As Mark Twain observed, "whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, this is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth."
Both the poem by Auden and the painting by Bruegel influienced the Sci Fi book by Travis “The Man Who Fell to Earth” which was later made into. a movie with David Bowie. Your analysis is incredible and I am going to be re-reading this poem; its certainly been. a while. Thank you.
My favorite poem. Nice comments. I’m glad to find your writing!
My interpretation of the poem is slightly different though. I think Auden is contrasting the old masters with the then fairly new “expressionist” art. In expressionism, the goal is to see the world as it is actually seen, through strong emotions, desires, psychologically altered states. An expressionist, for example, can sketch the universe so that every line of every distant star speaks the heartbreak of one mother. In a way this way of seeing is more true, since we do all too often project ourselves into everything. But I like Auden’s old masters better, and on the whole I find them more humane. I don’t think Auden is calling for “ignoring” suffering exactly. Rather by acknowledging, depicting suffering in painstaking detail, while at the same time recognizing the everyday that surround suffering for what it is, the masters show that life is more durable than the expressionists can allow. Expressionist art can turn the entire universe into a prison. The old masters, by contrast, show the universe unmoved, which suggests that my emotions also, however total they may feel, can be transcended. For me this is a comfort.
What an interesting reading! That’s what I love about poetry—it can mean so many different things to different people! Genuinely curious though, where are you getting the expressionism idea from? Not sure that that comes up in the poem’s text itself.
My argument, which might not be very persuasive, would have to go: 1) expressionism was part of the cutting edge of modernism during the Weimar years. And 2) Auden’s poem is a perfect response to this approach to art that seeks to see everything through a person’s emotion. Thus it’s reasonable to think that someone in modernist artistic circles in 1938 would recognize the contrast between modern practice and the “old masters.”
But Im not a literary scholar! This could be a totally subjective reading.
If I could identify a place in the poem, which is a reach, it would be the emphatic line “they never forgot.” This raises the question: so who does the speaker think forgets this and why? I take it that in your reading you assume he thinks people mistakenly think that there is a requirement not to ignore the suffering of others, and the line “they never forgot” would be targeted at such people?
A very interesting commentary as always. I might quibble about your characterization of the first line as having an unusual word order. This is well within my syntactic comfort zone. It's a phrasing which was once more common than today, but was often used rather jocularly: "They really knew how to party, those Roman emperors, know what I mean?" It is only slightly less common, I think, than the construction with the subject apposition first: "That Babe Ruth, he could really swat them out of the park, couldn't he?" Both forms are rather informal in writing, but they carry a sense of being very impressed, which is certainly conveyed by the opening line here. Using "the" instead of "that" or "those" makes it read less informally, but preserves (while slightly muting) the shaking-the-head-in-wonder-at-it feeling which the phrasing carries.
You write about all my favorites! This is spectacular!
Woo thank you! Glad you enjoyed and don't forget to check out my analysis over on YouTube :)
Yoda would say "About suffering never wrong they were".
Yoda puts the verb at the end, like Bismarck
As Mark Twain observed, "whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, this is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth."
Both the poem by Auden and the painting by Bruegel influienced the Sci Fi book by Travis “The Man Who Fell to Earth” which was later made into. a movie with David Bowie. Your analysis is incredible and I am going to be re-reading this poem; its certainly been. a while. Thank you.
Ooh very cool. Love Bowie, will check out the movie. Glad you enjoyed and stay tuned for some more poetry analyses coming soon :)
My favorite poem. Nice comments. I’m glad to find your writing!
My interpretation of the poem is slightly different though. I think Auden is contrasting the old masters with the then fairly new “expressionist” art. In expressionism, the goal is to see the world as it is actually seen, through strong emotions, desires, psychologically altered states. An expressionist, for example, can sketch the universe so that every line of every distant star speaks the heartbreak of one mother. In a way this way of seeing is more true, since we do all too often project ourselves into everything. But I like Auden’s old masters better, and on the whole I find them more humane. I don’t think Auden is calling for “ignoring” suffering exactly. Rather by acknowledging, depicting suffering in painstaking detail, while at the same time recognizing the everyday that surround suffering for what it is, the masters show that life is more durable than the expressionists can allow. Expressionist art can turn the entire universe into a prison. The old masters, by contrast, show the universe unmoved, which suggests that my emotions also, however total they may feel, can be transcended. For me this is a comfort.
What an interesting reading! That’s what I love about poetry—it can mean so many different things to different people! Genuinely curious though, where are you getting the expressionism idea from? Not sure that that comes up in the poem’s text itself.
My argument, which might not be very persuasive, would have to go: 1) expressionism was part of the cutting edge of modernism during the Weimar years. And 2) Auden’s poem is a perfect response to this approach to art that seeks to see everything through a person’s emotion. Thus it’s reasonable to think that someone in modernist artistic circles in 1938 would recognize the contrast between modern practice and the “old masters.”
But Im not a literary scholar! This could be a totally subjective reading.
Interesting! I can definitely see that with some outside sources, just not sure I see it directly within the poem.
If I could identify a place in the poem, which is a reach, it would be the emphatic line “they never forgot.” This raises the question: so who does the speaker think forgets this and why? I take it that in your reading you assume he thinks people mistakenly think that there is a requirement not to ignore the suffering of others, and the line “they never forgot” would be targeted at such people?
A very interesting commentary as always. I might quibble about your characterization of the first line as having an unusual word order. This is well within my syntactic comfort zone. It's a phrasing which was once more common than today, but was often used rather jocularly: "They really knew how to party, those Roman emperors, know what I mean?" It is only slightly less common, I think, than the construction with the subject apposition first: "That Babe Ruth, he could really swat them out of the park, couldn't he?" Both forms are rather informal in writing, but they carry a sense of being very impressed, which is certainly conveyed by the opening line here. Using "the" instead of "that" or "those" makes it read less informally, but preserves (while slightly muting) the shaking-the-head-in-wonder-at-it feeling which the phrasing carries.