"Auden in New York"
On Thursday evening, October 23, 2008., at 7 PM at
THE PHILOCTETES CENTER FOR THE MULTIDISCIPLINARY
STUDY OF IMAGINATION
at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute
(EDWARD NERSESSIAN AND FRANCIS LEVY, DIRECTORS)
The Philoctetes Center
247 East 82nd Street
(Phone: 646-422-0544; email: [email protected])
Our Life in Poetry: Auden in New York
Participants: Michael Braziller & David Lehman
Thursday, October
23, 2008 / 7 pm
one of the major poets of the twentieth century, spent the war years in New York
citizen in 1946, and exercised an enormous influence on the direction of
American poetry. The poems he wrote at this time are
among the most significant — and are without doubt the most
controversial — in the Auden canon.
"September 1, 1939" and "In Memory of William
Butler Yeats" command our special interest not only for their literary
excellence and fame but because of their publishing history (and because
"September 1, 1939"has struck many readers as eerily apropos to
the atrocious events of a more recent September). Auden
grew unhappy with both poems for reasons that are worth investigating, and he
revised them radically. Did he improve or harm them? We will talk about
his revisions, the ethical as well as literary implications of Auden‘s decisions, and about the lines in the poems that
have generated the greatest amount of heat: "Poetry makes nothing
happen." "We must love me another or die." The poems are
challenging and will reward a close examination.
Auden poems, such as "Under Which Lyre," "In Praise of
Limestone," "The More Loving One," and the villanelle beginning
"Time will say nothing but I told you so." (Auden
gave various titles to this villanelle.) Ambitious participants may want to
prepare by also reading "Caliban to the Audience," a long eloquent
prose poem Auden wrote during this period.