"No words men write can stop the war"

posted by k

Today is the 100^th anniversary of W.H. Auden’s birth. As the South Bank Show on Sunday made clear, he’s still seen as a difficult figure: the poet of the left who spent the war in America. No matter that his departure was arranged in the wake of Munich nor that the decision was personal (Auden later ascribed it to a need to grow up but he’d also found a life-long partner in the young Jewish-American poet Chester Kallman); according to the thinking of the time it was the responsibility of poets to join the army or be bombed in London. Settling in New York (eventually joining the U.S. army as part of the Strategic Bombing Survey) didn’t fit the popular image of the lyric poet who should, ideally, die young.

What Auden did instead was to rethink the role of the poet and, by implication, of language itself. Before the Second World War began, Auden, who had become accustomed to speak in public on a range of subjects from documentary film to anti-fascism, discovered that he had the ability to sway an audience. The experience shocked him and may have been one of the influences on his renunciation of lyric poetry. Within the space of a single poem – “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” – he moved from the idea that Time “Worships language” to the declaration that “poetry makes nothing happen”. By 1950, in “We Too Had Known Golden Hours”, Auden observed that “words like Peace and Love,/All sane affirmative speech” had been “soiled” and “debased” by mass media and politicians, so that the only possible speech remaining was “wry” and “Ironic”. Still the “suburb of dissent” remained.

The ironic, questioning, playful voice continued until 1973, often dissenting and asking awkward questions. Auden reminds us to be mistrustful of political and media rhetoric and to avoid the easy cliché which sways opinion by avoiding thought. He reminds us too of a shared humanity.

It seems apt to recall a few of his words on what would have been Auden's 100^th birthday.

“In our age, the mere making of a work of art is itself a political act. So long as artists exist, making what they please and think they ought to make, even if it is not terribly good, even if it appeals only to a handful of people, they remind the Management of something managers need to be reminded of, namely, that the managed are people with faces, not anonymous members, that Homo Laborans is also Homo Ludens.” [i.e. man who labours is also man who plays] (“The Poet & the City")

"Speech can at best, a shadow echoing
the silent light, bear witness
to the Truth it is not …" (“The Cave of Making”)

"how strange the change"

posted by k


Time for a quiz. (Most blogs have them).

There are just three questions and no prizes.


1. Who said this?

"My father fought in the last great European war. I was born in 1953, a child of the Cold War eara, raised amid the constant fear of a conflict with the potential to destroy all of humanity. Whatever other dangers may exist, no such fear exists today. Mine is the first generation able to contemplate the possibility that we may live our entire lives without going to war or sending our children to war. That is a prize beyond value and this agreement is a great contribution to it.

"The drawing of this new European landscape has not been easy, as many in this room know better than I. Stability and prosperity are never assured, they can never be taken for granted, but throughout central and eastern Europe political and economic miracles are being wrought. People raised on suffering and pain sense stability and prosperity can now lie ahead."


2. and who said this?

"The collapse of the Berlin Wall acted as a catalyst for a reappraisal of the type of Armed Forces that the UK would require to meet the security challenges which emerged to fill the vacuum of a post bipolar world. The peace dividend from the end of the Cold War was announced in the 1990 review "Options for Change", which sought an 18% reduction in manpower.

"Yet already a new strategic reality was upon us: the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait later that year confirmed that there were situations further afield which might require a military resolution. Closer to home the former Yugoslavia disintegrated into civil war and ethnic cleansing.

"This new security context was articulated in the 1998 Strategic Defence Review. It called for expeditionary Armed Forces that were deployable, agile and adaptable."

3. and who said this?

"There are two types of nations similar to ours today. Those who do war fighting and peacekeeping and those who have, effectively, except in the most exceptional circumstances, retreated to the peacekeeping alone.

"Britain does both. We should stay that way. But how do we gain the consent to do it?"

There's a clue in the picture. The last two are from Tony Blair's speech aboard HMS Albion on 12th January, 2007. And the first is from Tony Blair's speech in Paris on 27th May, 1997.

It's strange to contemplate the change from hope to horror. And it's strange to observe so casual and careless an attempt to rewrite history.