One day, while W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender were students at
Oxford, Spender told him that he was thinking of stopping writing
poetry. Auden stopped in his tracks, took firm hold of Spender’s arm,
and said, “You must keep writing poetry, Stephen—we need you.”
After relocating to America in 1939, Auden lived on Middagh Street in
Brooklyn, and in Manhattan on Cornelia Street, East 52nd Street, and
then, for a long time, at 77 St. Mark ’s Place and was a parishioner at
St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, though he made a point of leaving the
latter in the 60s when the rector modernized the liturgy and removed the
pews.
Frank O’Hara told me that once, around 1949, while he and John
Ashbery were at Harvard, they were in the Grolier Bookshop together and
saw Auden browsing the shelves. Nothing passed between Auden and the
then very young poets. After Auden left the shop, John said to Frank,
“Wouldn’t you think he’d know?”
Frank also said that Auden’s poem beginning “It was Easter as I
walked in the public gardens” inspired some of his “lunch” poems.
Another time, at the Free University on the Lower East Side, Frank spent
a whole class reading aloud from Auden’s long work The Orators.
Like many great poets, Auden said provocative but inaccurate things, like “There is no daylight in New York.”
In April, 1939, Auden and William Carlos Williams read together at
Cooper Union. Later Williams wrote of Auden: “There is no modern poet so
agile—so impressive in the use of the poetic means. He can do
anything—except one thing.”
One of Auden’s early books is called The Double Man. In it,
he quotes from Montaigne: “We are, I know not how, double in ourselves,
so that what we believe we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what
we condemn.”
A masterful, funny, and genuinely pornographic poem of his called
“The Platonic Blow” was pirated by Ed Sanders, who printed it in 1965 as
a supplement to an issue of Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts.
I met Auden only once, at a dinner party in the late 60s at the
journalist and songwriter Irving Drutman’s uptown apartment. I was late
for the occasion because of the poetry class I was teaching at the New
School for Social Research, and by the time I got there, not only had
everyone else sat down to dinner, but Auden had already drunk a lot of
wine and was, as he liked to say, “tiddly.” I sat next to him at the
table while he held forth, precisely and with great emotion, about his
life. “It took me 50 years,” he said, “to know that I belong to the
same social class as my parents.” He left right after dinner, which was,
Irving Drutman told me, the usual thing (“early to bed”) for him. Later
it occurred to me that he had made his remark about family class
structures for my benefit. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/twenty-three-things-about-w-h-auden/
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