Sobering post, Graywyvern. I memorized and performed/read this poem for a small group shortly after the Rodney King Riots in Los Angeles. And it is even more apt and uncanny after our recent calamity. In the midst of our current crisis.
I don't generally agree with those who claim that all art is political, because from my experience both as a reader and a poet, I'm convinced that few things are harder than writing an effective political poem. So difficult to avoid cant and hyperbole. And other than "Imperialism's face/ And the international wrong," Auden altogether avoids these pitfalls, crafting complex yet striking thoughts and images in almost plain, continually searing language. For example the lines:
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
There you have Freud's "Civilization and it's Discontents" boiled down to less than 25 words.
Of course it is tough to separate the political aspects of this poem from the aesthetic--so tough that Auden himself, in his later, more conservative life, unsuccessfully tried to purge it from his works. Other than his elegy for Yeats, I don't believe he wrote a finer poem.
[This message has been edited by C.G. Macdonald (edited September 21, 2001).]
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