article published in the journal
La Mosca di Milano - weaves poetry, art and philosophy (n.21, Edizioni La Vita Felice, Milano 2009)
Wystan Hugh Auden -
complexity, memory and irony
Rimbaud
The nights, the railway arches, the pure sky,
were unknown to his horrible companions;
but that child broke out in the lie of the rhetorician
as a pipeline: the poet made the cold.
The drink that his friend gave him weak and unregulated lyrical
the senses in a systematic way,
putting an end to all the usual nonsense;
until weakness and pound was unaware of.
The verse was an odd ear disease;
integrity was not enough, it seemed
hell of childhood: he had to try again.
Now, galloping for Africa, dreamed
another identità, il figlio, l'ingegnere,
quella sua verità buona per i bugiardi.
were unknown to his horrible companions;
but that child broke out in the lie of the rhetorician
as a pipeline: the poet made the cold.
The drink that his friend gave him weak and unregulated lyrical
the senses in a systematic way,
putting an end to all the usual nonsense;
until weakness and pound was unaware of.
The verse was an odd ear disease;
integrity was not enough, it seemed
hell of childhood: he had to try again.
Now, galloping for Africa, dreamed
another identità, il figlio, l'ingegnere,
quella sua verità buona per i bugiardi.
Wystan Hugh Auden, da Another Time (London, New York 1940)
Nel marzo del 1938, assieme allo scrittore Christopher Isherwood, amico d’infanzia e suo attuale amante, Auden raggiunse la Cina con l’incarico di realizzare un reportage di guerra. Da alcuni mesi la Cina resisteva all’urto dell’imperialismo nipponico, alle violenze e alle razzie che, in ogni tempo, sono consueto corollario alle campagne belliche. Durante during that year and the next, the whole world would be plunged into the abyss of global carnage. Commentaries in verse, Auden said the diary of his trip, read some passages that clearly illustrate the depth and knowledge which, even at that time, had landed his philosophy: "Ѐ a trend and an episode of general war between the dead and the unborn, between the real and the imaginary, which, for the creature you create, communicate and choose, alone among the animals conscious of the incomplete, is, in essence, eternal. " Then
poet Wystan had already said. In 1930 was published in the prestigious casa editrice londinese Faber&Faber, la sua prima raccolta di versi, dal titolo icastico e promettente, Poems. Egli vantava, inoltre, la stima di Thomas Stearn Eliot, che di Faber&Faber era direttore editoriale, nonché di altri poeti e critci: Stephen Spender , Dylan Thomas o Naomi Mitchison, la quale, sulle pagine di The Week-end Review , recensì la sua opera di esordio con toni encomiastici. In virtù di tali titoli di merito l’opinione pubblica inglese gli perdonava ciò che appena cinquant’anni prima non aveva potuto perdonare ad un altro grande della letteratura patria, Oscar Wilde. Se le inclinazioni omosessuali, che Wystan viveva con coraggio e senza infingimenti, non pregiudicavano the eyes of the public on its value as a poet, however, that he procured were regarded with suspicion and without a sign of conservative criticism, especially in environments ideologically conservative and respectable. Recall that homosexual behavior in the United Kingdom, began gradually to be decriminalized only since 1923, when WH was a boy of sixteen. The poet of York, after all, boasted more features to succeed unpopular with many British subjects, in years when the colonial empire was fading along with the systems of free trade and the gold standard by which the Kingdom had been, until then, guaranteed political power and industrial prosperity. In those thirty years, when the British government and common sense had not yet developed a clear and conscious against the Nazi threat, the explicit adherence Auden's Marxist ideology does not encourage a consensus to his work that it was unanimous and widespread. In a historical juncture in which even in Britain, a model of political and social stability, the movement's fascist Sir Oswald Mosley was able to gain many followers, those who made up the educated and professional classes, traditional consumers of literature, should not be unusual or difficult to judge with contempt patriotic biting irony and satirical works such as The orators (1932) or theater pieces composed for four hands together with Isherwood (The Dance of Death , 1933; The Dog Beneath the Skin , 1935; The Ascent of F6 , 1937). In spite of what Auden could then enjoy friendships important, mainly in progressive circles, and he profited from the solidarity and sympathy of famous men, from unquestionable authority. It belonged, therefore, full and, in the intellectual class, the small group of brilliant minds and counted which had also, by custom, delegated decisive choices, you want to practice in the field in the spiritual. Even if they are wrong, they were, nevertheless, well aware of the reasons that they had been misled. So, if WH was not maligned publicly and explicitly, because it was only one who did would be considered an inappropriate naive. In withdrawing from anything the poet had already tried: before enrolling as a driver in the International Brigades who fought in the English Civil War, then acceptance by Random House and Faber & Faber charged for war reporting in China. Come back east, he finally decided to leave England for the United States, which later received citizenship in 1946.
His departure for New York made a lot at home, the opportunity for apostrophe as a traitor an egoist who, faced with the difficult times that the country was preparing to face, had not been able to give comfort and consolation that the overseas would be exempt. Especially by those who shared his radical and progressive ideas he was harshly criticized. His departure from Europe, who went to great strides sinking into barbarism, had to be in a mood similar to that in which Arthur Rimbaud reached the African continent, the other land or the land of others, where he had wanted to chase the horizon, the liberation from the anguish of everyday bourgeois bellicose, compensation, through the distance of the wound of its diversity, of his being a poet. Wystan he told one of the most beautiful poems of the collection Another Time (1939), dedicated just to Rimbaud's sonnet, which concludes: "Now, through gallouping Afrika, he dreamed / Of A New Self, the son, the engineer, / His truth to lying Good Men. "¹
Nonetheless, the resentment was not to cause him to leave the homeland. During the second year of his New York residence he once wrote in a letter addressed to his friend Louis McNeice, who is in England and the U.S. "Today an artist feels basically alone, intertwined roots dying, always in opposition to a group, with the only but crucial difference that in America "with 140 million lonely that he is forced to turn around not to waste his time to comply or to rebel." An inner necessity, which could not fail to emerge and could not be criticized, it drives him to create a poetic language where myth meets each experience, even if it was trivial and everyday experience, which he, with unique clarity and penetrating, sensed the trend to decline everywhere in the form of mass neurosis of the monopolist under all latitudes and all schemes. This awareness was expressed in admirably in the collections of poems written during his first years in America: The Double Man (1941), For the Time Being (1944), The Age of Anxiety (1947) e The Shield of Achilles (1955).
In questi anni si operò nel poeta un ripensamento profondo delle radici della propria particolare vocazione, del resto mai disgiunto da una riflessione generale sulle condizioni di esistenza di una poetica possibile; ne fu segno distintivo il tema del disvelamento delle molteplicità, sottaciute o alluse, in ogni fissazione identitaria del pensiero. “All real unity commences/ In consciousness of differences”² scrisse in The Age of Anxiety , dove le differenze sono tanto quelle tra gli individui, socialmente determinate dai modi of their relations, as those who share internally the subjects of each utterance and every act. In the long poem canonicae Hora, which was published in the collection The Shield of Achilles , the voices of the perpetrator, the victim and the witness intertwine subjectivity elegiac noun in a timeless eve, which is the time of anthropological ' waiting, full of thrills wakes up the body and unconscious images that surrounded him from sleep, no less than it is in talks on Friday with Christian theology or the memory of other events, the Messianic, more thoroughly forgotten. The substance of his research, relentlessly aimed at exploring the complexity and the depth of being, also explains his reconciliation, which dates from the period in question, the Christian religion. If, then, in December 1939 after being shocked by the nationalist vision of the public exultation of German immigrants crowding a movie theater in New York, he refused the verses with which, in the famous opera Spain, had invoked the international resistance, Auden did not move closer to theology in order to have assurances to misinterpret the meaning of a lost identity. The time of armed nationalism already staged its overtly secular apocalypse, and the poet was too acute awareness of what we are to take back the ground that he had left dietro si sé (i nonni di Auden erano stati entrambi pastori della Chiesa d’Inghilterra, e il loro lascito spirituale era stato ricevuto con devozione dai genitori del poeta). Il suo senso del sacro fu, al contrario, sempre accompagnato da una tensione inestinta verso l’incontro con la diversità, che Wystan testimoniò pure nella vita, unendosi sentimentalmente al poeta ebreo Chester Kallman, stringendo sodalizio con i poeti afro-americani Owen Dodson e Robert Hayden, dimostrando una spiccata sensibilità per la nuova condizione della donna nei mutati contesti sociali.
Quando Auden rivide il proprio giudizio su alcune sue opere passate e mutò posizione rispetto all’ideologia marxista, della quale i His works of the thirties were impregnated, was not at all to adhere to retrive positions which, in Anglo-Saxon literary world, he had expressed anti-Semitic and nationalist writers like Wyndham Lewis: "Whichever cause you Adopt a game it is Purely and Simply. The only important thing is to be on the side to Which You Belong "³. By contrast, Auden, while acknowledging their membership in the "bourgeoisie" ("No, I am a bourgeois," he concludes a letter to his friend Rupert Doone, which explained the reasons, in 1932, had made him desist dall'aderire the Communist Party), continued his artistic and existential journey on the path that, although he was aware and the limits of human perfectibility, to free his view on the outlook of the future, keeping in balance the strings parallel to the subjectivity of historical trends and desiring object. In the collections he published in the last part of life, from Homage to Clio (1960) to Thank You, Fog (1974), he cast in an increasingly happy meter classic iambic or trochaic, language and conversational slang, drawing, under the auspices of a congenial and humorous muse, the outcome of mild and generous ways, exempt from the lips of an experienced rider who has now learned to forget the truth on which his future disciples not fail to be shocked and , perhaps awakened.
are examples of what the verses, bitter and disillusioned, with whom the poet reflected on employment Soviet Czechoslovakia, in August 1968 : "About a subjugated plain, / Among ITS desperate slain, / The Ogre stalks with hands on hips, / While drivel gushes from His lips "⁴.
poet Wystan had already said. In 1930 was published in the prestigious casa editrice londinese Faber&Faber, la sua prima raccolta di versi, dal titolo icastico e promettente, Poems. Egli vantava, inoltre, la stima di Thomas Stearn Eliot, che di Faber&Faber era direttore editoriale, nonché di altri poeti e critci: Stephen Spender , Dylan Thomas o Naomi Mitchison, la quale, sulle pagine di The Week-end Review , recensì la sua opera di esordio con toni encomiastici. In virtù di tali titoli di merito l’opinione pubblica inglese gli perdonava ciò che appena cinquant’anni prima non aveva potuto perdonare ad un altro grande della letteratura patria, Oscar Wilde. Se le inclinazioni omosessuali, che Wystan viveva con coraggio e senza infingimenti, non pregiudicavano the eyes of the public on its value as a poet, however, that he procured were regarded with suspicion and without a sign of conservative criticism, especially in environments ideologically conservative and respectable. Recall that homosexual behavior in the United Kingdom, began gradually to be decriminalized only since 1923, when WH was a boy of sixteen. The poet of York, after all, boasted more features to succeed unpopular with many British subjects, in years when the colonial empire was fading along with the systems of free trade and the gold standard by which the Kingdom had been, until then, guaranteed political power and industrial prosperity. In those thirty years, when the British government and common sense had not yet developed a clear and conscious against the Nazi threat, the explicit adherence Auden's Marxist ideology does not encourage a consensus to his work that it was unanimous and widespread. In a historical juncture in which even in Britain, a model of political and social stability, the movement's fascist Sir Oswald Mosley was able to gain many followers, those who made up the educated and professional classes, traditional consumers of literature, should not be unusual or difficult to judge with contempt patriotic biting irony and satirical works such as The orators (1932) or theater pieces composed for four hands together with Isherwood (The Dance of Death , 1933; The Dog Beneath the Skin , 1935; The Ascent of F6 , 1937). In spite of what Auden could then enjoy friendships important, mainly in progressive circles, and he profited from the solidarity and sympathy of famous men, from unquestionable authority. It belonged, therefore, full and, in the intellectual class, the small group of brilliant minds and counted which had also, by custom, delegated decisive choices, you want to practice in the field in the spiritual. Even if they are wrong, they were, nevertheless, well aware of the reasons that they had been misled. So, if WH was not maligned publicly and explicitly, because it was only one who did would be considered an inappropriate naive. In withdrawing from anything the poet had already tried: before enrolling as a driver in the International Brigades who fought in the English Civil War, then acceptance by Random House and Faber & Faber charged for war reporting in China. Come back east, he finally decided to leave England for the United States, which later received citizenship in 1946.
His departure for New York made a lot at home, the opportunity for apostrophe as a traitor an egoist who, faced with the difficult times that the country was preparing to face, had not been able to give comfort and consolation that the overseas would be exempt. Especially by those who shared his radical and progressive ideas he was harshly criticized. His departure from Europe, who went to great strides sinking into barbarism, had to be in a mood similar to that in which Arthur Rimbaud reached the African continent, the other land or the land of others, where he had wanted to chase the horizon, the liberation from the anguish of everyday bourgeois bellicose, compensation, through the distance of the wound of its diversity, of his being a poet. Wystan he told one of the most beautiful poems of the collection Another Time (1939), dedicated just to Rimbaud's sonnet, which concludes: "Now, through gallouping Afrika, he dreamed / Of A New Self, the son, the engineer, / His truth to lying Good Men. "¹
Nonetheless, the resentment was not to cause him to leave the homeland. During the second year of his New York residence he once wrote in a letter addressed to his friend Louis McNeice, who is in England and the U.S. "Today an artist feels basically alone, intertwined roots dying, always in opposition to a group, with the only but crucial difference that in America "with 140 million lonely that he is forced to turn around not to waste his time to comply or to rebel." An inner necessity, which could not fail to emerge and could not be criticized, it drives him to create a poetic language where myth meets each experience, even if it was trivial and everyday experience, which he, with unique clarity and penetrating, sensed the trend to decline everywhere in the form of mass neurosis of the monopolist under all latitudes and all schemes. This awareness was expressed in admirably in the collections of poems written during his first years in America: The Double Man (1941), For the Time Being (1944), The Age of Anxiety (1947) e The Shield of Achilles (1955).
In questi anni si operò nel poeta un ripensamento profondo delle radici della propria particolare vocazione, del resto mai disgiunto da una riflessione generale sulle condizioni di esistenza di una poetica possibile; ne fu segno distintivo il tema del disvelamento delle molteplicità, sottaciute o alluse, in ogni fissazione identitaria del pensiero. “All real unity commences/ In consciousness of differences”² scrisse in The Age of Anxiety , dove le differenze sono tanto quelle tra gli individui, socialmente determinate dai modi of their relations, as those who share internally the subjects of each utterance and every act. In the long poem canonicae Hora, which was published in the collection The Shield of Achilles , the voices of the perpetrator, the victim and the witness intertwine subjectivity elegiac noun in a timeless eve, which is the time of anthropological ' waiting, full of thrills wakes up the body and unconscious images that surrounded him from sleep, no less than it is in talks on Friday with Christian theology or the memory of other events, the Messianic, more thoroughly forgotten. The substance of his research, relentlessly aimed at exploring the complexity and the depth of being, also explains his reconciliation, which dates from the period in question, the Christian religion. If, then, in December 1939 after being shocked by the nationalist vision of the public exultation of German immigrants crowding a movie theater in New York, he refused the verses with which, in the famous opera Spain, had invoked the international resistance, Auden did not move closer to theology in order to have assurances to misinterpret the meaning of a lost identity. The time of armed nationalism already staged its overtly secular apocalypse, and the poet was too acute awareness of what we are to take back the ground that he had left dietro si sé (i nonni di Auden erano stati entrambi pastori della Chiesa d’Inghilterra, e il loro lascito spirituale era stato ricevuto con devozione dai genitori del poeta). Il suo senso del sacro fu, al contrario, sempre accompagnato da una tensione inestinta verso l’incontro con la diversità, che Wystan testimoniò pure nella vita, unendosi sentimentalmente al poeta ebreo Chester Kallman, stringendo sodalizio con i poeti afro-americani Owen Dodson e Robert Hayden, dimostrando una spiccata sensibilità per la nuova condizione della donna nei mutati contesti sociali.
Quando Auden rivide il proprio giudizio su alcune sue opere passate e mutò posizione rispetto all’ideologia marxista, della quale i His works of the thirties were impregnated, was not at all to adhere to retrive positions which, in Anglo-Saxon literary world, he had expressed anti-Semitic and nationalist writers like Wyndham Lewis: "Whichever cause you Adopt a game it is Purely and Simply. The only important thing is to be on the side to Which You Belong "³. By contrast, Auden, while acknowledging their membership in the "bourgeoisie" ("No, I am a bourgeois," he concludes a letter to his friend Rupert Doone, which explained the reasons, in 1932, had made him desist dall'aderire the Communist Party), continued his artistic and existential journey on the path that, although he was aware and the limits of human perfectibility, to free his view on the outlook of the future, keeping in balance the strings parallel to the subjectivity of historical trends and desiring object. In the collections he published in the last part of life, from Homage to Clio (1960) to Thank You, Fog (1974), he cast in an increasingly happy meter classic iambic or trochaic, language and conversational slang, drawing, under the auspices of a congenial and humorous muse, the outcome of mild and generous ways, exempt from the lips of an experienced rider who has now learned to forget the truth on which his future disciples not fail to be shocked and , perhaps awakened.
are examples of what the verses, bitter and disillusioned, with whom the poet reflected on employment Soviet Czechoslovakia, in August 1968 : "About a subjugated plain, / Among ITS desperate slain, / The Ogre stalks with hands on hips, / While drivel gushes from His lips "⁴.
Giancarlo Micheli
1 "Now, at a gallop through Africa, dream / to a new self, his son, the engineer / The truth is acceptable to the liars. "
2 "Every genuine unit starts / In recognition of diversity."
3 "Any cause you adopt, it is a mere game. The only important thing is, instead, choose to be on the side where you belong "in Inglese Review, 59 (November 1934).
4 "Long a subjugated plain, / Among its desperate victims, / The Ogre advances with ease, / hands on her hips and making jokes."
2 "Every genuine unit starts / In recognition of diversity."
3 "Any cause you adopt, it is a mere game. The only important thing is, instead, choose to be on the side where you belong "in Inglese Review, 59 (November 1934).
4 "Long a subjugated plain, / Among its desperate victims, / The Ogre advances with ease, / hands on her hips and making jokes."
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