W.H. Auden passed away on this day
Allen Ginsberg, writing to his father, from Ischia (Italy), September 1 (sic), 1957, contemporaneously, sharing thoughts about Auden – “orthodox and conservative and merciless in an offhand way”:
“Auden stays in all day & comes out to cafe in evening & sits with a tableful of dull chatty literary old fairies & they seem to vie with each other in making deprecatory home-made sophisticated small talk. I tackled the whole table on the Whitman issue & wound up tipsy calling them a bunch of shits – Auden seems to have a longwinded rationalistic approach to his opinions – I doubt if he respects his own feelings anymore – I think his long sexual history has been relatively unfortunate and made him very orthodox and conservative and merciless in an offhand way – he sounds like an intelligent Time magazine talking. (Alan) Ansen has the same peculiarity – approaching such questions as capital punishment and literary censorship as if they were complicated bureaucratic problems in which they have no right to have private feelings but only series of factual logical considerations – a sort of fetish of objectivity – which strikes me as no objectivity at all but a sort of abject distrust of people & their own lives. I quoted the first line of Whitman – “I celebrate myself”, etc, and Aude said, “Oh but my dear, that’s so wrong, and so shameless, it’s an utterly bad line – when I hear that I feel I must say please, don’t include me” (re “what I shall assume, you shall assume”) – said that he was an orthodox Englishman, not a democrat (in this context). It all boils down to some sort of reactionary mystique of original sin. Auden is a great poet but he seems old in vain if he’s learned no wildness from life – sort of a Wordworthian camp. Said he “intensely disliked” Shelley. He thought my own book was “full of the author feeling sorry for himself” and saw no vitality or beauty beyond that as far as I could see. All this gives me the conviction, or strengthens the conviction I have had, that the republic of poetry needs a full scale revolution and upsetting of “values” (and a return to a kind of imagination of life in Whitman’s Democratic Vistas that I’ve been reading in Venice).In all this scene with the great names like Auden and Marianne Moore trying to be conservative, and Eliot ambiguous & Pound partly nuts, Williams stands out as the only beautiful soul among the great poets who has tearfully clung to his humanity and has survived as a man to bequeath in America some semblance of the heritage of spiritual democracy – heritage established and handed down by Whitman…”