V-2nd, Chapter8, looking for that Auden poem...

[Michael Bailey]

On Thu, Sep 30, 2010 at 11:05 PM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> Not the erection you're looking for but Auden's "The Unknown Citizen
> (To JS/07/M/378 The Marble Monument Is Erected by the State)" is the
> kind of poem that Adams and Pynchon, not to mention Benny & Stencil,
> would smile at.
>
> http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15549
>

actually that union job with a health plan looks pretty good to me
right now...I can work on free and happy on my own time...

it does seem like Pynchon's exploring the issue, but I wonder if the
pattern of shots on the target doesn't indicate a different take than
Auden's: if anything, Benny's further from freedom and happiness as a
nonunion yo-yo.
(If there were a yo-yo's union, though...)

anyway, thanks for that.  The one I'm looking for, I'm pretty sure
that Robert Hayden taught it in the beginning poetry class at U of
Michigan in 1974, and I think it was Auden...something about how all
loving impulses are good...

I gather Auden went thru somewhat of a religious re-orientation as
time went by, after having a life-changing "agape" experience sitting
with 6 colleagues in a university dining room somewhere (co-workers -
"he was popular with his mates and liked a drink")  and in fact
revised a bunch of his work (like Whitman) to reflect that.
Also found an anecdote about telling one of his early tutors that he
was going to be a poet, and the tutor rattled off some boilerplate
about how writing verse is a good exercise for developing verbal
skills, to which he replied, "You don't understand!  I'm going to be a
*great* poet."