which is very much of a kind of elite social circle or educational circle, a kind of coterie phenomenon rather than a broadly public one.
00:03:58
Speaker
Bob develops in this book the really exciting to my mind idea of the lecture circuit as a meta-institution. So not thinking of, say, particular universities or particular cultural centers as institutions or publishing houses or what have you, but thinking of the kind of shifting amorphous living notion of the lecture circuit itself as a kind of institution of institutions in which
00:04:27
Speaker
An old saw about modernism, a kind of idea that those of us who work in modernist studies have talked about and thought about for years and years, the idea of modernist impersonality.
00:04:40
Speaker
an idea that is perhaps most famously expounded by the poet T.S. Eliot, but that gets different iterations and different thinkers' work and so on. That idea of modernist and personality
00:05:00
Speaker
in some sense underwrites the performance of elasticity. That's not my phrase. That's Bob's phrase, performance of elasticity. It's such a nice phrase that these writers had to put forward in order to be
00:05:17
Speaker
legible and or perhaps I should say audible from the stage of their lectures. So it's a fabulous book, it's a very important book and as I say it's soon to be out in paperback.
00:05:32
Speaker
and doubtless much more affordably gotten in that way. So I hope even more people will read it shortly. Bob's scholarship has appeared in lots of places. He has articles in PMLA and textual practice and the journal Novel, 20th Century Literature, Modernism and Modernity, Journal of Modern Literature,
00:05:54
Speaker
He's an associate editor at College Literature, the journal College Literature, which I note with a particular kind of poignancy because where I got to know Bob was when he invited me to take on a project that I have to say he already had well underway by the time I came aboard to co-edit with him a special issue of the journal College Literature. This was before he himself became an editor.
00:06:24
Speaker
of the journal. So together Bob and I worked on this issue of college literature called Poetry Networks. We've had a couple of contributors from that issue on the podcast already, most recently Michelle Taylor.
00:06:40
Speaker
And in working with Bob on a project like that, I just have to say that I noticed a few things about him that come through also in the scholarship. So as we sifted through the wonderful proposals and abstracts we got for papers, as we divvied up the work of selecting those, the ones that we would go with, and then working with the authors and seeing the thing through print,
00:07:07
Speaker
Bob is just again and again a kind of model of curiosity, of reasonableness, of geniality, and he brought to the work a real kind of vision. And by that, I mean both a kind of social vision where he, perhaps by virtue of the nature of the issue itself, which is on networks and sort of
00:07:35
Speaker
suggested a kind of model of sociality in its very topic. Bob was a major factor behind what I'm so proud of in that issue, which is that we were able to cast a really wide net in terms of the scholars we represented, stages of career, the kinds of poetry that we were featuring in the issue, the kinds of scholarship we were featuring in the issue.
00:08:05
Speaker
And then also vision in a kind of aesthetic sense. I mean, Bob has a really expert ear for what's working and what isn't on the page, whether that's with respect to
00:08:19
Speaker
a poem that is under discussion or a piece of prose that he and I might have been editing or writing together. We wrote a little introduction together, and it was such a pleasure to do it with Bob. So I will, of course, make a link available to his book. I'll also make a link available to that special issue and to other things that Bob has done. But without further ado, Bob Volpicelli, welcome to Close Readings. I'm so happy to have you on the podcast. How are you doing today?
00:08:47
Speaker
I'm great, Cameron. Thanks so much for that generous reading of my work. I was thinking about our special issue two in preparation for today. And that was the only time, the first and only time I've written collaboratively. I don't know if you've done that since, but I was thinking about what a joy that was to do with you.
00:09:12
Speaker
And I don't want to make too much of a myth out of our collaboration. But I was thinking back to quite specifically how that joy came down to borrowing someone else's sentence structures. As writers, you kind of get trapped in the same sentences over and over again and the same structures.
00:09:32
Speaker
And I remember, you know, I'm a lover of a punchy opening line. And I think I maybe put down on the page on our Google Doc, you know, we live in networks as the first sentence there. And then I think you put a semicolon and add it to it. We think through them, you know,
Discussion of W.H. Auden's Influence
00:09:50
Speaker
afterwards. And it was it was the perfect, you know, symbol of collaboration unto itself. So not to make too much of a myth of that sentence, but
00:09:59
Speaker
But I'm great. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for that description of my work. It's funny. I've thought about that. I mean, I have to say, I'm patting you on the back, not me. It was a good opening. I'm sorry that I fussed with it and put a semicolon on it, but I'm glad that you think fondly back to my picking up of the baton there.
00:10:21
Speaker
So Bob, today we have a poet whom we have not yet discussed on this podcast, and in a sense, a poet whom we have discussed on the podcast. So there has been a Yeats episode. Listeners to the podcast might remember I talked to Dan Chason about William Bellary Yeats, but here we have W.H. Auden.
00:10:42
Speaker
Could you tell the uninitiated a little bit about who Auden was and how he fits in to your kind of mental map of 20th century, well, we should say, I guess, transatlantic or anglophone poetry, US and American poetry. The one thing I might just sort of one kind of frame, because that's a very big question, obviously, and maybe I can
00:11:08
Speaker
steer you slightly in giving one among many answers that you could give to it by asking the question in these terms. I'm not really an Auden expert. I love Auden, but I'm not really an Auden expert. One hears quite often talk of Auden that wants to divide his career in two and to think of there being a poet called the early Auden and a poet called the late Auden or the later Auden.
00:11:35
Speaker
And I know that that division into two maps also onto a kind of geographical move, but presumably also to an aesthetic or a political one. And I guess I just wonder, first of all, is that a useful kind of rubric to have in mind when trying to conceptualize his career and to the extent that it
00:12:00
Speaker
it is not the right picture to have in mind. How might you want to tweak it or correct it? Yeah, sure.
Auden's Move to America
00:12:08
Speaker
I was surprised no one had done Auden yet. So I was eager to take him up and bring him to your listeners. Right. So very famously, there is a biography of Auden that's divided into two volumes, early Auden and the later Auden. And
00:12:29
Speaker
The early Auden, characterized by his formative years in the 20s and then 30s, he's the premier political poet of England, more or less. And I like thinking back to Auden's school days a lot and his formative reading experiences with the wasteland and things like this. And then becoming, especially in the political turmoil of the 30s,
00:12:57
Speaker
a much more kind of active voice in that scene. And then Auden in 1939, so the year of the poem we'll be just discussing today in memory of W.B. Yates, makes the move to America, I think after feeling the pressure of the public and political role that he had assumed during that time.
00:13:24
Speaker
This particular poem we're discussing today is the first poem that Auden publishes after his move to America. It's January, he moves the poems published for the first time in March. And some critics talk about it and we can get into this a little bit as Auden's first American poem. He uses the word, that might hang almost solely on the word ranches in the second section of the poem. So we'll get into that. But I think the poem in terms of geography
00:13:54
Speaker
is very interesting with that in mind. It's an English poet in America writing about an Irish poet. That's right. And it's kind of scattered among a hundred cities as one of the lines of the poem. Right. You know, the poem is kind of demonstrating that in a lot of ways. And then so my coming to Auden is very much invested in this moment in 1939 when he arrives in America, because as you discussed, my book is about
00:14:22
Speaker
lecture tours and poets and authors as public lecturers.
00:14:27
Speaker
And the first thing that Auden does when he arrives in America to make money, basically, because he's divorced himself from many of his kind of usual pathways in publishing poetry, is he becomes a public speaker, a wide public speaker.
Auden as a Public Speaker
00:14:40
Speaker
And I think this is, you know, the very charismatic Auden that many of us conjure is from after this period, you know, Auden as teacher of other important poets, you know, going in and out of colleges and universities in America.
00:14:55
Speaker
And the personality that's attached to that, I've always been fascinated with. And so there's just a little bit of a sketch of the early and late Auden. I think any of these divisions with phases of poets, and Yeats is another poet who's broken, his career is often broken into phases, right? And I think that's just- Like a romantic poet in a modern, right. Yeah, it might be a tripartite Yeats and a halved Auden that we get. That's right. I mean, they're as useful for working within
00:15:23
Speaker
Um, as they are, um, you know, as we are responsible for working against them, um, and we can learn much from both. So it's good to have it in mind, but you know, when, when appropriate deviate from it, um, one of the kind of mainstays of that argument is that the audit of the thirties, the English audit is the audit of public speech. And that later on audit has this textual turn, whereas poetry kind of abandons the idea of public speech.
00:15:50
Speaker
I have a chapter in Auden in the book. I argue against this. I think Auden is very much interested in public speech still, but a modified form. We're thinking about varieties of public speech.
00:16:01
Speaker
Right. I see. Yeah. Well, that sounds compelling. And I can already anticipate ways in which we might get to that as this poem unfolds before us. I mean, Auden, also, I found myself wanting to say for so many of the poets that I've focused on or written about in my scholarship,
00:16:27
Speaker
Auden feels like an interestingly intergenerational figure where he's after the high modernists, but before the mid-century poets. I'm thinking of poets like Bishop and so on. So you've sketched out Auden's
00:16:51
Speaker
career usefully just now. So listeners to the podcast should think, well, Bishop was in college in the 30s, right? So she would have been reading Auden in a particular way up to that point. And I think it was Bishop who said something like, you had to work to not sound like him.
00:17:07
Speaker
because the kind of impulse to imitate was so strong. And then, of course, he also had this illustrious and significant run as the editor of the Yale Younger Poets Prize, where he was the first publisher of many significant poets' first books.
Auden's Influence on American Poetry
00:17:28
Speaker
So just a really interesting figure to think about in terms of the history of 20th century American poetry.
00:17:35
Speaker
Yeah, I think he's pervasive in America, in the American poetry scene once he arrives in so many ways. And I think thinking of him intergenerationally is really smart and right. I mean, if Bishop had to work to sound not like Auden, Auden had to work to sound not like Yeats, and you get the modernist genealogies through all of these connections. I mean, he's a late modernist, but although sometimes that phrase
00:18:05
Speaker
carries with it a certain meaning that they were modernist and experimental but had abandoned other modernist principles. I don't know if he's that or if he's more like Beckett, like one of the last modernists. In my book, he comes last and he does kind of close an episode in the lecture tour where we go from
00:18:27
Speaker
really diverse settings and venues for American lecturing to it more or less only being contained in universities and colleges, kind of like more how we see it today in a lot of ways. And Auden's kind of in that moment where it's happening, where, you know, when he first arrives, he's speaking all sorts of places. And, you know, by 45, he's pretty much doing lectureships at different
00:18:51
Speaker
academic institutions in the country. You've given us a really nice kind of biographical trajectory to follow here and also talked to some extent about
00:19:06
Speaker
well, a move from a kind of politically engaged figure to some other kind of poet. And even if you want to complicate this picture, a move from a kind of public speak, poetry is public speech to a kind of textual poetics now.
00:19:26
Speaker
I've heard you say you don't think that's what happens to him in the second part of his career, but that he's interested in different varieties of public speech. I guess I have a slightly different question also to ask before we get to this poem in particular, which is just more from a kind of poetics point of view or a
00:19:43
Speaker
I don't know, to describe Auden's relationship, say, to form or something. Is there a trajectory between early Auden and middle or late? Or maybe I could put the question slightly differently and just say, we're reading a poem that comes right at this sort of hinge point in his career.
00:20:05
Speaker
Does it, as a kind of formal matter, does it resemble other autumn poems? In what sense would it be right to say that it's characteristically like him from a kind of poetics point of view? We don't have to dwell on that over long. I just thought maybe it'd be useful to think about that. Can you say, really? Sure. It's got a very peculiar kind of
00:20:33
Speaker
ear, I think, and whatever it means to sound like Odin is a hard thing to actually put your finger on, though. Oh, and it might be his increasing tolerance or penchant for writing pretty abstractly. That defines this turnaround.
00:20:51
Speaker
the 30s and the World War period. And I think increasingly his ability to adapt different types of speech or discourse within a singular poem and the diversity we find in poems is also something you see increasingly after this turn, you know, the extent to which the odd end of those earlier years and writing more public facing poetry, you might say, was not trying to beguile the reader in those same ways that
00:21:19
Speaker
later on and was all too willing to
Listening to Auden's Reading
00:21:23
Speaker
do. I mean, there are lines in memory of WBA that you'd do both for me, that read very cleanly and clearly in some that I just wonder at and left and often stop there wondering.
00:21:38
Speaker
Well, I'm very eager to get on with it. This is such a beautiful poem. It is for sure one of my favorites. And we'll have lots to talk about in just a moment. Let me say we're going to listen to a recording of Auden reading the poem. You also have a link in the episode notes to a text of the poem. One thing I should say is that
00:22:04
Speaker
you will notice some minor or maybe not so minor discrepancies between the poem that you hear and the poem that you read. And there are still other textual variants floating around. So we will address those in part, I imagine, but also we needn't belabor them either.
00:22:29
Speaker
you might just sort of know going in that Auden is one of these poets who famously tinkered with poems of his after they were published and into new editions of collected editions and so on of his work. This poem is one good example of that. But without further ado, here is W.H. Auden reading in memory of W.B. Yates.
00:23:00
Speaker
He disappeared in the dead of winter. The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted, and snow disfigured the public statues. The mercury sank in the mouth of a dying day. Oh, all the instruments agree, the day of his death was a dark, cold day. Far from his illness, the wolves ran on to the evergreen forests. The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable keys.
00:23:29
Speaker
By morning tongues, the death of a poet was kept from his poems. But for him, it was his last afternoon as himself. An afternoon of nurses and rumours, the provinces of his body revolted, the squares of his mind were empty, silence invaded the suburbs, the current of his feeling failed. He became his admirers.
00:23:54
Speaker
Now he is scattered among a hundred cities and wholly given over to unfamiliar affections to find his happiness in another kind of wood and be punished under a foreign code of conscience. The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living. But in the importance and noise of tomorrow
00:24:17
Speaker
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the bourse, and the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed, and each in the sale of himself is almost convinced of his freedom, a few thousand will think of this day as one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual. O, all the instruments agree, the day of his death was a dark, cold day.
00:24:46
Speaker
You were silly like us. Your gift survived it all. A parish of rich women, physical decay, yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry. Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still. The poetry makes nothing happen. It survives in the valley of its saying, where executives would never want to tamper. It flows south from ranches of isolation and the busy griefs.
00:25:15
Speaker
Raw towns that we believe and die in. It survives a way of happening, a mouth. Earth receive an honored guest. William Gates is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie, emptied of its poetry. Time that is intolerant of the brave and innocent, and indifferent in a week to a beautiful physique.
00:25:43
Speaker
Worships language and forgives everyone by whom it lives. Pardons cowardice conceit, lays its honours at their feet. In the nightmare of the dark, all the dogs of Europe bark, and the living nation's weight each sequestered in its hate. Intellectual disgrace stares from every human face, and the seas of pity lie locked and frozen in each eye.
00:26:14
Speaker
Follow poet, follow right to the bottom of the night, with your unconstraining voice, till persuade us to rejoice. With the farming of a verse, make a vineyard of the curse, sing of human unsuccess in a rapture of distress. In the deserts of the heart, let the healing fountain start. In the prison of his days, teach the free man how to praise.
00:26:45
Speaker
So that's W.H. Auden reading in memory of W.B. Yates.
Auden's Reading Style and Public Persona
00:26:50
Speaker
Bob, this is sort of like an unfair question or something, but I suppose any time a poet, you know, we have a recording of a poet reading a poem in public,
00:27:04
Speaker
a scholar like you whose stake the claim that you've staked might say, well, see, that's public speech. But is, I mean, I am sure that you as a fair minded scholar, right, might listen to some recordings and say they sound more like public speech than others. Right. Notwithstanding the fact, let's just stipulate that both of them are all of these hypothetical poems on recording that we were listening to.
00:27:34
Speaker
were read from a stage or behind a podium or something, and thus recorded. So my question for you, I mean, often I ask people, what was that like listening to that voice? But in this case, I have a slightly more pointed version of that question to ask you, which is, if you think that sounded like public speech of some kind, can you help our listeners hear that as well? Or what do you mean when you make a claim like that?
00:28:04
Speaker
Yeah, I think of, oh gosh. And maybe it's less pronounced in this recording than in others of Auden. And we were talking before that we don't know the provenance of this particular recording, which is a little bit frustrating. Yeah, sorry. I'm sorry. I must have found it since now. We probably could find it, but yeah.
00:28:25
Speaker
But a man. That's right. I know. Picking away at my keyboard. Yeah. Just doing the podcast work. Yeah. So I can't help but to hear Auden without thinking of it filtered through a later poem of his from the 60s called On the Circuit, which is what my book begins by meditating upon.
00:28:49
Speaker
And that poem is basically, you know, odd and describing what it's like to go around giving readings and lectures about his poetry and readings of his poetry, you know, and like what drudgery, what pure drudgery it is to be jet and prop propelled, you know, from place to place. He talks about
00:29:08
Speaker
you know, going to these little American colleges and girl organists and bars and music at breakfast and all of these things. And it's just like it's great. It's it's you know, one of the reasons I love Auden and one of the reasons I kind of think of him as a modernist, he's always kind of performing this disinterestedness. Right. Which is like such a part of that poem. Like there's actually a recording of him reading it, I think, at the Guggenheim and he's getting laughs while he's reading it.
00:29:37
Speaker
about like not liking being in public, right, and not liking the attention he gets and, oh, off to another place, you know, and I'm getting paid for this and it's the way poet makes its money. So, you know, Auden is like a really kind of static reader of his poetry sometimes. And I think that comes through in the reading we just had. But I've heard more disinterested Auden.
00:30:02
Speaker
I do always hear a bit of that in the reading. And that's, I mean, that's a bit of his public performance to me, that he's putting forward this personality. Yeah, sorry, by disinterested. I mean, if I could just ask you to unpack that word a bit more, a kind of ironic stance or a kind of flatness or
00:30:25
Speaker
I think all those things, a bit flat, maybe a bit disdain for the enterprise of doing it in and of itself. A kind of weariness, a world weariness or something. Yeah, something of that. It wasn't the most dynamic or engaging reading of a poem you've ever heard. Those are things I hear there. I only wish I could see him. A lot of it for his audiences came down to a certain visual appeal, which was this kind of
00:30:55
Speaker
typical Auden messiness. I've heard about him showing up in slippers to give readings. You just imagined cigarette buds tumbling out of the man. And I'm always remembering this description of a student at Swarthmore who described his hair as looking messed like a thatched roof. And it's like all of these things make up Auden to me a little bit.
00:31:23
Speaker
That particular reading, I mean, I'm only getting hints of it there, but it's kind of, I don't know, there's a sort of like largeness to the room, I think, in that reading too. Yeah, you could sort of hear it. But otherwise, you know, I don't have too much to say about that particular reading, no. How about you? What did you hear? I don't know. I mean, and it's hard, it's hard a little bit to disambiguate the kinds of feelings that
00:31:53
Speaker
one has in listening to disambiguate the sources of those things.
Analysis of Auden's Elegy for Yeats
00:31:59
Speaker
Am I responding to his accent? Bob just disappeared, but I wonder if you can hear me, Bob. Can you hear me, Bob?
00:32:11
Speaker
All right. So we just had a little glitch and I'm going to figure out how we will stitch things back together. But Bob and I got cut off in talking when the topic at hand was whether or not this sounded to either or both of us like public speech. And I was saying, I think that it's a little bit hard to
00:32:32
Speaker
tell how much am I just responding to a particular kind of English accent as somebody who's from the US. There is another issue at work here, though, I think, with respect to that question, Bob, with respect to the question, namely,
00:32:50
Speaker
of whether this sounds like public speech or not or what it does sound like, which is to slightly, I don't know, metaphorize the question or something, but to note that this is an occasional poem, right?
00:33:13
Speaker
It's a poem, it's an elegy, right? So that's a term we use in poetry to talk about a poem. I mean, it's a term that has meant various things at various moments in the history of poetry, but it is, broadly speaking, a term we use to describe a poem that's written on the occasion of someone's death. Often, and this poem is no...
00:33:38
Speaker
different from this tradition. Often, poets are writing elegies for other poets. Auden is not the first to do it. It is a rich tradition for reasons that perhaps we can get into in a moment, and I'm sure we will. But I guess I just want to say that a poem that is written on the occasion of someone's death, we might be more inclined to hear as public speech because it sounds like the kind of thing that could be read at a ceremony.
00:34:08
Speaker
right? And perhaps a particular kind of ceremony, a memorial service or something like that. Or I think for instance of
00:34:18
Speaker
I don't know if this, I'm now dating myself and maybe you, you know, vaguely my age, share this experience. Probably one of the first times I encountered Auden, I can't remember exactly, was when I watched the movie Four Weddings in a Funeral and stop all the clocks that that bit of Auden's verse was used at a funeral as a bit of public speech. So there is something about his,
00:34:48
Speaker
And this, of course, is not the only elegy for a public figure that Ovid Oden wrote. He wrote one for Freud. So I think some of that is at work here. But now I want to turn things back to you, Bob. And just to say,
00:35:03
Speaker
I think in the lead up to listening to this recording, you were saying something when I asked you about Auden and form, you were saying something about how he's a poet who oftentimes has multiple sort of orientations towards form within a single poem. And this poem does that
00:35:21
Speaker
explicitly, right? It's a poem in three parts. He didn't read the parts as numbered in the reading that he gave. He just moved seamlessly between them. But I'll bet even if people weren't looking at a text that the transitions between them were pretty audible. They sound different. Right. So before we dive into looking more closely at the first of those three parts, Bob, is there something you might want to say from a 30,000 foot view about
00:35:50
Speaker
how those three parts of this poem fit together into something like a scheme. Yeah, for sure. And I'm thinking of what you were just saying too, is this poem is an elegy and I'm by no means a scholar of elegy's. So your listeners might have other thoughts to add to the conversation.
00:36:13
Speaker
online and things like that. But as you were talking, I was thinking about, well, which of the sections of the poem is most like an elegy? And for me, there are parts of this poem that are really like that and others that are less so. And so the in and out of the elegy form is really interesting to me based on what you were saying. And I would be curious to know your thoughts on this, but for me, the third part, the beginning of the third part,
00:36:38
Speaker
is the most squarely within that sound, the sound of the elegy. In fact, it almost sounds like a funeral rite or something. I know. Like a priestly kind of speech. It begins so rhythmically and sounds like something that an audience could immediately grasp, but then it gets more complicated from there. Maybe that's some of what Auden is up to in this poem.
00:37:02
Speaker
I think they're all different meditations on persistence in a lot of ways, the ways in which things persist and obviously in being an elegy posthumous persistence in particular, although I think there are some departures from that because sometimes we leave the poet entirely and we're just thinking about the poetry and so the way the poetry persists
00:37:27
Speaker
beyond the poet is one of the things that kind of comes up throughout the entire poem there. I was telling you, and we might talk about some of the textual variants of the poem, but when the poem was first published, the second section, which I think is the most characteristically odd in section of the poem, I'm not sure I can put my finger on exactly why that is the case,
00:37:55
Speaker
But I think that, you know, I'll stand by that claim wasn't added until a while after. And the first sections of the poem, for me, especially kind of slip in to very Yeatsian sounding rhythms and language.
00:38:11
Speaker
When I'm looking at the first section here and the alliteration, the day of his death was a dark, cold day, and the use of that as a refrain, I'm put back into Easter 1916, you know, all changed, utterly a terrible beauty was born.
00:38:30
Speaker
And so I hear odd and kind of slipping in and out of the eights across the structures here. But yeah, so I think persistence in general, but in a variety of ways. And I think there are some ways in which the third section tries to work out some of the issues of the first two.
00:38:49
Speaker
Yeah, that's super interesting. It sort of strikes me that rhetorically they're very, I mean, not only do they sound different, are their line lengths different and the kind of verse modes different and metrically different or whatever, but rhetorically, I mean, the first section is in this third person kind of mode. The second one is in a second person mode, it's a
00:39:17
Speaker
seems to be addressing Yeats, but then shifts into making these kinds of pronouncements, which are perhaps among the most quoted phrases of Auden's. I mean, one reason why I think it sounds like Auden to you is because these are his most famous lines, right?
00:39:41
Speaker
Poetry makes nothing happen in particular, which is frequently quoted and frequently put to bad use. It's funny how many of the most quoted lines of poetry are in their ubiquity, totally misread, like, good fences make good neighbors. Isn't
00:40:03
Speaker
another one that I think of. Right, the more they circulate, the more they circulate erroneously. I was almost scared of choosing this poem because of that big line, but then I thought, no, let's do it anyway. Let's talk about it. And then the third, I think, has this kind of ritualistic sort of rhetoric to it. But let's talk about that first section of the poem, which is
00:40:34
Speaker
you know, maybe not the most memorable section of the poem, though I think I find it quite interesting.
Exploration of Poetic Themes and Metaphors
00:40:44
Speaker
There is
00:40:51
Speaker
I mean, the first line of the poem is, he disappeared in the dead of winter. But then after that line, and even after the first word of that line, after the he, we're not really talking about him anymore. What Auden seems to be doing is sort of giving a weather report or
00:41:12
Speaker
you know, describing the landscape or something like that. So what do you think is interesting to you? I mean, are there phrases or moments that are keys for you there, Bob, in understanding what Auden is up to in beginning the poem in the way that he does?
00:41:28
Speaker
Right. And maybe this is the case many times in analogies that the poem was about other things, many other things. I think it's a poem about Auden. I think it's a poem about what was then being called the European conflict, right? About to break out. Right.
00:41:44
Speaker
and it records all of these things through Yeats and of course then about Auden's relationship to Yeats. So looking at the first stanza, one of the first things that jumps out to me are the airports that are almost deserted there. Certainly Yeats has disappeared in that first line and we've moved on to other things as you say, but certainly one of the things that connects Auden and Yeats are there kind of
00:42:14
Speaker
status as poets who have strong national relationships, right, as we were saying with Auden and England originally, and Yeats of course with Ireland and its nationalism which comes back up in the poem, but then who also circulate beyond those national primitives and have really
00:42:34
Speaker
exiled or strange relationships with their homelands. Sort of via the imperial history of English as a language. Absolutely. So one of the first connection points to me is that kind of geographic dispersedness, which is then performed kind of later in the poem when Yeats is scattered among 100 cities and becomes all of his readers. So that's one of the things I'm picking up here in the beginning, thinking about those connections between
00:43:02
Speaker
Auden and Yates, and the next one in the next line that is also jumping out to me are the public statues. Because I think one of the things that Auden is thinking about here in 39 is, again, as we've said, his status as a public figure
00:43:21
Speaker
And I think he's thinking about that through Yeats, who had this kind of famously tortured relationship with the public. I mean, Yeats, whose poetry was so important for creating a national Irish culture, but then who would stand up on the stage of the Abbey Theatre and yell at the audience because they didn't, you know, take the play the right way. And so I think Yeats is this figure through which Auden can think about publicness
00:43:49
Speaker
And given all that, then I can't help but to notice that this public statue has been disfigured by the snow of the scene. Thinking about the geographic nature of the poem, I can't help but to think of this as an Irish statue. I don't know if this is too much.
00:44:05
Speaker
I'm thinking about the end of James Joyce's The Dead where the snow is covering all of Ireland and you've been in Dublin, you can't turn around without seeing a statue to this or that poet or this or that political leader. So I don't want to read too much into the Irishness of this statue. Well, it seems reasonable.
00:44:22
Speaker
Yeah, but those are things I'm thinking about there. I've kind of set this up, like I think this is a poem a lot about speech and I see the mouth there, the tongue in the next stanza. So public speakers, public figures, but also public speakers and an odd and kind of triangulating all of this three eights. Right.
00:44:43
Speaker
The airports being almost deserted might be read, in other words, as a kind of historically specific act of noticing about what was going on in Europe in 1939, but it's also a kind of ready-to-hand pathetic fallacy about the, you know, this is such a major death that everything stopped or
00:45:11
Speaker
Yeah, I think... Or is it? Because sometimes it also seems like... Not that big of a deal. Not that big of a deal, exactly right. I mean, by the end of the first section, we get a few thousand will think of this day as one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual. I mean, that wouldn't be, unless you were very, you were interested in being very provocative, that wouldn't be something you read at someone's memorial service.
00:45:35
Speaker
I think these first objects we get are really trying to take stock of what Yates' death means. We know that he died, and we're trying to figure out how important it is, what kind of impact it's going to have on the world.
00:45:52
Speaker
So, what instruments do we have around to measure this? Well, we've got the airport. We've got the public statue. We've got the temperature of the day. Oh, all the instruments agree. The day of his death was a dark, cold day. The other textual variant in later poems that you and I have already talked about off-air was that the other line is what instruments we have all agree.
00:46:15
Speaker
And I kind of, I mean, that shades it slightly differently for me. It's because it's the speaker searching around for whatever instrument they can find. Okay. These are the ones I happen to have and they suggest, you know, that it was a dark cold day. So, so my ability to articulate this is based on the instruments I have.
00:46:37
Speaker
But also in the reading we heard, he says, oh, all the instruments. Oh, all the instruments, yeah. But that oh as a kind of conventionally poetic, I mean, it's got more, it's more inflected with its own kind of pathos in that moment, right? Like the, it's less disinterested, I might say, right? Yeah, for sure. Than to use your word earlier. And so,
00:47:07
Speaker
Bob, am I right that part of what you're suggesting here is we can set aside for the moment the question of whether, you know, when you said, well, the question is how significant or what is the significance of Yeats's death? We know that Yeats has died. How significant is his death?
00:47:27
Speaker
we might want to be careful not to mistake that question for a related question, which is like, how significant is Yeats's poetry? Even to Auden, let's say. Like, I'm imagining a version of that problem in which, as seems to be the case here, Auden seems ready to grant
00:47:48
Speaker
the significance of the poetry, the question is, is it important that this man has died? Right. I think the first section of the poem is trying to figure out all these relationships, and I don't think it has a very good reading of them. In fact, what I think I see happening a lot of times is almost like
00:48:07
Speaker
a retrospective structure imposed on a lot of the stanzas, by which I mean it's not until the end of the stanza that we have a clearer idea as to what things previously mentioned even are. Can you give an example? Yeah, that first stanza. It's not until the end that we know the airports, the public statues, and the temperature. What were all those things? Why did we visit them?
00:48:32
Speaker
Oh, those are instruments we're using to measure, right? And so it's only at the very end that we can kind of read backwards. Perhaps this is a kind of
00:48:41
Speaker
elegiac, you know, wave of reading, or in the later stanza, let's see, the right, okay, so now I'm in the fourth stanza, where Yeats's body is scattered among 100 cities, and he's given over to all of his readers these unfamiliar affections.
00:49:04
Speaker
to find his happiness in another kind of wood. So this is, you know, the poet going over to the other side. But then the next line is like quite a hammer drop for me and punished under a foreign code of conscience. The words of the dead man are modified in the guts of the living. It's not until the end of that stanza that I realized like this going over to the other side could go one of a number of ways, right? To find your happiness in another kind of wood or to be punished under a foreign code of consciousness.
00:49:34
Speaker
But in either case, what's happening here, at least at one level, is this idea, well, okay, the person who died was a writer, was a poet. His words have circulated already. Now, one might be tempted to make a kind of homiletic statement at that point of, well, he may be gone, but his words will live forever, right?
00:50:01
Speaker
It's not that this poem isn't making that claim, but I think it's, as you've just pointed out to us, it's being much more...
00:50:12
Speaker
ambiguous about the nature of what that living forever might look like because for those words to find their way into other people's mouths and for those mouths perhaps to live in different countries, to go back to your point about nation,
00:50:32
Speaker
isn't just living on, it's being modified in the guts of the living. Such an interesting two lines, the words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living. I think how would that line be different if it were the words of a dead man are modified in the mouths of the living or in the...
00:50:53
Speaker
minds of the living, but the guts really does something to it. It's metabolic, right? Yeah. And you don't know, I think the point you're making is you don't know what that's going to be like in advance, right? You have no idea in giving your poems over to posterity, you know, what the public is going to do with them.
00:51:11
Speaker
in the same way that you don't know when you scatter ashes, which seems to be the kind of implied image of that first line. Now he is scattered among 100 cities before we realize it's not literal. You don't know where those ashes will wind up or what form they'll take or what they'll be transubstantiated into eventually.
00:51:32
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I almost get the sense we talked about Auden and Yeats as both being poets of phases, that this is a new phase that Yeats is about to enter, and we haven't yet determined what that phase is going to be about. To find his happiness in another kind of wood reminds me of Yeats' volume, his 1903 volume in the Seven Woods, which is
00:51:58
Speaker
famously used as a marker for readers of Yeats as a turning point in his career. Yeats' turn from the fairy land of Ireland and the mythical, legendary Ireland, there's a critical line. This is the first volume in which you can tell the speaker is a reader of the newspaper, meaning he knows things are going on. But now we're in another kind of wood. We don't quite know yet what that's going to yield.
00:52:25
Speaker
And that's very compelling and not to flip the order of things too much. I just want to quickly have a say a word about either the third or the second stanza or both of them. One thing I'm noticing in the
00:52:40
Speaker
Third stanza, I mean the second stanza ends with that wonderful line, the death of the poet was kept from his poems, which I don't know that it requires explication on our part, although I'm sure that you might have some things to say about it. I was more interested for the moment in the third stanza
00:53:00
Speaker
in which there is this kind of play on public and private scales of, well, scales, let's just say so. But for him, so whatever it was for the rest of us, for him, it was his last afternoon as himself, an afternoon of nurses and rumors. And then we got this sort of three lines of figurative
00:53:28
Speaker
language here that all seem kind of vaguely parallel to me. The provinces of his body revolted, the squares of his mind were empty, silence invaded the suburbs. There seems there to be some kind of play on the poet as public figure, the poet as private man or something. I wonder what else, if anything, Bob, you'd want to say about those lines?
00:53:55
Speaker
I find them to be very moving lines in the poem. It's quite an image of death there, where Yeats's body feels quite small to me next to the process that's about to unfold. I mean, I'm reminded of Yeats calling the body in
00:54:11
Speaker
Was it sailing to Byzantium? A paltry coat upon a stick? I mean, you just you feel the smallness and the inconsequentiality of the human body there as it fails among nurses and rumors, right? It's quite sad to me. And then, right, that this all then gets carried over into the people who will read his poems. He became his admirers.
00:54:37
Speaker
Yeah, and I'm thinking about the phenomenon quite specifically of like when poets die, how their poems get posted everywhere almost virally, right? And gosh, Auden has become this in a different way, the way his September 1st, 1939 poem gets posted every 9-11 now and becomes this kind of viral circulating thing for that.
00:54:58
Speaker
So for me, you know, the morning tongue of the death of the poet was kept from his poems reminds me of that moment when the poems go on this different trajectory than the person, right? And actually maybe have more life in that moment than they've had previously. Right, right. It's as though whatever it is we designate with the name W.B. Yates,
00:55:28
Speaker
seemed formerly to include public or something, but now it seems like one way death is being understood is that now Yeats himself, from his point of view or from the experience of his day,
00:55:49
Speaker
that public is emptying out. Or I'm imagining, you know, like with your lecture tour in mind, you know, the audience filing out of the auditorium, the squares of his mind were empty. The poet needs the public, you know, to be alive in that sense, right? Yeah. Yeah. Um, um,
00:56:17
Speaker
And then before we leave behind the first section altogether and move on to that famous second section and that really strange and important third, I wonder what you make, Bob, of those, they also feel kind of odd and esque to me, those gestures of, I don't know what to call them, humility or of a kind of undercutting rhetoric.
00:56:47
Speaker
The poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed, and each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom. A few thousand will think of this day as one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual." I'm interested in those adverbs, so the slightly or the fairly or the almost convinced. If the section of the poem has been
00:57:14
Speaker
troubled by or trying to think through what it means, as you said, that Yeats has died. Do those adverbs
00:57:27
Speaker
put their thumb on the scale in some way as deciding that question, or if they retain a kind of ambivalence about it, what are the terms of that ambivalence by the end? Sure, yeah. I think less of the adverbs and more of the number. A few thousand is such an interesting number, isn't it? It's not small. It's not just a handful of us.
00:57:52
Speaker
but it's not huge either, right? It's poetry audience-sized. Yeah, it's above the coterie, but beyond mass publication. A few thousand will think of this day. Not insignificant, but not...
00:58:08
Speaker
super significant either. I think that's the place the poem is now where it's trying to think about whether that still can be measured as a lasting impact. I think you have to read back up in this stanza again to the noise of tomorrow. That's a line to me that
00:58:30
Speaker
gestures at the wartime context or near wartime context of the poem. Again, next to those huge events of history, what does Yeats's death matter? And again, I don't think the poem is going to give us an answer to this. I think it's going to suggest that there are different scales of looking at it.
00:58:51
Speaker
And depending on which scale, okay, well, in the context of World War II, not that much, right? How about in the context of universal human suffering? You know, maybe not that much there either, but to the few thousand of us who have read and engaged with Yeats as a poet may be still deeply impactful, right? So ambivalent in that sense. And presumably also, you know, whatever we think of Yeats as death as a person, we might
00:59:20
Speaker
hold on to or project differently the significance of the poems that he's written and that are now busily being modified in the guts of the living or what have you.
00:59:33
Speaker
Oh, for sure, yeah. And I think of that separation being complete now with Yeats' physical body, the bourse being perhaps a reference to France where Yeats was buried. And then Auden, of course, couldn't have known this, but there's quite a strange
00:59:55
Speaker
to do over Yates's physical body after his death. And then it was imported back to Ireland some years later. And so like the poet's physical body is circulating differently, we might say, than his poetry at this point.
01:00:09
Speaker
Yeah, and of course Yeats is a poet who in some sense wrote his own epitaph and imagined his own grave and sort of found his own poems. Yeah, he was asking these questions before Auden was. Right, yeah, good. All right, so we move into the second section of the poem, which is one kind of block of text, one, I don't think stanza is even the right word for it, but it reads like a bit of blank verse or something.
01:00:39
Speaker
and it begins with this strange line, you were silly like us. Oh, I think it's so good. Your gift survived it all. Yeah, so silly is a really interesting word, obviously, and I catch some people short, so I wonder how you begin to make sense of it.
01:00:55
Speaker
Oh, wow. I think silly is everything in this poem. It reminds me of your discussion of O'Hara and Yogurt back from, was that episode one? That was the episode one. You are hard pressed to find another poem with a mention of Yogurt and maybe just as hard pressed to find another poem that uses the word silly like this.
01:01:15
Speaker
Well, you'd have to go back to Spencer or something, because I think the etymology of silly is innocent, isn't it? Oh, that's great. That makes a good deal of sense. Yeah. But what work is that word doing for you in this austere context, Bob?
01:01:33
Speaker
Yeah, so in what senses was Yeats silly and what is silliness opposed to, I think, are the questions of this section of the poem. I mean, Yeats was silly in a great many ways. He believed in fairies and the occult, right?
01:01:51
Speaker
and had all sorts of ideas of the spiritual that crossed over sometimes in ugly fashion with the political. I mean, and Yeats, towards the end of his life, you know, there's great work being done on this now, is kind of known for his authoritarian politics and his interest in that, like Ezra Pound, right? So the poem raises this idea that perhaps Yeats was silly.
01:02:20
Speaker
which is really to exonerate him of a lot of those things that I just mentioned, right? And I think I read silliness in opposition here. I'm wondering if you do to mad or madness, right? What makes Ireland, you know, perhaps different than Yeats here and what makes madness different than silliness?
01:02:43
Speaker
Might be a sort of like self seriousness Perhaps right like it's okay to believe in fairies and things like that and politics and nationalism if you don't take it all too seriously, but if you do Then perhaps it tips over into madness or something like that. So that's that that's kind of the Opposition that I'm seeing here. Yeah, because Ireland goes on being mad has her madness and her weather still
01:03:12
Speaker
Right, and it sort of predicts the opposition that the section of the poem famously resolves into, which is an opposition between poetry on the one hand and, well, I don't know what, but everything else perhaps on the other, but business or real life, maybe we could say.
01:03:41
Speaker
Right. So Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry. Now, Ireland has her madness and her weather still, for poetry makes nothing happen. So what people like Bob and I instinctively want to do is to say that phrase, that sentence goes on, right?
01:04:11
Speaker
Yes, poetry makes nothing happen, a phrase in and of itself, which admits of all kinds of ambiguity that maybe we would want to get into. But then after Auden says that, he goes on to tell you about poetry's interesting sort of career. But still, there is a kind of salient point being made there, which I think, to my reading, Bob, you asked what I make of silliness, sort of aligns poetry fundamentally with silliness, right? Sure, absolutely.
01:04:41
Speaker
There's a kind of, I mean, it reminds me of the other famously kind of anti-poetic, modern poetry joke of Marianne Moores, right? I too dislike it. There are things that are important beyond all this fiddle, right? Fiddle, yeah. Yeah, fiddle seems like silly, right? Like it's...
01:05:03
Speaker
It's a way of defanging poetry or saying that poetry is not going to affect the kinds of changes in the world that you might look to find or expect to see.
01:05:20
Speaker
But let's talk about that line. Poetry makes nothing happen. Oh, let's do it. OK. So how do you feel when people quote that line to you? Oh, ambivalent, as the poem would want me to feel. I approach this line, and I've kind of already set this up, as having a lot to do with Auden, his relationship to public speech,
01:05:47
Speaker
and how he's filtering that through Yeats at this moment. And if you'll permit me just a slight tangent back into Auden's biography, I'll note that Auden arrives in America in January of 1939. He publishes this poem, First Time Without the Section, that we're discussing now in March. And right around this time in March, Auden's doing some of his first public speaking in America.
01:06:14
Speaker
He gives one speech at a foreign correspondence dinner, which is to raise money for the Spanish Civil War. And we actually have the typescript for it. And, and Auden finds out that he can be a really good public speaker. He afterwards reflects that he is quote, really, he's really done it in this speech. And the end has all this flying rhetoric and rhetoric, I think, as you brought up is an important kind of thing to be thinking about this poem.
01:06:41
Speaker
And he says he has them all roaring at the end. It's all this flying rhetoric about democracy and fascism and all of this stuff. And he's got them all roaring. And he tells the person he's writing to a correspondent at this time. He just feels covered in dirt afterwards. He feels ashamed that he was able to whip up this audience in that way.
01:07:04
Speaker
And then shortly after, I mean like weeks after, the poem comes out again with this second section. And now all of a sudden I'm reading that line a little bit differently than I might have previously. I think sometimes there's a critical tradition of reading this line as an apology. Poetry makes nothing happen. I'm sorry, I wish I could make more happen. Might be one way of approaching it.
01:07:28
Speaker
But now I'm hearing poetry in contradistinction to public speaking, like the kind that Auden had just engaged in, especially political public speaking in 1939, where all of these types of speech are being connected to propaganda and dictators who are strong speakers, right?
01:07:47
Speaker
And now, all of a sudden, poetry, making nothing happen, sounds like a kind of welcome reprieve from that type of speech, right? Like, thank God poetry makes nothing happen. Not an apology, but a defense, maybe. A defense, and almost like a wishing it to be so. Because sometimes I feel like Autumn thinks, well, like, you know, poetry might be more impactful than I'm saying.
Critique of Political Speech in Poetry
01:08:12
Speaker
But I hope, I hope poetry makes nothing happen. I hope it's a space in which we can speak without the same sort of implications, rhetorical implications of political speech. I think this all happens in a poem about Yates, because Yates is a poet who sometimes marshaled his poetry for that strong type of speaking. I mean, his early, Yates's early poems were political national anthems, right?
01:08:38
Speaker
And and Auden here is kind of reflecting on Yeats and in calling Yeats as silly is like, well, I don't want that to be the Yeats that I remember that strong political public speaking Yeats. I'm going to I'm going to grant him the generosity of calling him and all of that silly in this moment and kind of reeling him back because because I think both Yeats and Auden realize that they they could become that figure. Right. And and thought about the implications of of what it would mean to do so.
01:09:11
Speaker
Yeah. Makes nothing happen. I mean, of course, there's a way, and I think this is all sort of implicit in what you were just saying.
01:09:28
Speaker
a way of reading that kind of flatly or simply and literally as like poetry doesn't make anything happen as opposed to demagoguery or political speech or what have you. But then, of course, too, I want to read it with thinking of the kind of nothing that Stevens, while Stevens
01:09:55
Speaker
rights of in the snowman, right? Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is, right? Nothing as a weird kind of name for a certain kind of, a substantive nothing that poetry affirmatively makes happen. Poetry makes this thing that we call nothing. It's always making it happen. Whatever that thing is, it's not gonna be useful.
01:10:25
Speaker
politically. But I mean, what immediately follows that phrase here is a colon. And then before we get to the end of the line, the two words, it survives. Poetry makes nothing happen, sure, but it survives.
01:10:45
Speaker
Yeah, I think Autumn, when he reads this, he kind of reads through that line quite strongly. Right. It was, for poetry, makes nothing happen. It survives in the valley of its saying. He kind of blows through that.
01:11:02
Speaker
You know that that line stop at the end there On to the next line and you know kind of has different Emphasis doesn't if you if you stop there and dwell on the surviving or if you move on to the surviving and the valley of it say You know, you might come away with different conclusions a little bit I tend to kind of privilege the latter where it comes back to that saying And and specifically the valley of that saying which I read
01:11:31
Speaker
as being about the potentiality of language, right? That there's a- The Valley suggests potentiality to you. Yeah, something. The Valley of it's saying like the depths, the resources of it's saying like you could go all the way down to the bottom and the Valley of it.
01:11:46
Speaker
like it's a kind of reservoir or something. Exactly, yeah. And that, for me, again, distinguishes poetry from this kind of political speech, where, you know, poetry, we could always bring different interpretations to, we can get a lot out of it from different perspectives, and the political speech wants to do none of that.
01:12:06
Speaker
right, wants to blow through interpretation and just create action in the way that we were describing before. But this is a step removed from that, a step backwards, in other words, about where we are in relationship to language and action. political speech doesn't happen in the valleys. It happens on the mountain tops or something, right? Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Right. The valley also seems like a place of refuge or a place where one could hide. Yeah, right. In wartime.
01:12:36
Speaker
Yeah. And now I also want to note that depending on the text that you're looking at, you might be thinking, why are Bob and Kamran saying, in the valley of its saying? Because at least in some editions, Auden had that as in the valley of its making. And we were chatting a bit before we started, Bob, about
01:13:04
Speaker
how that might point to two ways of thinking about poetry, right, as a kind of genre of saying as opposed to a genre of making that are both sort of rich traditions for thinking about what poetry is. But saying, at least to my ear, suggests, I mean, it's more aligned with your project in some obvious ways, but also it's,
01:13:32
Speaker
If it's strongly rooting, let's say, poetry to a kind of oral tradition as opposed to this tradition of making, if it's a tradition of saying, then saying is kind of ambivalent about who the person was who made the words.
01:13:55
Speaker
That is, saying seems to be more like death of the author comfortable or something, right? You say the poem, I say the poem. It's like thinking of poetry as a kind of folk music or something. Who cares who wrote it? Anyone with a mouth can say it, which is a kind of model of what you called earlier persistence.
01:14:24
Speaker
And then what should we say about the lines that follow from that? I'll read them and then you say something smart about them. Okay, sure. It survives in the valley of its saying where executives would never want to tamper, flows 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,
01:14:52
Speaker
Yeah, just reading from where we were before, where the executives would never want to tamper, there is language that approximates action in the world. The business world here is Auden's example of this, where we don't want to get into interpretations and differences and the relationship between language in the world. We just want to have the effect, the utilitarian effect that we're hoping for.
01:15:17
Speaker
So that's what I read into that line. The next line I find extremely confusing and difficult. It flows south from the ranches of isolation and busy griefs, raw towns that we believe and die in. I guess this is kind of picking up more with what you were saying about, you know, the persistence of poetry beyond the death of the poet. Is that what you're reading into those lines? I always found them to be quite strange.
01:15:46
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it does put us in this kind of mythical American landscape, like you were saying with the reference to ranches. Raw towns, right? The frontier, apparently. Well, you know, Auden seems always interested, not just in this poem, but I think of another poem that was another thing that we were talking about before we started recording, I think, In Praise of Limestone. Like, Auden always seems interested to me in
01:16:15
Speaker
zooming in and zooming out of kind of landscape and person, and they become two different kind of figurative languages for describing each other. It's hard to tell what figure and ground always is there, but it's like he's a poet who seems interested in
01:16:36
Speaker
topography in the kind of straightforward sense of that term, but then also as metaphor. And so here flows on south from ranches of isolation and the busy griefs seems like a way of imagining
01:16:56
Speaker
the kind of, you know, via metaphor, via this metaphor of the American landscape or the West or something, of imagining
01:17:08
Speaker
the kinds of private experiences and crises and affective states that in an individual's life might prompt poetry or feeling of some kind, but that don't have any, I think because they're ranches of isolation, they seem to be removed from the social.
01:17:40
Speaker
And the day-to-day and the personal, it's kind of an argument for the impersonality of poetry, right? Yeah. But there's this weird kind of both and thing going on because it flows on south from them
01:17:56
Speaker
but then survives. So poetry makes nothing happen, but it survives. It's a way of happening.
Poetry as a Way of Happening
01:18:10
Speaker
It's a mouth.
01:18:15
Speaker
what kind of, you know, we at one point use, you know, offered and then retracted the word apology and maybe even the word defense, but what kind of meta poetic statement is that poetry makes nothing happen. It survives a way of happening, a mouth. Right. I think this doesn't preclude the possibility that one might read a poem
01:18:43
Speaker
and then go out and do something, right? Like there is a certain action that could come from poetry.
01:18:50
Speaker
It's not contained within the poem itself. And in fact, for it to be a poem and an odd incense of poetry here, it's probably got to contain multiple possibilities for what that action would be and always stay at the level of a way of happening and not turn into kind of happening itself. In my reading, that's where it becomes something like propaganda again and something different than what poetry is, which always reserves that.
01:19:21
Speaker
possibility propaganda also seems and and maybe this is I mean this I don't know that I want to say this is my view or even necessarily Auden's view but it's a view that we can consider which is that there's like propaganda by definition is sort of disingenuous right it's like a use of rhetoric
01:19:43
Speaker
that's instrumentalized to produce a particular kind of social or political effect or response. It's manipulative in that sense. And that's one way I take it one could understand what it means to make something happen. If I make something happen, I think of myself as an agent outside of something that I make happen.
01:20:10
Speaker
affect it, and it is separate from me. But if poetry is a way of happening, then it seems to me to be kind of always, I'm just debating whether to use the jargony word here, imbricated. It seems to be like always itself a part of the happening that it's,
01:20:38
Speaker
describing or, you know, is itself a way of happening. In other words, if I could add a word to clarify to what audience or to emphasize something you might be saying here, it doesn't make it doesn't stand outside of things and like make a thing happen. It is itself a way of happening. And that's the surviving part, right? Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, that's what's happened. It still exists. Right, right. Which both gives it more power, but also takes some away. I mean, you can't
01:21:08
Speaker
Another way to say it is like, well, poetry can't help but be political. It might not be political in a way that you can control. Right. Yeah, I think that's the important part. And if you thought that you could, then it's not what you thought it was. It's propaganda. Audite gives a commencement address at Smith College in 1941, so pretty close to this.
01:21:30
Speaker
And it's a commencement address unlike any that you've ever heard before. It's incredibly philosophical and dense. I'm so surprised that it happens, given the rhetorical occasion. He's talking a lot about in that commencement address about propositions.
01:21:47
Speaker
And I almost get the sense that that's another word we could use for poetry here, that poetry is always propositional, meaning like it's it's potentially one way of describing things or describing the world. It's a proposition. And what you take from that then would be the action that you do out in the world. But it's not delivering to you directly that action. It's giving you instead of proposition, which is a space for you to kind of figure out something about your feelings about it and then move on.
01:22:17
Speaker
Right. It will, after all, have to be modified in the guts of your living body. That's right. It's got to be metabolized. Yeah. Good. Okay. And then we shift, I think it's like so dramatically into this third section of the poem, which has this sort of liturgical kind of chant-like tone to it.
01:22:41
Speaker
I've also, I'm sorry, I forget who it was who said this to me once, but that it sounds like Blake's tiger, tiger burning bright. It's got the same kind of meter to it because it's in these quatrains, but they're not rhymed like
01:22:59
Speaker
you know, say ballad stands are a common meter, is they're not ABAB, they're quatrains that are made of couplets, which is a little unusual, and they're short lines. So the first one, just to remind people, I will read aloud now, Earth receive an honored guest, William Yeats is laid to rest, let the Irish vessel lie, emptied of its poetry.
01:23:26
Speaker
So like you, like me, Bob, you're hearing something different happening here. What's that hearing doing for you in this moment?
01:23:36
Speaker
Well, you know, you're talking about this before with Yeats. It almost sounds like tombstone language to me. Like, you could print that on Yeats' tombstone, perhaps. And I think, you know, sets us off in a place that's doing much less wrestling than the rest of the poem has done. Although I think this section eventually goes on to wrestle just as much with Yeats.
01:24:01
Speaker
I'm thinking a lot about those textual variants here. I think in our conversations about this poem we've discovered there are at least three different versions of this final section too. There are two or maybe three stanzas that are either included or not. So it's got this kind of accordion like growing and condensing that's happening over years, all of which tells me
01:24:25
Speaker
And Auden, like Marianne Moore, edited his poetry, thought a lot about how his poems would reappear later on. But there's just so much kind of restlessness about this particular poem, which must go back to Auden's kind of restlessness about how he imagines Yeats and Yeats's relationship to himself.
01:24:48
Speaker
You mentioned earlier Yeats's poem, Easter 1916, which to my mind so memorably ends with Yeats sort of inscribing names of people, you know, whose political kind of heroism or whatever he wants to memorialize. Here we get Yeats's name and
01:25:15
Speaker
I don't know. I mean, you know, it's hard to say which comes first, but is it the meter that produces this or whatever? But it's always struck me that he says William Yates. Right. Which isn't how we ever refer to him, right? I mean, maybe his friends did. I don't know. But in print or in academic context or, you know, he's always either William Butler Yates or W.B. Yates or
01:25:45
Speaker
Yeats, you know, it's great. Yeah. William Yeats is kind of like I had a friend once say to me, this is a weird question. He said, you know, the actor James Earl Jones, wouldn't we think differently of him if his name was just James Jones or Jim or Jim? Right. Yeah. Anyway, William Yeats, like what's why why why the name here and why the name in that form here? Does any of that seem meaningful to you, Bob?
01:26:15
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think you're suggesting and I think correctly makes them sound less literary, doesn't it? William Yates or Billy Yates or something like that if you bring them up here. I think it is like, it's a gesture at memorialization and maybe even as you were discussing in Easter 1916, kind of monumentalization. Right.
01:26:42
Speaker
I don't know how much intention to read into it, but what happens with inscription in those moments and how you have to make choices. A particular Yeats is going to be inscribed in this moment and maybe it's not the Yeats that Yeats wanted and maybe it's not the Yeats that you and I are familiar with.
01:27:01
Speaker
But it gets written here in stone nevertheless, right? And we're kind of left to deal with the fallout of that. This is how the poet is metabolized in the guts of the living in this moment, right? And thus something different than the eights that lived and persisted previously.
01:27:21
Speaker
I suppose if he is the Irish vessel that has been emptied of its poetry, you know, now that he's dead or something. Right, right, something like that, yeah. And there's only so much room on the tombstone or earlier, right? Yeah, right. So no butler, yeah. I guess so, right. But it also might make sense, like, well, okay, here's the kind of thing, the theoretically interesting thing that one could say is like, the author is not laid to rest.
01:27:50
Speaker
in some, I mean that in some like Foucaultian sense, right? The author does not get buried, the person gets buried. And maybe Butler is a way or WB is a way of signifying like the author function which lives on. But William Yates is this person who's now in the ground, right? Right, the one who was surrounded by nurses and rumors previously, just the body.
01:28:19
Speaker
Right. Right. And then we zoom out to this. Well, it depends the version that, you know, whether we get these included quatrains or whether they are excluded.
01:28:32
Speaker
And I wonder, I don't know if you have very much to say about what's at stake in including them or excluding them. If so, please lead with that if you like, Bob. But in the version that we'll be linking to for our audience, what follows that first stanza of the third section is this section which looks to, that most directly addresses like the coming war, in the nightmare of the dark, all the dogs of Europe bark.
01:29:02
Speaker
What do you make of the kind of movement, the early movement of this third section of the poem? If you've got the two stanzas about time, time and language... Just since people aren't perhaps looking at them, do you want to read those two stanzas out loud?
01:29:19
Speaker
The one I'm interested in is the third one, worship's language. And what worship's language here is time and forgives everyone by whom it lives. Pardons, cowardice, conceit, plays its honors at their feet. This for me goes back to
01:29:37
Speaker
the silliness of section two and the fact that Auden seems to be forgiving Yeats the person here, pardoning Yeats the person because of the poems that go on to have this persistence, right? And because, as you've so eloquently done before, you've separated the body of the author from
01:30:00
Speaker
you know, the author function that keeps going on, which is why time loves language so much because it does that beyond, you know, the life of the author's body, that we can separate those two things. And it's for that reason that we can forgive Yates, we can forgive him for being silly, right? When there are many things that we would perhaps, you know, kind of take him to task for. There's an
01:30:24
Speaker
essay that Auden publishes right around this time, too, called The Public versus the Late Mr. W. B. Yates. And it's written in this kind of legal like defense structure, where there's a prosecutor and a defense, right? They're kind of wrestling back and forth. You know, and the question is, like, how much do we blame Yates? Right. And here, I think we err on the side of generosity again. He was just silly, and we can forgive him.
01:30:52
Speaker
Blame him for what though presumably I mean how specific can we be about that?
01:30:56
Speaker
Yeah, I think I think in my reading again, it's blame him for being the poet who believed that poet was that poetry did more than make nothing matter, make nothing happen. Right. There were there were times in his career as a nationalist poet, you know, as as a politically fraught poet, as a poet of the occult, perhaps where I think Yates ascribed more powers to poetry than Auden did. Right. Right.
01:31:26
Speaker
Interestingly, after the first stanza of the third section,
01:31:37
Speaker
It's not really about Yeats at all anymore, right? Instead, I mean, if I had to give like a title to the section or something, I mean, a bad one, it would be something like, instructions to poets or something, right? Here's what to do now. Yeah, right.
Auden's Instructions to Poets
01:31:51
Speaker
It's like, and I guess we should say that, I mean, this is typical of at least some kinds of, you know, elegiac modes, particularly an elegy for a poet,
01:32:08
Speaker
often becomes an occasion for the poet who's doing the elegizing to theorize or get polemical or offer a view of poetry that they believe in or that they want to celebrate or defend.
01:32:32
Speaker
And the death of the poet, for better or for worse, seems like an occasion to do that kind of theorizing. I don't know, the famous examples, but going all the way back, say, to Milton's Licitis or back further still. So I guess my question for you, Bob, would be if we
01:32:57
Speaker
agree that that's something like what's happening in the rest of this poem, like he's sort of giving a view of what poets should do now.
01:33:07
Speaker
I guess two questions. First of all, what is that view? What should poets do in your own reading of Auden's poem here? And then perhaps more interestingly, what does it have to do with everything that's come before in this poem or with Yeats? Presumably it grows organically in some sense out of that occasion and out of Auden's Yeats. For sure. But how so, if so?
01:33:37
Speaker
I think the first thing to note moving into the final stanzas is the one that will be your second stanza if all of those stanzas we were just talking about have been elided puts us back in the context of the European crisis and the kind of approaching war and the nightmare of the dark, all the dogs of Europe bark and the living nation's weight each sequestered in its hate. So something about the type of poetry that we want to do, that we're being encouraged to do, I think
01:34:08
Speaker
is in response to this political atmosphere, you know, and therefore connected to a lot of the things we've been saying about, you know, the dangers of propaganda and public speaking in this particular moment. I'll note that moving on to the stanza that begins again with that rhythm from the beginning, follow poet, follow right to the bottom of the night.
01:34:32
Speaker
there's a call to rhetoric here at the end of that stanza with your unconstraining voice still persuade us to rejoice. So persuasion, as being what's being asked, so poets should still be interested in persuasion.
01:34:49
Speaker
But the question for us then is what kind of persuasion and how does it function? I note that in the... And how to do it without falling into the trap evidently of propaganda or whatever. Yeah, I think so. Anyway, go on. Sorry. The third line there, this persuasion is done with an unconstraining voice, right? So different than a constraining voice or one that wants to restrict or limit something or potentially the person it's speaking to.
01:35:16
Speaker
So that's one modification made to the rhetoric of speech here in this poem. We want to do with an unconstraining voice, which one reading of that might be allow possibility and potential to remain and what you're saying and don't, you know, delimit or foreclose interpretation.
01:35:37
Speaker
Um, and the next part, the next, the penultimate stanza then, um, continues to describe how this persuasion might work. Um, this is, um, one way trial. Yeah, sorry, go ahead. I just, I just wanted to say one thing, which is that like what we're being persuaded to do is to rejoice. Right.
01:35:57
Speaker
which is a funny kind of limit placed on what the persuasion might be oriented towards. Anyway, go on. Especially given what comes next. I'm gonna borrow this argument from Charles Altieri's reading. So this persuasion's not gonna happen by me telling you, comrade, on how to rejoice or what that means. But I guess I'm gonna sing of unsuccessful and a rapture of distress.
01:36:25
Speaker
Altieri says like this sort of rhetoric doesn't happen in any straightforward way. You know, I'm trying to convince you to do something. What I'm going to do is paint pictures of the human condition, right? Human unsuccess, distress, probably may be connected to this wartime environment that I'm in.
01:36:41
Speaker
And in doing so, maybe we might get to connect over some of these things. So I think that's an important part of what's happening here. Do you want to jump in on either of those last dances before I move on to the last one? Well, I mean, I guess I want to note something along the way here about the interesting work that Rhyme is doing throughout here.
01:37:10
Speaker
I mean, not to take us all the way back, but in that first stanza, it seems interesting that the word lie rhymes with the word poetry. I mean, it's the slantiest, perhaps, of the rhymes that the section contains, but it seems to me to be at least a potentially ironic one. And in the stanzas that you were just talking about,
01:37:31
Speaker
voice rejoice is interesting. Of course, verse and curse are interesting. It seems like Auden is obviously attentive here to the etymology of the word verse and is kind of literalizing it with the farming of a verse. For people who don't know where that word comes from, the word verse is from the Latin sort of to turn and what you're,
01:38:01
Speaker
meant to imagine as the farmer plowing a field and sort of turning in that way. So with the farming of a verse, make a vineyard of the curse. There's all kinds of, there's like this interesting kind of paradoxical thing that he keeps doing in these lines. So sing of human unsuccessful,
01:38:27
Speaker
You normally think singing of success, right? Sing of human unsuccess in a rapture. Okay, you're thinking, okay, well now it's at least it's gonna be something exalted or whatever of distress, right? So there is this kind of through the looking glass kind of feeling to those lines. And I don't, I'm having trouble myself
01:38:56
Speaker
accounting for or saying something beyond just to note that kind of paradoxical turning that's happening here.
The Didactic Nature of Auden's Work
01:39:05
Speaker
But perhaps it's a bid for accounting for the way of happening that poetry is or survives as.
01:39:23
Speaker
And that paradoxical logic persists, of course, into the final stanza, in the deserts of the heart, let the healing fountain start. So we have a kind of arid,
01:39:35
Speaker
landscape that's populated by this healing fountain. And then we have the prison of his days, but the free man had a craze, right? So another kind of paradox or oxymoron there. I don't have much more to say about it than that, Bob. I mean, at least for now, but I want to hear you say something about the final stanza.
01:39:58
Speaker
Well, and just kind of noting what you were saying, something about this persuasion has to seem to do with a range of emotion, right? The poem that would do this if it's trying to persuade us of something and maybe especially if it's trying to persuade us to rejoice would not shy away from
01:40:18
Speaker
These other aspects of human experience or the human condition, right? It would give us like the full range of all of this and and from that You know and from connecting over that perhaps, you know, we can find some joy But the word I'll tell you that really stands out to me in the last sense stands out would be teach hmm
01:40:39
Speaker
And I say this again with a bit of a nod towards Auden's biography, because it's at this moment more or less that Auden becomes really immersed in the college and university classroom.
01:40:54
Speaker
And so it kind of anticipates his next couple of decades in America, where he's going to have so much influence over other poets. So think about the didactic nature of these last stanzas and then teaching and then Auden teaching all kind of lines up for me in that way.
01:41:12
Speaker
And, you know, teaching might be, if you just take it as, you know, to teach someone something might be viewed as the kind of strong action oriented language we've been talking about here. But I think Kamran, you and I as teachers might think of the space of teaching more like the space of poetry we've been talking about, you know, where
01:41:34
Speaker
We hope that action and things might come of what happened in the classroom, but we're certainly never telling someone directly what kind of actions we want, or at least most of the time in our best moments, that the classroom, the scene of teaching is more like this scene of poetry, the scene of possibility, manifold interpretation, one step removed from action that then might
01:42:03
Speaker
with individuals be taken up and mean something later on, perhaps. So I read a lot into that turn towards teaching at the end and how it aligns with making nothing happen in the best way possible. Yeah. Well, that's really nice. I'm persuaded by your emphasis on that first word of that last line and
01:42:31
Speaker
It is interesting to think of Odin as having a kind of didactic, pedagogical kind of spirit at this moment and beyond it. I do want, I mean, earlier, let's see, earlier in the poem,
01:43:00
Speaker
we had the line, this is in the first section, each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom. That image seems to return then in the last two lines of the poem, right? So again, from the first section of the poem, the line was, each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom.
01:43:29
Speaker
Which would sound like, fundamentally, we are not free, but we are sometimes nearly persuaded to mistakenly believe that we are.
01:43:46
Speaker
Yeah, I think so. We get a similar kind of configuration in the final two lines, but the terms are slightly different, and I suspect it's a difference that makes a difference. It's a distinction that makes a difference. In the prison of his days, so what does that phrase mean in the prison of his days?
01:44:07
Speaker
Yeah, I'm the boundedness. Yeah, I don't know. The paradoxical nature of it again, like we're both free and unfree all the time. Maybe the mistake is to think that we're one or the other. Right. And be confident, too confident in that assertion. Right.
Role of Praise in Poetry
01:44:20
Speaker
Because I balance that with another line from section three, which is and the living nation's weight each sequestered in its hate, which kind of connects to this imprisonment or something like that. Right. The divisions.
01:44:37
Speaker
And so certainly there are ways and frames of mind that focus solely on one or another of what Auden might think of as the kind of spectrum inherent to human existence at all times, like nationalism being one that sequesters you, no question about it, something like that.
01:44:59
Speaker
But if we're being honest and if we're being poets, maybe we're pointing out that it's more complicated than this, right? Perhaps we're having both. We exist in both states simultaneously. We are both in prison and free. Right, yeah.
01:45:15
Speaker
Right. Teach the free man how to praise. It just struck me that this is the second poem featured on this podcast that ends with the words to praise. Was that right? The first one, and I'm sure at some level was thinking of this poem because Auden was so important to him, was James Merrill's Christmas tree, which ends still to recall to praise.
01:45:45
Speaker
And there, in that poem, I was talking to Lanny Hammer, who was reminding me that praise is
01:45:54
Speaker
one of poetry's oldest sort of most ancient functions, the poem as praise song, like that the obligation of poetry is to praise, to praise the world or to praise what needs praising in the world. But the idea, I mean, it's a kind of paradoxical idea that the free man would need to be taught how to praise
01:46:23
Speaker
Though if you think of this as a 1939 poem, it might seem more or as a 2024 poem for that matter, it might seem more straightforward. Why in a world that seems to be going to hell, like someone would need to find or discover the resources that would allow for praise still to go on.
01:46:54
Speaker
without denying the horrors of the world, but actually by taking them on in some way. That's right. Yeah, never leaving behind the human unsuccess, right? Or the prison of our days, yeah. The other thought I have there is that that praise is related to Yeats here in the way that you've kind of framed it, that the elegy, you know,
01:47:23
Speaker
as a whole, I think is leaning towards, you know, that those lines pardoning and forgiving that come up with time and language in section three, that I think Auden can very much and gestures that many times for this poem, a version that does not presiates, right? And then it's trying maybe to resolve itself in a space where it can
01:47:50
Speaker
That's beautifully said. Bob, this is such a pleasure. I wonder, as a way of concluding the conversation, if I could ask you to read the poem to us one more time. I would love to. I'm going to read, just for the sake of difference, the collected poems version, which has the slightly truncated third section.
01:48:20
Speaker
He disappeared in the dead of winter. The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted. And Snow disfigured the public statues. The mercury sank in the mouth the dying day. What instruments we have agree the day of his death was a dark cold day.
01:48:42
Speaker
Far from his illness, the wolves ran on through the evergreen forests. The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable keys. By morning tongues, the death of the poet was kept from his poems.
01:48:57
Speaker
But for him, it was his last afternoon as himself. An afternoon of nurses and rumors, the provinces of his body revolted. The squares of his mind were empty. Silence invaded the suburbs. The current of his feeling failed. He became his admirers.
01:49:19
Speaker
Now he is scattered among a hundred cities and wholly given over to unfamiliar affections to find his happiness in another kind of wood and be punished under a foreign code of conscience. The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.
01:49:38
Speaker
But in the importance and noise of tomorrow, when the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the bourse, and the poor have had the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed, and each in his cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom, a few thousand will think of this day as one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual. What instruments we have agree. The day of his death was a dark, cold day.
01:50:10
Speaker
You were silly like us. Your gift survived it all. The parish of rich women, physical decay, yourself. Mad Ireland hurts you into poetry.
01:50:23
Speaker
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.
01:50:50
Speaker
Earth receive an honored guest. William Yeats is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie, emptied of its poetry. In the nightmare of the dark, all the dogs of Europe bark and the living nation's weight each sequestered in its hate. Intellectual disgrace stares from every human face and the seas of pity lie, locked and frozen in each eye.
01:51:18
Speaker
Follow, poet, follow right to the bottom of the night, with your unconstraining voice still persuade us to rejoice. With the farming of a verse, make a vineyard of the curse, sing of human unsuccessful in a rapture of distress. In the deserts of the heart, let the healing fountain start. In the prison of his days, teach the freemen how to praise.
01:51:48
Speaker
Robert Volpecelli reading In Memory of W.B. Yates by W.H. Auden. Bob, this was a real pleasure for me and an education to get to speak with you about this poem for the last couple hours. And I just want to thank you for taking the time and giving us the benefit of your wisdom. Oh, it was so great. I so enjoyed our conversation.
01:52:15
Speaker
Good. Well, listeners, thank you for hanging out with us. And please stay tuned. We'll have more episodes of Close Readings coming for you soon. Be well, everyone.