Digging through what we here affectionately call “the vault” (where back issues come to rest), I picked up the 1964 Winter Issue of KR–our 100th issue, and a tribute to John Crowe Ransom. (Our 70th year of publication is approaching–I wanted to see how we’ve done ‘grand’ in the past.) Inside I found this: three takes, by George P. Eliot, Karl Shapiro, and Stephen Spender, on the W. H. Auden poem “A Change of Air.” Shapiro’s is a delight; I excerpt it here partly because Joe Campana and I both have had Auden on our minds recently, too, and partly because of a writing style and wit that has a strange genius all its own. Such weird and stunning declarative sentences. Buckle your seat belts, ladies and gents:
“Nobody in his right mind is going to horse around with an Auden poem–even a blackboard poem like this one, written with one hand tied behind him. Talk about an Auden poem is anyhow irrelevant; he is a poet of issues and the issues are big. He is his own anthology, the typical poet of the age, the Explainer, and all that. He really is all that. He is lost of other things, one of the few masters of modern speech, one of the great practitioners of English prosody, a true custodian of the tradition. In the Serious World he is already aere perennius, something which is not absolutely certain about Eliot, for instance.
Baudelaire was a great furniture salesman and the twentieth century is sill buying and selling his Effects.
Des muebles luisants
Polis par les ans,
Decoreraint notre chambre…
He was also the pseudo-traveler or travel agent.
The travel agent never goes anywhere and is apparently happy sighing through the brochures. This voyage of Baudelaire’s which he never took–never intended to take–is one of the great topics of modern poetic conversation. But B after all was on a short tether; A is not. Baudelaire made an ideology out of his fear of travel and his hatred of the home town (Paris). We inherit his hatred and his fears. But Auden has the ambience of a fish and is a regular Vasco da Gama. The voyage of B has long since become an affair of psychoanalysts. The voyage of A was a quest and ended successfully in the chapel. B was ashamed of his touristic sensibility and lampooned it, while A covered all the ground and found it wanting. In between was Rimbaud, the last of the voyagers really to go Elsewhere. Nowadays going Elsewhere is as easy as falling off a log.
…I think it was Robert Browning who said his name over and over until he reached the plane of illumination–the moment before the fit so often described by epileptics. Browning was the farthest thing from an epileptic, and we have no illuminati among modern poets, only consciousness addicts and intelligent poets. Intelligent poets are extremely rare and Auden is one of them. Perhaps it is the voayge to the land of intelligence which makes modern poetry so peculiar. In any case, this concern about name and self pulls the rug out from under poetry. If there is one question the poet is not allowed to ask, it is Who am I? (There goes 90 percent of poetry.)”
Hat’s off to Shapiro for horsing around with an Auden poem. What an amazingly prescient take on things.