A request and Auden for your time

[penguin-dodger.livejournal.com]

Dear fellow poetry lovers, I'm currently working on a project about 20th century British poetry. The theme is along the lines of "has poetry of the 20th century managed to be both simple and significant?" Obviously: what do we mean by simple? Simple in form/meter/metaphor/content? And by significant - socially important/political, dealing with the eternal metaphysical questions, influential etc?
I would be very grateful for any suggestions on what poets I could focus on. So far I have Eliot for complexity and Auden for somewhat diminished complexity.

And here is Musée des Beaux Arts by W. H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong, 
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the plowman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Comments

[ryntha-doghare.livejournal.com]

Ahh, I love Auden's poetry...

[penguin-dodger.livejournal.com]

:)

[moireach.livejournal.com]

I would look at Geoffrey Hill's Holocaust poetry, particularly Ovid in the Third Reich and Septembe Song. He uses super stripped down language to encompass massive horrors -- his line encompassing what went on at the concentration camps is "Things happen."

[penguin-dodger.livejournal.com]

Thank you, I've never read Hill before and this is exactly the sort of thing I was looking for. Ovid in the Third Reich gives a lot of food for thought - very understated language and form, and yet the feelings explored are overwhelmingly complex.

[penguin-dodger.livejournal.com]

Thanks, nice to compare the two works. Seems like Icarus inspired a lot of poets - Jack Gilbert's Failing and Flying comes to mind too.

[veronica-milvus.livejournal.com]

It's a big subject. Get a copy of "The Firebox", edited by the fabulous Sean O'Brien. It's all in there. There are some wonderful poets writing now. Of course the 20th Century greats are Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin, John Betjeman, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Wilfrid Owen, Siegfried Sassoon.... But now or recently there are so many: Michael Longley, Christopher Reid, Jo Shapcott, Carol Ann Duffy, Gillian Clarke. Google "The Poetry Archive" for some tasters.

[penguin-dodger.livejournal.com]

Heh, it is indeed rather a broad topic (eeek). Thanks for the suggestions, I'm not very good with current poets so that's definitely something I'm going to look into.

[tears-of-nienna.livejournal.com]

The World War I poets would be worth a look--the forms are fairly simple, but the content is very complex. Pro-war, anti-war, and often both at the same time.

For some of them, the "poetic" sense wasn't even the goal: "The Poetry is in the pity," as Wilfred Owen said.

[penguin-dodger.livejournal.com]

You're very right, the war poets were writing to express the pity and the misery rather than play with words and poetic form. An interesting point - whether the poetic form being the main goal makes the poetry simpler or more complex.

[pachamama.livejournal.com]

A poet who manages to investigate complex and significant ideas through really fairly simple, approachable language is Don Paterson. Likewise John Glenday. And of course the very master of this is Seamus Heaney.

[penguin-dodger.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the suggestions!

[my-maverick.livejournal.com]

This is my favourite by Auden!