'His Enduring Influence on Myself and Others'

“He was the very model of a grand old man: punctilious, unbellicose, evenhanded, coasting with evident enjoyment down the waning rim of his life and into—well, posterity?” 

A graduate student in English, soon to write one of the first books devoted to the now forgotten novelist John Gardner, came downstairs, probably on September 30, 1973, to tell me W.H. Auden had died at age sixty-six. He had tears on his face. I had thought of Auden for some time as old yet somehow permanent, like Proust. In the previous year or so we had lost Marianne Moore, John Berryman, Edmund Wilson. As a kid, I discovered Auden’s poems in an Oscar Williams anthology. Here’s an admission that at one time would have embarrassed me: I liked his poems because I understood them. He wrote to be understood and to please his reader, not to sound brooding or baffling. Among his chief virtues as a writer were articulation and clarity. You came to think he could write a poem about anything, however unlikely, and make it work.

 

Over the holidays I’ve kept his hefty Collected Poems on my nightstand, reading a few at random each day, starting with my current favorite, “In Praise of Limestone.” It’s fashionable to see a decline in quality in Auden’s work in his final years. I don’t see it. Take “Old People’s Home,” written in 1970 for his friend Elizabeth Mayer and collected in Epistle for a Godson (1972). It begins:

 

“All are limitory, but each has her own

nuance of damage.  The elite can dress and decent themselves,

    are ambulant with a single stick, adroit

to read a book all through, or play the slow movements of

    easy sonatas. (Yet, perhaps their very

carnal freedom is their spirit's bane: intelligent

    of what has happened and why, they are obnoxious

to a glum beyond tears.)”

 

A fiction writer might envy the human wealth in these lines, clear and suggestive as good prose. The passage quoted at the top is from the remembrance L.E. Sissman wrote for Auden, published in The Atlantic Monthly and collected in Innocent Bystander: The Scene from the 70’s (1975). Sissman concludes:

 

“So I have written instead this fragment of reminiscence of how his work affected me when I first came upon him, and how it has affected me for the rest of my adult life. Because he has lived, in his enduring influence on myself and others, it is safe to say he will live. Of that I am quite sure.”

 

Sissman himself, born on January 1, 1928, would die two and a half years after Auden, on March 10, 1976, at age forty-eight.