Poet's Choice

This month marks the centennial of the birth of W.H. Auden (1907-73). Auden's characteristic view was outward rather than introspective. He embraced the ideas and issues of his time and thought about Marx and Freud, for whom he wrote a memorable elegy. As a poet, he was inventive, but not in what he found to say or in formal matters; his distinctive originality is in his omnivorous imagination. He included in his poetry every sort of thing that attracted his eye, every sort of word or speech he heard or read. He devised a tone, a feeling of wry, informed and doom-ridden attentiveness, as seen here:

The Fall of Rome

(for Cyril Connolly)

The piers are pummelled by the waves;

In a lonely field the rain

Lashes an abandoned train;

Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

Fantastic grow the evening gowns;

Agents of the Fisc pursue

Absconding tax-defaulters through

The sewers of provincial towns.