2.21.2007
Happy Birthday Auden
[Posted 11:01 AM by Emily Ghods]
Today is the 100th anniversary of W.H Auden’s birth. In tribute, The Wall Street Journal published this article written by Ms. Julia M. Klein (log-in required). In the article, Ms. Klein is in conversation with the Columbia professor of English and comparative literature Edward Mendelson, who is Auden’s executor and who has recently published new editions of Auden’s collected and selected poems.
Mr. Mendelson notes that Auden’s reputation has only grown since his death. His verse has resurfaced in everything from political speeches and commercials to the films “Four Weddings and a Funeral” and “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” and the play “The History Boys.” The last two invoke “Musée des Beaux Arts,” with its famous opening lines: “About suffering they were never wrong/The Old Masters . . .” Mr. Mendelson says that the first President Bush’s references to “a thousand points of light,” a phrase attributed to speechwriter Peggy Noonan, may have drawn on Auden’s “ironic points of light” in “September 1, 1939.”
Why does Auden remain so popular? Mr. Mendelson says that in “a culture designed to tell you that the individual person does not really matter,” Auden addresses readers as individuals and takes as his central concern their “moral relation” with one another. His poetry also has a “visionary quality” that involves “seeing the infinite value of what’s right in front of you,” he says.
For more on The New Criterion’s thoughts about Auden, click here for an article by