Greetings, writers—
W.H. Auden was a driven genius and an absolute slob. In an apartment on St. Mark’s Place that “reeked of stale coffee grounds, tarry nicotine, and toe jam mixed with metro pollution and catshit1,” the poet, who has been called the greatest poet of the 20th century, kept a strict writing schedule:
Eight to ten hours of work (with a 30-minute break for lunch)
Teatime at 4:00 (admirers, students, etc. could attend)
Cocktail hour at 5:00
Dinner at 6:00
Auden never worked in the evening, and he went to bed whenever he felt like it, whether his guests were still there or not.
“I hate living in squalor—I detest it!—but I can’t do the work I want to do and live any other way,” he said once.
But this is just the gossip to get you to the poem, which you’ve probably read before, but perhaps a long time ago. Please read and feel awe.2
Musee des Beaux Arts About suffering they were never wrong, The old Masters: how well they understood Its human position: how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
Today, write a scene/poem/freewrite in which something startling and terrible happens in the midst of an otherwise everyday scene.
Perhaps it is “not an important failure”; perhaps it is. But in any case, “the sun shone as it had to” and everyone “had somewhere to get to.”
Happy writing,
Emily
Bonus points: Consider, if you like, William Carlos Williams’s Icarus poem, which I think suffers a little in comparison.
P.S. “He is the dirtiest man I have ever liked” comes from Igor Stravinsky, whose wild, dissonant orchestral ballet The Rite of Spring caused a riot 110 years ago.
Before St. Mark’s, Auden roomed with Carson McCullers and a trained chimpanzee.
I was already planning to use this poem today, but when I sat down to write the post I learned that September 29th marks fifty years since W.H. Auden died.
Bravo Emily! Thank you for always bringing such pleasure and joy to my days with your Good Ideas.