In today’s Writers Almanac, Garrison Keillor mentions a poem by W. H. Auden called “September 1, 1939.” Though he read a bit of it, my appetite was whetted to read the entire poem. Oddly, It’s not in my Collected Poems by Auden. I did find it in my copy of The Oxford Book of American Verse.
There’s some interesting information in the Wikipedia article on this poem. From that entry and from reading about this poem in Fuller’s W. H. Auden: A Commentary (p. 290-3), it’s obvious that Auden had second thoughts about this poem. He even went so far as to put it in a list of five poems that he thought were “trash.”
However, I think it is a good poem. In The Oxford Book of American Verse it is immediately followed by the poem, “In Memory of Sigmund Freud, d. 1939.” Auden has psychology on the brain. There are Jungian images in the first poem (“imago”) and obviously the second kicks around Freudian ideas. Both poems seem to have been written within a month of each other.
The Wikipedia article on “September 1, 1939” mentions Yeats “Easter 1916” as a model for the stanza form Auden chose. I like that poem also. the Poetry Foundation has a poem guide for the Yeats. I have it bookmarked to read.
Opinion | What Guantánamo Says About Kavanaugh – The New York Times
Linda Greenhouse is always worth reading.
NYTimes: Trump’s Assault on Google
“Trump appears to have gotten his information from the Fox Business Network host Lou Dobbs, who in turn was relying on a blog post from PJ Media titled, “96 Percent of Google Search Results for ‘Trump’ News Are From Liberal Media Outlets.” The rub, here, is how the post defines “liberal.” It includes a chart in which almost every mainstream, credible news organization is on the left — not just The New York Times and The Washington Post, but Bloomberg, USA Today and The Associated Press. The chart puts Infowars, Alex Jones’s conspiracy website, closer to the center than Time magazine.”
From Tolkien to Burgess: the ethics of posthumous publication
This article looks interesting.
80 Treasures | The Hymn Society of Great Britain and Ireland
A gaggle of online articles from the 30s to now.
Opinion | Kamala Markandaya: A novelist lost in literary oblivion – Livemint
I run across the oddest shit online.