Tony, it’s always a pleasure to read your rants!
I’m no expert on WCW, he’s not my favorite poet, but I think he was entirely correct in his distrust of Eliot. IMHO, poetry is at least as much the truth of the heart as the truth of the head; Eliot missed, mistook, the truth of the heart.
I’ve always thought that, for all his celebrated religious conversion, for all his embrace of orthodoxy, Eliot was a heretic -- a Manichee, to be precise. One must also love the world, somebody in it. It seems to me that WCW intuited this deeply, and “Asphodel” is the flower and testament. (So, in a smaller way, is “Red Wheelbarrow” and “This Is Just to Say”. They convey to me an enchantment with the world.)
How natural that Auden should so have admired “Asphodel” – I think Auden understood both truths of poetry, and which must be subaltern.
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