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rebeccabateman's review
4.0
How does one rate a poem? Or a book of poetry?
A poem which might seem empty at one moment will speak to you with the weight of the world in the next. Familiarity with a variety of poems allows one to archive them away and then retrieve one when the timing is right, and it, like a balm, heals. And so I read poetry.
W.H. Auden is simultaneously accessible and complex. His writing is a paradoxy; a mixture of modern and ancient, everyday commonplace raised to royal, angry and loving.
I've carried this edition in my handbag for several months now, referring to it whenever I had a free minute. Many of the corners are dog-eared so I can easily return. Here are a couple:
A poem which might seem empty at one moment will speak to you with the weight of the world in the next. Familiarity with a variety of poems allows one to archive them away and then retrieve one when the timing is right, and it, like a balm, heals. And so I read poetry.
W.H. Auden is simultaneously accessible and complex. His writing is a paradoxy; a mixture of modern and ancient, everyday commonplace raised to royal, angry and loving.
I've carried this edition in my handbag for several months now, referring to it whenever I had a free minute. Many of the corners are dog-eared so I can easily return. Here are a couple:
Epitaph on a Tyrant
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst
with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
Law Like Love
Law, say the gardeners, is the sun,
Law is the one
All gardeners obey
To-morrow, yesterday, to-day.
Law is the wisdom of the old,
The impotent grandfathers feebly scold;
The grandchildren put out a treble tongue,
Law is the senses of the young.
Law, says the priest with a priestly look,
Expounding to an unpriestly people,
Law is the words in my priestly book,
Law is my pulpit and my steeple.
Law, says the judge as he looks down his nose,
Speaking clearly and most severely,
Law is as I've told you before,
Law is as you know I suppose,
Law is but let me explain it once more,
Law is The Law.
Yet law-abiding scholars write:
Law is neither wrong nor right,
Law is only crimes
Punished by places and by times,
Law is the clothes men wear
Anytime, anywhere,
Law is Good morning and Good night.
Others say, Law is our Fate;
Others say, Law is our State;
Others say, others say
Law is no more,
Law has gone away.
And always the loud angry crowd,
Very angry and very loud,
Law is We,
And always the soft idiot softly Me.
If we, dear, know we know no more
Than they about the Law,
If I no more than you
Know what we should and should not do
Except that all agree
Gladly or miserably
That the Law is
And that all know this
If therefore thinking it absurd
To identify Law with some other word,
Unlike so many men
I cannot say Law is again,
No more than they can we suppress
The universal wish to guess
Or slip out of our own position
Into an unconcerned condition.
Although I can at least confine
Your vanity and mine
To stating timidly
A timid similarity,
We shall boast anyway:
Like love I say.
Like love we don't know where or why,
Like love we can't compel or fly,
Like love we often weep,
Like love we seldom keep.
nacirema's review
5.0
I'm embarrassed to admit that I had been given this book ten years ago, and only just now had I gotten myself to read it. Though now having read it, more than embarrassed, I feel bad for myself that I missed out for so long on an experience with Auden.
I like to take my time with poetry anyway, but this is a book that is especially demanding of a slow read. With varying structures of rhyme and meter, as well as different lengths of poems, I found this collection worked better doing short reads of 2-4 poems a sitting than simply going through the entire book at once.
By my understanding just from the text, this is an anthology of sorts, with various poems published from Auden throughout his career. This was also fun for me, to watch certain changes occur, or at least how they're placed. For example, there are a lot of shorter poems in the beginning, and get longer as they go on.
However, the quality of poem, in my opinion, remains the same. Looking at my copy of the book right now, there are more dog-ears than I can count, and many poems that I can tell I'll be coming back to in order to reflect on later.
In a way, I suppose I'm glad I waited this long to read these poems. I doubt that my middle-school aged self would have been able to fully appreciate many of the topics at hand.
I like to take my time with poetry anyway, but this is a book that is especially demanding of a slow read. With varying structures of rhyme and meter, as well as different lengths of poems, I found this collection worked better doing short reads of 2-4 poems a sitting than simply going through the entire book at once.
By my understanding just from the text, this is an anthology of sorts, with various poems published from Auden throughout his career. This was also fun for me, to watch certain changes occur, or at least how they're placed. For example, there are a lot of shorter poems in the beginning, and get longer as they go on.
However, the quality of poem, in my opinion, remains the same. Looking at my copy of the book right now, there are more dog-ears than I can count, and many poems that I can tell I'll be coming back to in order to reflect on later.
In a way, I suppose I'm glad I waited this long to read these poems. I doubt that my middle-school aged self would have been able to fully appreciate many of the topics at hand.
trish204's review
2.0
W.H. Auden was born on 21st February 1907 in York. He grew up in and near Birmingham in a professional middle-class family. He attended English public schools and studied English at Christ Church, Oxford.
After a few months in Berlin in 1928–29, he spent five years (1930–35) teaching in English public schools, then travelled to Iceland and China in order to write books about his journeys.
In 1939 he moved to the United States and became an American citizen in 1946.
Auden was also gay, maintaining a lasting but intermittent sexual friendship with Christopher Isherwood, with whom he also collaborated on three plays, while both had briefer but supposedly more intense relations with other men.
In 1939 Auden fell in love with Chester Kallman and regarded their relation as a marriage; this ended in 1941 when Kallman refused to accept the faithful relation that Auden demanded. The two maintained their friendship and from 1947 until Auden's death they lived in the same house or apartment in a non-sexual relation, often collaborating on opera.
From 1941 to 1945 Auden taught in American universities, followed by occasional visiting professorships in the 1950s (he was the Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1956 to 1961 for example).
From 1947 to 1957 he wintered in New York and summered in Ischia; from 1958 until the end of his life he wintered in New York (in Oxford in 1972–73) and summered in Kirchstetten, Austria, where he died on 29th September 1973.
He won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his long poem The Age of Anxiety (published 1947), the title of which became a popular phrase describing the modern era. Unfortunately, this poem was not included in this book; a shame since a collection should always include the best/most known works.
Auden wrote prose essays and reviews on literary, political, psychological and religious subjects. He also worked on documentary films, poetic plays, and other forms of performance. Throughout his career he was both controversial and influential. Critical views on his work ranged from sharply dismissive, treating him as a lesser follower of Yeats and T. S. Eliot, to strongly affirmative (as in Joseph Brodsky's claim that he had "the greatest mind of the twentieth century").
I must admit that I had hoped to love Auden’s works more. I discovered him when Stephen Fry recited Funeral Blues in one of his documentaries about language and fell in love with the lines. Auden was definitely the romantic type. However, he was strong in expressing political views too, as is evident in Refugee Blues (yeah, he seems to have had a thing for „blues“, using that word in several titles). That became my second favourite en par with Archaeology and almost en par with Musée des Beaux Arts (again, the romantic kind). Also a pretty good one was The Shield of Achilles, which describes expectations of war vs reality. To be clear: those deserve 4 to 5 stars each (I'm only mentioning this because of my exceptionally low rating).
Nevertheless, there were only these few works that really stood out; the rest were either not really very memorable or even „ugly“ to me. That was surprising and saddening. Since Auden's poetry was noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, religion, and its variety in tone, form and content, I had hoped to spend several hours marvelling in the poet‘s world, seeing that I was understood or learning new perspectives even (which is what poetry is chiefly about) – but that was unfortunately not the case.
So 5 (6 with the Pulitzer-Prize-winning but not included one) out of 102 poems in this collection ... that's not a good bottom line.
After a few months in Berlin in 1928–29, he spent five years (1930–35) teaching in English public schools, then travelled to Iceland and China in order to write books about his journeys.
In 1939 he moved to the United States and became an American citizen in 1946.
Auden was also gay, maintaining a lasting but intermittent sexual friendship with Christopher Isherwood, with whom he also collaborated on three plays, while both had briefer but supposedly more intense relations with other men.
In 1939 Auden fell in love with Chester Kallman and regarded their relation as a marriage; this ended in 1941 when Kallman refused to accept the faithful relation that Auden demanded. The two maintained their friendship and from 1947 until Auden's death they lived in the same house or apartment in a non-sexual relation, often collaborating on opera.
From 1941 to 1945 Auden taught in American universities, followed by occasional visiting professorships in the 1950s (he was the Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1956 to 1961 for example).
From 1947 to 1957 he wintered in New York and summered in Ischia; from 1958 until the end of his life he wintered in New York (in Oxford in 1972–73) and summered in Kirchstetten, Austria, where he died on 29th September 1973.
He won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his long poem The Age of Anxiety (published 1947), the title of which became a popular phrase describing the modern era. Unfortunately, this poem was not included in this book; a shame since a collection should always include the best/most known works.
Auden wrote prose essays and reviews on literary, political, psychological and religious subjects. He also worked on documentary films, poetic plays, and other forms of performance. Throughout his career he was both controversial and influential. Critical views on his work ranged from sharply dismissive, treating him as a lesser follower of Yeats and T. S. Eliot, to strongly affirmative (as in Joseph Brodsky's claim that he had "the greatest mind of the twentieth century").
I must admit that I had hoped to love Auden’s works more. I discovered him when Stephen Fry recited Funeral Blues in one of his documentaries about language and fell in love with the lines. Auden was definitely the romantic type. However, he was strong in expressing political views too, as is evident in Refugee Blues (yeah, he seems to have had a thing for „blues“, using that word in several titles). That became my second favourite en par with Archaeology and almost en par with Musée des Beaux Arts (again, the romantic kind). Also a pretty good one was The Shield of Achilles, which describes expectations of war vs reality. To be clear: those deserve 4 to 5 stars each (I'm only mentioning this because of my exceptionally low rating).
Nevertheless, there were only these few works that really stood out; the rest were either not really very memorable or even „ugly“ to me. That was surprising and saddening. Since Auden's poetry was noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, religion, and its variety in tone, form and content, I had hoped to spend several hours marvelling in the poet‘s world, seeing that I was understood or learning new perspectives even (which is what poetry is chiefly about) – but that was unfortunately not the case.
So 5 (6 with the Pulitzer-Prize-winning but not included one) out of 102 poems in this collection ... that's not a good bottom line.
tijanak's review
challenging
emotional
funny
reflective
slow-paced
4.0
Enjoyable read of an interesting selection of poems. Granted, some poems were not to my liking. Even so, I found myself annotating in those poems as well, as some of the verses were spectacular. When Auden is good, he is great! A selection of some of my favorite poems include:
• The Question
• As I Walked Out One Evening
• At Last the Secret is Out
• Funeral Blues
• Johnny
• O Tell Me the Truth About Love
• In Memory of W. B. Yeats
• The More Loving One (absolute gem!)
• The Question
• As I Walked Out One Evening
• At Last the Secret is Out
• Funeral Blues
• Johnny
• O Tell Me the Truth About Love
• In Memory of W. B. Yeats
• The More Loving One (absolute gem!)
hayley_loves_books's review
2.0
This one was hard work for me. The majority of poems I found wordy with no emotional impact for me.
The poems I did love I really loved. My favourite, the reason I bought the book was Funeral Blues. Made popular in the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral.
Other standouts were O Tell Me The Truth About Love, In Memory of WB Yeats and Refugee Blues. The Shield of Achilles and Thanksgiving not too bad.
The poems I did love I really loved. My favourite, the reason I bought the book was Funeral Blues. Made popular in the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral.
Other standouts were O Tell Me The Truth About Love, In Memory of WB Yeats and Refugee Blues. The Shield of Achilles and Thanksgiving not too bad.
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