March 05, 2007	Monday	Safar 15, 1428

LOS ANGELES: T. S. Eliot, who was born in St. Louis, spent all of his life escaping America and trying, in the footsteps of Henry James, to become an Englishman. Wystan Hugh Auden, whose 100th birthday would have just passed, was born in York, England, and succeeded in the slightly more difficult task of becoming an American (or at the very least in transmuting himself from a Yorker to a New Yorker). In my opinion, the United States got the best of this exchange.

Auden had three of the qualities that make poets immortal. He wrote beautifully about love, movingly about war, and he was witty. On at least two occasions in the last decade or so, Americans have flocked to bookstores or switched on their browsers in order to read him — often for the first time. The first occasion was the reading of his “Funeral Blues” in “Four Weddings and a Funeral.” The second was during the search for meaningful words after 9/11, when his long elegy for the 1930s, “1 September 1939,” with its lines about how “the unmentionable odour of death/offends the September night,” seemed to answer a need, as well as to mark the end of an epoch and the beginning of a different and more unpleasant one.

Another celebrated Auden line — “We must love one another or die” — was annexed without his permission and used in Lyndon Johnson’s notorious attack ad on Barry Goldwater in 1964, showing a little girl counting petals as she mutates into a thermonuclear countdown. The hideous scene closes with Auden’s words.

He was so furious at this that he removed the poem from his canon. He was prone to excise things that had been exploited or distorted, which is why “1 September 1939” — the poem from which the line is taken — can still be hard to get hold of. The same is alas true of “Spain 1937” and of his verse obituary for W.B. Yeats in 1939 — three utterly magnificent works in the space of three years.

Auden understood that a complete retreat from political life was impossible. He continued to review the public square, though increasingly from the standpoint of a skeptical Christian.—Dawn/The Los Angeles Times News Service