The Good Stuff

Auden's poetry and a book on World War I

The Beat of his Own Drummer

W. H Auden was the most prominent and probably the most gifted of the poets writing in English after the generation of Eliot, Frost, Yeats, and Stevens. He achieved his highest acclaim in his 20s and 30s; in the view of many readers and critics, he never fulfilled his capacious potential. Many of his later poems appear tossed off in the moment; others seem to reflect a self-image of Poet as Public Figure; still others are best described as doggerel.

I have little knowledge about Auden’s life or what made him tick, but I wonder if he was simply a gifted poet who enjoyed writing. He wrote a lot, on every imaginable topic and occasion. If not all his writing reaches the high seriousness that some critics require, well, some occasions and some topics are not matters of high seriousness.

'“Musee des Beaux Arts” makes a poem out of a simple observation. It is memorable because it has the ring of truth. Its informal, conversational tone can be deceiving; this is a carefully crafted poem.

- Jack Jr.

A German soldier on horseback wearing a gas mask eerily captures modern warfare’s eclipse of a world that was passing away.

A World Undone

World War I has long been the most important war I know the least about. Several years ago I listened to Dan Carlin’s excellent Hardcore History podcast series about The Great War, and felt like I had really learned a lot. One book he mentions frequently is G.J. Meyer’s one-volume history, A World Undone. I’ve been reading it for the last several months and it has been every but as good as I was expecting. Meyer is very good at both giving the reader an understanding of the background of the conflict and individual battles, as well as a sense for the men responsible (in every sense of that word) for what happened.

One of the features in Meyer’s book I especially enjoy is that he intersperses short background segments between chapters that focus on one person or group or aspect of the war. One segment covers the Cossacks; another, the Hohenzollern dynasty; another, the issue of morale at home and in the trenches. You can skip all of these if you want and the flow of the book won’t be interrupted. But if you want to go deeper into the background, they are there. It’s a really interesting way of including additional information without making chapters tedious or full of footnotes. A World Undone gets an enthusiastic recommendation from me.

- Jack III