Rana remembers WH Auden, whose birth centenary falls on 21 Feb.
Linked by bhupinder. Join Blogbharti facebook group.Poets no longer enjoy the kind of fame that Auden, Eliot or Yeats had. Perhaps the last poet to receive such attention was Alan Ginsberg. He may not be in the same league, but each of them was the voice of his generation. And their words resonated with those that followed. Yeats, Eliot and Auden were widely read and quoted during my schooldays in Calcutta (Kolkata), when Ginsberg was shocking people with poems like Howl. That also happened to be the time when the Beatles and Bob Dylan were making waves. And the singers eventually became more popular than the poets.
I remember reading Auden in 50’s. I came from a Telugu medium school and knew ver little (still the same) about English literature but slowly started liking poets like John Donne, T.S.Eliot and Auden. I thought I picked up what suited my tastes and then read an article in Time that these are the kind of poets which appealed to (young?) people those days. Clearly ‘no man is an island’.
I still remember lines from Auden’s ‘In memory of W.B.Yeats’ and keep quoting from it often:
“You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
…..
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives”
gaddeswarup,
I too remember these lines.
“your gift survived it all”
This is beautiful. :)