major american writers: wallace stevens poet(s) of the week: w. h. auden (1907-1973) and muriel...

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Poet(s) of the Week: W. H. Auden (1907-1973) and Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980)


Poet(s) of the Week: W. H. Auden (1907-1973)

Herman Melvilleby W. H. Auden

Towards the end he sailed into an extraordinary mildness,And anchored in his home and reached his wifeAnd rode within the harbour of her hand,And went across each morning to an officeAs though his occupation were another island.

Goodness existed: that was the new knowledgeHis terror had to blow itself quite outTo let him see; but it was the gale had blown himPast the Cape Horn of sensible successWhich cries: 'This rock is Eden. Shipwreck here.'But deafened him with thunder and confused with lightning:—The maniac hero hunting like a jewelThe rare ambiguous monster that had maimed his sex,The unexplained survivor breaking off the nightmare—All that was intricate and false; the truth was simple.

W. H. Auden (1907-1973)Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Herman Melville Evil is unspectacular and always human,And shares our bed and eats at our own table,And we are introduced to Goodness every day.Even in drawing-rooms among a crowd of faults;he has a name like Billy and is almost perfectBut wears a stammer like a decoration:And every time they meet the same thing has to happen;It is the Evil that is helpless like a loverAnd has to pick a quarrel and succeeds,And both are openly destroyed before our eyes. For now he was awake and knewNo one is ever spared except in dreams;But there was something else the nightmare had distorted—Even the punishment was human and a form of love:The howling storm had been his father's presenceAnd all the time he had been carried on his father's breast.


Herman Melville Who now had set him gently down and left him.He stood upon the narrow balcony and listened:And all the stars above him sang as in his childhood'All, all is vanity,' but it was not the same;For now the words descended like the calm of mountains——Nathaniel had been shy because his love was selfish—But now he cried in exultation and surrender'The Godhead is broken like bread. We are the pieces.'And sat down at his desk and wrote a story.


The Unknown Citizen(To JS/07 M 378This Marble MonumentIs Erected by the State)

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to beOne against whom there was no official complaint,And all the reports on his conduct agreeThat, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.Except for the War till the day he retiredHe worked in a factory and never got fired,But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.Yet he wasn’t a scab or odd in his views,For his Union reports that he paid his dues,(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)


The Unknown Citizen

And our Social Psychology workers foundThat he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every dayAnd that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declareHe was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment PlanAnd had everything necessary to the Modern Man,A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.Our researchers into Public Opinion are content That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.He was married and added five children to the population,Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation.And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.


September 1, 1939W. H. Auden, 1907 - 1973

I sit in one of the divesOn Fifty-second StreetUncertain and afraidAs the clever hopes expireOf a low dishonest decade:Waves of anger and fearCirculate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth,Obsessing our private lives;The unmentionable odour of deathOffends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can Unearth the whole offenceFrom Luther until nowThat has driven a culture mad,Find what occurred at Linz,What huge imago madeA psychopathic god:


September 1, 1939

I and the public knowWhat all schoolchildren learn,Those to whom evil is doneDo evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knewAll that a speech can sayAbout Democracy,And what dictators do,The elderly rubbish they talkTo an apathetic grave;Analysed all in his book,The enlightenment driven away,The habit-forming pain,Mismanagement and grief:We must suffer them all again.


September 1, 1939

Into this neutral airWhere blind skyscrapers useTheir full height to proclaimThe strength of Collective Man,Each language pours its vainCompetitive excuse:But who can live for longIn an euphoric dream;Out of the mirror they stare,Imperialism’s faceAnd the international wrong.

Faces along the barCling to their average day:The lights must never go out,The music must always play,All the conventions conspire To make this fort assumeThe furniture of home;


September 1, 1939

Lest we should see where we are,Lost in a haunted wood,Children afraid of the nightWho have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trashImportant Persons shoutIs not so crude as our wish:What mad Nijinsky wroteAbout DiaghilevIs true of the normal heart;For the error bred in the boneOf each woman and each manCraves what it cannot have,Not universal loveBut to be loved alone.


W. H. AudenSeptember 1, 1939

From the conservative darkInto the ethical lifeThe dense commuters come,Repeating their morning vow;“I will be true to the wife,I’ll concentrate more on my work,"And helpless governors wakeTo resume their compulsory game:Who can release them now,Who can reach the deaf,Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voiceTo undo the folded lie,The romantic lie in the brainOf the sensual man-in-the-streetAnd the lie of AuthorityWhose buildings grope the sky:There is no such thing as the StateAnd no one exists alone;Hunger allows no choiceTo the citizen or the police;We must love one another or die.

W. H. Auden (1907-1973)


September 1, 1939

Defenceless under the nightOur world in stupor lies;Yet, dotted everywhere,Ironic points of lightFlash out wherever the JustExchange their messages:May I, composed like themOf Eros and of dust,Beleaguered by the sameNegation and despair,Show an affirming flame.



W. H. Auden (1907-1973)


Poet(s) of the Week: Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980)

MythLong afterward, Oedipus, old and blinded, walked the roads. He smelled a familiar smell. It wasthe Sphinx. Oedipus said, “I want to ask one question.Why didn’t I recognize my mother?” “You gave thewrong answer,” said the Sphinx. “But that was whatmade everything possible,” said Oedipus. “No,” she said.“When I asked, What walks on four legs in the morning,two at noon, and three in the evening, you answered,Man. You didn’t say anything about woman.”“When you say Man,” said Oedipus, “you include womentoo. Everyone knows that.” She said, “That’s whatyou think.”

Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980)Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

The Poem as Mask

OrpheusWhen I wrote of the women in their dances and wildness, it was a mask,on their mountain, gold-hunting, singing, in orgy,it was a mask; when I wrote of the god,fragmented, exiled from himself, his life, the love gone down with song,it was myself, split open, unable to speak, in exile from myself.

There is no mountain, there is no god, there is memoryof my torn life, myself split open in sleep, the rescued childbeside me among the doctors, and a wordof rescue from the great eyes.

No more masks! No more mythologies!

Now, for the first time, the god lifts his hand,the fragments join in me with their own music.


Painters

In the cave with a long-ago flarea woman stands, her arms up. Red twig, black twig, brown twig.A wall of leaping darkness over her.The men are out hunting in the early lightBut here in this flicker, one or two men, paintingand a woman among them.Great living animals grow on the stone walls,their pelts, their eyes, their sex, their hearts,and the cave-painters touch them with life, red, brown, black,a woman among them, painting.


The Conjugation of the Paramecium

This has nothingto do withpropagating

The speciesis continuedas so many are(among the smaller creatures)by fission

(and this speciesis very smallnext in order tothe amoeba, the beginning one)



The parameciumachieves, then,immortalityby dividing

But whenthe parameciumdesires renewalstrength another joythis is what the paramecium does:

The parameciumlies down besideanother paramecium



Slowly inexplicablythe exchangetakes placein whichsome bitsof the nucleus of eachare exchanged

for some bits of the nucleusof the other

This is calledthe conjugation of the paramecium.


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