Monday, May 18, 2009

Letter to W.H. Auden


Letter to W.H. Auden

“This critique is then enacted by the parabolic autobiography Auden recounts—a story shot through with sexual suggestion, whose larger meaning requires the reader to weigh this poet’s eccentricity and typicality.”—Richard Bozorth, “Politics and Authority in the 1930s,” Auden’s Games of Knowledge: Poetry and the Meanings of Homosexuality

Forgive me for inflicting—all this on you
It’s easy to forget—you’ve been thru it too
Many have lost faith—in choice and thought
Many now endorse—The Hobbes Report
“The life of man is—nasty, brutish, short”
Dictators rise up again—from their bunkers
Promising to set up—Law and Order
It was Athens—who murdered Socrates
It was America—who murdered Harding
Generals and corporations—slavering at
The chance to—stir-up war everywhere
To make an easy buck—with a little luck
The doughy masses—bourgeois rubes
The peanut-crunchers—couch-potatoes
Bored asleep even now—as Rome burns
And every man—in every generation
Tossing in his anxious—dilemma bed
Cries in the shadows—to the noble dead
But the dead are deaf—they don’t care
No letters home—from where they are
Urgent, vexed—but still quite inaudible
Perhaps I’ll try—Madame Sosostris maybe
You know—that world-famous clairvoyante
She’s often the guest—on The Oprah Show
She’s better than Ouija—entrails of owls
More imaginative than—ratty tea leaves
Predicting the future—better than WSJ


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