Two Poets

Two unusually intelligent and contrarian essay/reviews about two unusually great poets were published this week: In The New Yorker, Dan Chiasson writes about Les Murray, and Alan Jacobs remembers W.H. Auden at Christianity Today.

Chiasson uses the publication of Murray’s latest volume, The Biplane Houses, to launch a brief retrospective look at the Australian’s work. That’s a useful and necessary service because American readers seem unaware of Murray’s pugnacious pyrotechnics. As with Auden, you suspect Murray has claimed the English language as his proprietary turf and remade it in his own image. He’s one of those rare writers (Whitman and Melville are others) whose work is big and elastic enough to contain any subject matter, any word or emotion. His sensibility is omnivorous, his verbal energies Shakespearean. Each of Murray’s books is dedicated “to the glory of God.” Chiasson writes:

“[Murray] read Hopkins and Eliot early on and, the biography tells us, devoured the poetry of John Milton in a single weekend. Those three authors govern Murray’s entire career. You hear Hopkins in the homemade compounds and heavy consonants (“Nests of golden porridge shattered in the silky-oak trees, / cobs and crusts of it, their glory box”); you sense Milton behind Murray’s larger-scale works, notably his 1998 verse novel, “Fredy Neptune”; but most of all you detect the presence of Eliot, whose self-monitoring Christianity suggests an inner untidiness too vast to be tamed by ordinary secular means.”

Here’s “Poetry and Religion,” from The Daylight Moon (1987):

“Religions are poems. They concert
our daylight and dreaming mind, our
emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture

“into the only whole thinking: poetry.
Nothing's said till it's dreamed out in words
and nothing's true that figures in words only.

“A poem, compared with an arrayed religion,
may be like a soldier's one short marriage night
to die and live by. But that is a small religion.

“Full religion is the large poem in loving repetition;
like any poem, it must be inexhaustible and complete
with turns where we ask Now why did the poet do that?

“You can't pray a lie, said Huckleberry Finn;
you can't poe one either. It is the same mirror:
mobile, glancing, we call it poetry,

“fixed centrally, we call it a religion,
and God is the poetry caught in any religion,
caught, not imprisoned. Caught as in a mirror

“that he attracted, being in the world as poetry
is in the poem, a law against its closure.
There'll always be religion around while there is poetry

“or a lack of it. Both are given, and intermittent,
as the action of those birds - crested pigeon, rosella parrot –
who fly with wings shut, then beating, and again shut.”

There’s much to marvel at here, starting with the use of “concert” as a verb in the first line and continuing through the ingenious bird metaphor in the final stanza. In an age of Lilliputian poets, Murray is a truculent giant.

Jacobs, who teaches English at Wheaton College in Illinois, writes enthusiastically and non-academically about Auden, especially after his move to the United States in 1940, a period that in the eyes of many critics signaled the start of Auden’s poetic decline. In his defense of the American Auden, Jacobs has begun an admirable reclamation project:

“…here at the centenary I think the most important thing to note is this: in the early 1940s Auden began writing poems that scarcely anyone knew how to read—that scarcely anyone even today knows how to read.”

Jacobs is on to something here. After all, isn’t “In Praise of Limestone,” written in 1948, one of the great poems in the language? Jacobs cites numerous factors that contributed to the critical devaluation of Auden’s later work – his newly fortified Christianity, his homosexuality, his Americanness, his abandonment of knee-jerk left-wing politics – but cites another, more poetic reason:

“Auden had always been a critic of Romanticism and an aficionado of earlier and less fashionable poetic movements: from the beginning he had drawn on medieval literature -- which he had come to love after hearing some lectures at Oxford by an Anglo-Saxonist named Tolkien -- and had celebrated Alexander Pope and Lord Byron -- the one Romantic poet Auden admired, in part because everyone else treated him as a minor poet who had been over-celebrated in his lifetime. Auden despised Shelley especially, often singling out for scorn the notion that `poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.’ It was a model of poetic power that, he saw, many of the great modernists had accepted as well, for all their vocal anti-Romanticism.”

Auden was a public poet in an era when the accepted model of a poem was the personal lyric, usually composed in the first-person, usually with a one-to-one correspondence between poet and speaker. On this business of Romanticism here’s “Contra Blake, from the last book of poems published during his life, Epistle to a Godson:

“The Road of Excess
leads, more often than not, to
The Slough of Despond.”

And from the same volume, from “Shorts II”:

“No, Surrealists, no! No, even the wildest of poems
Must, like prose, have a firm basis in staid common-sense.”

In his indispensable Auden and Christianity, Arthur Kirsch offers an intriguing explanation for the seeming bifurcation in Auden’s poetic career:

“…Auden’s restraint of his vast lyric powers and his consequent disciplinary focus upon metrical virtuosity, as well as the revisions of his poems and canon, may also be understood as acts of religious humility, acknowledgements that poetry is not magical or sacred, and that all things of this world it is a vanity. Auden’s doubts about his art are Christian doubts, and the American Auden is emphatically a Christian Auden – which may be yet another, and often unacknowledged, reason for the depreciation of the achievement of his later poetry.”