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It’s Auden at the height of his energy and power, and also his scholarship, also his crankiness – that he went back. “A Baroque Eclogue” ( sic) – (“Baroque”, because he’s using a great many fancy complicated meters). It’s during the war, and “Age of Anxiety”, a really prophetic poem. William Burroughs and Alan Ansen – Photograph by Allen Ginsberg So I picked out some passages that I remember from the (19)40’s – to the (19)80’s, that almost thirty-five years have stuck in my mind, so I guess they still are good. So we were all very familiar with it, back in the (19)40’s – mid-‘Forties and late-‘Forties and some early (19)50’s – and I haven’t looked at it since, until today – again – (I) went over to the Boulder Library and picked up a copy (because I remembered it was written in the alliterative meter) and it really is great.
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And Alan Ansen, who was a friend of (Jack) Kerouac’s and mine, and Neal Cassady, was Auden’s secretary when he wrote this huge epic poem. was a big queer, who lived out in Woodmere , New York, and had huge learned correspondence with Thomas Mann about the prosody in Wagner’s Ring operas (because Wagner was into prosody, as was Auden, as was Stravinsky, as was Chester Kallman, as was Alan Ansen), prosody, like the measurement of word and music together, or the music of the language or the measure of the language, the measure of the line. stayed with Auden in a house in Brooklyn Heights in (19)39 when Auden first came over from England, and there was a brilliant, eccentric, strange guy named Alan Ansen, who, at the time. I remember, at the time, I was living with ( Jack) Kerouac and with (William) Burroughs near Columbia University on 115th Street.
Auden around about that time was a really great poet and is, remains, a great poet. I think it came out in… wait a minute, let’s see.(19)44 maybe?. So I thought I would read some of that (and there’s one copy that I got out of the Boulder library which I’ll put in our own (Naropa) library for a couple of weeks, and then I have my own copy here, so if anybody wants to take a look at this at leisure, do so). We will begin with Auden’s masterpiece The Age of Anxiety, then move to his celebration of Christ’s incarnation and nativity in For the Time Being, and then explore some of his later lyrics where Christ is, and is not, present.Ĭlick HERE for a book of collected works that contains both poems.Allen, continuing with his “Basic Poetics” class at Naropa – January 7, 1980ĪG: So Auden – W.H.Auden, the… who, incidentally, it was his anthology that I was reading from originally – the… it’s the first thing in his five-volume anthology of English poetry, poetry of the English language (which we’ve talked about before) also, in the (19)40’s, during World War II, wrote a very great poem called “Age of Anxiety” in old Germanic and Anglo-Saxon alliterative meters. Responding to these poems contemplatively, we will seek to incorporate them into our religious and spiritual sensibility, and explore how they present problems and opportunities for the public proclamation of Christ’s saving grace. Please write a little about yourself and why you would like to participate and send it to in mind Auden’s concern with articulating a public poetics of grace and salvation, we will read several of his long poems where Christ is, and sometimes is, present and heralding salvation.
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We will use writing to explore our response to the poems. Due to a shared focus on the text, we find we are able to share poetry with a sense of community using this format. We have decided to hold this group on Zoom as long as social distancing restrictions are in place.