Dan Schneider on W.H. Auden, 9/11, & The World Trade Center

S14-DES9
The Twin Towers & W.H. Auden
Copyright Ó by Dan Schneider, 5/15/03

Now, over a year & a ½ after 9/11, some of the nonsense being propagated by the assorted groups who had vested interests in the event, its aftermath, & the laying of blame, or heroism, can be dealt with more straightforwardly.
Let’s forget the political, psychical, & spiritual aspects & concentrate on just the poetic responses. There have been numerous poems about 9/11: the Internet is dripping with them- ranging from Leftist ‘We got what was coming to us!’ BS to Rightist calls to arms. Anthologies aplenty have been published- often with the same crapola from the Internet. Then, with the Afghan War of 2002, & the recently concluded Gulf War 2 in Iraq, we’ve gotten such vomit-inducing stuff as the Poets Against The War nonsense- see my essay regarding that- & many retread War/Anti-War poems from the past- from Tennyson to Owen & then some. But, without a doubt, the most talked of poem from the past in relation to 9/11 was W.H. Auden’s September 1, 1939.
This is not to say that WHA’s poem is a bad poem- it’s not. It’s a pretty good poem- but nowhere near great, & certainly nowhere near the rapturous gushings that mostly non-poet-types have hurled at it. Let’s look at the poem, dissect it both literarily & in relation to 9/11, & then compare it with a great poem of mine written about the Twin Towers- for better or worse. Then I’ll posit why 9/11 has not yet inspired a single great poem from the published Literati, & why it may never. Also why there is this desire to find solace in old & inappropriate places. The poem:

September 1, 1939

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

OK, let’s take a look at WHA’s poem stanza by stanza- & let’s start with the title. The date refers to the date of a notorious speech Adolf Hitler gave before the German Reichstag where basically he outlined his zeal for conquest, in response to ‘supposed’ Polish provocation. In short, this was the date Germany invaded Poland & World War 2 began. Here’s a snip, typical of the fanaticism which inspired WHA’s response in verse:

This night for the first time Polish regular soldiers fired on our territory. Since 5.45 A.M. we have been returning the fire, and from now on bombs will be met by bombs. Whoever fight with poison gas will be fought with poison gas. Whoever departs from the rules of humane warfare can only expect that we shall do the same. I will continue this struggle, no matter against whom, until the safety of the Reich and its rights are secured.

For six years now I have been working on the building up of the German defenses. Over 90 millions have in that time been spent on the building up of these defense forces. They are now the best equipped and are above all comparison with what they were in 1914. My trust in them is unshakable. When I called up these forces and when I now ask sacrifices of the German people and if necessary every sacrifice, then I have a right to do so, for I also am to-day absolutely ready, just as we were formerly, to make every possible sacrifice.

I am asking of no German man more than I myself was ready throughout four years at any time to do. There will be no hardships for Germans to which I myself will not submit. My whole life henceforth belongs more than ever to my people. I am from now on just first soldier of the German Reich. I have once more put on that coat that was the most sacred and dear to me. I will not take it off again until victory is secured, or I will not survive the outcome.

Historical background- check. Now for the analysis of stanza 1:

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Music holds its own, & WHA delves in to the historic psychoses of the German people- from Martin Luther’s extremism & anti-Semitism, to the screwing of the defeated German Army at Versailles after World War 1, to Hitler’s return to his home town of Linz, Austria, after Germany annexed Austria- the Anschluss on 3/13/38. An imago is an idealized version of a real thing- usually an early childhood memory of a parent or incident. Freudian melodrama is quite a turn from stanza 1’s banalities. At this point the poem is getting interesting- with a Yeatsian Second Coming ominousness.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Here is where WHA starts veering from a possibly unique take to a classic War Poem reaching back in to history to show off the poet’s breadth of staggering knowledge. The whole trope of Nietzschean recurrence is not new. Thucydides was a famed general from Athens who was scapegoated after losing a battle in 424 BC, at the start of the Peloponnesian War. He responded with a scathing attack, his version of ‘The History Of The Peloponnesian Wars’ on the dictatorial bent of Athens’ rulers. OK, so we know WHA is smart- but this is a diversion that could be summed up in a line or 2- at most. Instead, WHA’s peroration hits a 2^nd stanza- #4:

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

This stanza references Thucydides account of Pericles’ eulogy for the wasted dead soldiers of Athens. It also goes back to Hitler’s declaration of war on Poland, where the Führer none too subtly warns those nations who agreed to remain neutral to remain neutral. There’s less music in this stanza & it drags in sound & narratively. This stanza could easily be elided. Excelsior! On to stanza 5:

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

A bit more alliteration & assonance lift the music, & we’ve come almost all the way back to the ‘real world’ after a 2 stanza aery. There is a reference to a famous WW1 quote by a British diplomat, Edward Grey, on 8/3/14, which stated ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe and we shall not see them lit again in our life time.’ Hyperbole, for sure, but effective in politics- in poetry? Not really. There are, however, some nice turns of phrase- ‘Cling to their average day’ & ‘All the conventions conspire/To make this fort assume/The furniture of home’- & some clichés- ‘music must always play’, ‘Lost in a haunted wood’, & ‘afraid of the night’- especially as used in this context. But, perhaps being grounded will set the poem right. #6:

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

This stanza should also have been a line or 2- a bit windy & overdone. Nijinsky was the famous- & manic depressive- ballet star whose comment on his ballet producer/lover was inspired by rage & said after Nijinsky forsook homosexuality & got married. It was ‘Some politicians are hypocrites like Diaghilev, who does not want universal love, but to be loved alone.’ This psychoanalysis of Hitler &/or militancy, in general, is- to say the least- specious as headshrinking, & a bit silly for this poem- especially considering the metaphor of 2 homosexuals & ballet aficionados. But, musically & narratively the stanza piques. #7:

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

More melodrama & overblown statements- most of the clichés are intended here, to show how narrow the middle brow bourgeoisie is- so WHA gets a bit of a pass, & the music is fine- but, again- this is a 2 or 3 line reference, not a whole stanza. On to #8:

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Too melodramatic here, although very nice musically. But, narratively the stanza’s a throwaway- especially the egregious last line. The whole trope of being the lone truthteller is PC decades before that horror was unleashed. Stanza #9, & the last 1:

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

& the poem ends with the lone vigilant standing against the ravening hordes, the coming darkness, the madness, etc. Ugh! A very weak end to a poem with a lot of potential. So, we’ve seen this is a so-so poem with potential- but why the connection with 9/11? Just a guess- but I think a lot of Leftists, who were hoping 9/11/01 was the start of WW3 (& the demise of the American Imperium), thought this was as definitive a date as 9/1/39. Indeed, it may prove so- but I doubt it. Non-Americans cannot conceive how quickly Main Street Americans have tucked 9/11 away like a nasty little cold. This was not our Hiroshima, nor another Pearl Harbor. How quickly we’ve digested the tragedy & moved on stands in sharp contrast to the current regime in Washington, D.C. It was on their watch that this lapse in security happened so they are hyper about resolving something. But, to Joe Average, Reality TV shows, sporting events, personal events, & the withering U.S. economy are far more cogent than that long ago bombing. The comparisons with WW2 have been overdone, & the connection to this poem has proven shaky.
1 of the reasons, however, that this poem has been posited as a ‘9/11’ poem is because there have been no good- much less great- published poems about 9/11- the date, the buildings, the politics, etc. So, ego-fed critics have grasped at whatever they could find to shoehorn in as a 9/11 poem. Yet, I’ve written a few 9/11 poems- even 1 I’d consider great. Still, the best poem I wrote about the Twin Towers was a poem I wrote about 2 years prior to 9/11. It was part of my series of Skyline Poems- each adapting a musical type of song about a particular skyscraper, & moving beyond its Whitmanian idea. The poem is called The Twin Towers Canon- that’s canon as in Row, row, row your boat….To achieve the canon-like effect of repetition & rhyme I placed 2 sestinas side-by-side on a page, to be read by 2 competing, yet complementary, voices. Each ½ was about 1 of the 2 towers. Let’s gander at it & opine:

The Twin Towers Canon

(1)

SOUTH TOWER

Cured of humanity, the taller World Trade Center
despises its creators, growing ever more dull
in their reach for the sun, to cast upon it, its Light,
which reveals, to its makers, a vision to benight
even the wonder of children, drawn to the taller
aspects of aspiration, those laid low by design

or at least gray proficiency. This is a sure sign
that what uses once modern merely fades to the center
which thrives on uniqueness. So, this tower is taller
than the north one? Both of them are incredibly dull
in the afternoon. Has either, once, lit up the night
like the Empire State? Has it ever given light

to a young boy's design? When it is cast in this light
no lecture on the intricacies of its design
can rescue its reputation, which sinks as the night
whispers its way westward, out from behind the Center
which slowly grows lightward, from within. The day grows dull
as the tower is left to its dreams. It is taller

than its dreams. It is real. Reality is taller
than dream. So what if it is uglier in daylight
than Yamasaki's vision? No vision is as dull
as that made to become part of another's design,
or another’s fraction of dream, part of a center
that cannot be comprehended. Much like this coy night

Mankind hopes vaguely, yet dreads precisely. In the night
all our dreams are leveled, only fear grows taller,
like a goodbye a loved one cannot voice. The center
sinks into its own peace, the low dudgeon of twilight,
which ramifies its structure, as if by some design
of a god of the inanimate, or something dull

as the joys of big boys with their toys, or even dull
as knowing the ultimate artificer of night
is poetry- itself an artifice, a design
of the anima that propels life through dream, taller
than a child's, which are ever fading, as the light
gives its last, a burst of orange, over the Center

receding. It stands, a dull icon, in the taller
canyons of cumulus clouds, which design the last light,
outside the night's tower, disavowed of its center.

(2)

NORTH TOWER

We have lost ourselves to marvel, much as the skyline
has lost its appeal to those beings below, smaller
than the circle of night. Yet, entranced by its starlight
they look ever upward, as I do to you, this night,
as my eyes fill with a grandeur, an unequal pull,
greater than these engineered Twin Towers. I enter

this ardor that you inspire. And, as I enter
my being- within I construct our own skyline,
of transnebulous beauties, which can only lend pull
to your presence. In this night only I grow smaller
as your hair shadows the tower, the wind, making night
sheer illusion, when its fluid is cast with the light,

of Manhattan at night, all my depths become that light
of love, a parabola that will arc and enter
the dream of a boy floating wary above the night,
which stood out starkly, a kind of immortal skyline,
against eternity's blackness, never made smaller
than the dream of love. Nothing is real. Nothing can pull

as eternity, save you beauty, which I feel pull
in my silence, full as the unblinking summer light
which faded with the hours. It never grows smaller
for your eyes are oxygen, your glance what can enter,
and power this dance that ignites beyond the skyline
where a scared star leaves its place in the immortal night,

and rinses your eyes of their doubt. You see me, this night,
for the first time, on this skyscraper. You feel the pull
as I touch you with my words and fingers. The skyline
recedes, as if a memory lost to the sharp light
of the now, where something other than love can enter
this joy which increases, and can never grow smaller,

like the future, itself, which can never grow smaller,
the murmurs of tomorrow, which gets us through this night,
nothing but a part of our love, which can enter,
and recede, with your kiss. You are that hope, which I pull
on in the breeze of adventure, which dares to alight,
on your being, as your eyes disavow the skyline,

as the east meets morning. The skyline would grow smaller,
without you, if our love were to pull, as the night,
what kind of love could it light? Or a new love enter?

Requiescat in pace [1972-2001]!

Even if 1 puts 9/11 out of their mind, the poem is flat-out awesome. It’s difficult enough to produce a great sestina (although 1000s of bad 1s abound in print & online), but to do 2, that play off of each other & produce an even greater entity!? The 1^st sestina, The South Tower, is darker, more political, while the 2^nd, The North Tower, is more a philosophical love poem. That the sounds play off of 1 another as they are read, & the last tercet of the 2^nd sestina starts only after the 1^st sestina’s tercet has ended, is only 1 of the many examples of the poem’s technical excellence- including such things as its alliteration, assonance, rime schemes, lack of clichés, neologizing, & lack of bathos.
But reading the poem post-9/11 let’s us see a little spoken of aspect of great poetry- that of timelessness & applicability to present circumstances & themes. Although political realities, & the physical realities of the World Trade Center had changed it’s interesting to note a bit of presaging in this poem. The South’s political bite & the portrayal of the WTC’s symbolism to the world ring especially true after 9/11, while the North’s ‘reminiscence’ of a thing still there, as of its writing, is downright freaky. Post-9/11, however, it adds a touch of terrible poignancy. These things lend the poem timelessness to tandem with its excellence. It also shows its greatness by the poem’s becoming even more incisive & heartrending after the tragedy.
Now, let’s compare that to WHA’s poem. Post-WW2, the poem lost alot of its oomph, due to its being tied to its time- not by the title, but by both its references & very naïve approach to political poesizing: ‘From the conservative dark/Into the ethical life/The dense commuters come,/Repeating their morning vow;/"I will be true to the wife,/I'll concentrate more on my work", indeed! So why this bizarre need to equate a poem that is outdated, & more of a relict than a relevant thing? Is it just the Left’s childish desire to not let go of things? I don’t think that’s all- although it’s part. More I blame a deep-seated recognition in today’s Academia that they simply cannot produce poetry of lasting value. While this will always go unspoken in print, & even be furiously denied, if you truly sit down with an Academic- or any poet in the system- they’ll tell you that there simply is no getting around the fact that the ridiculous reaches into street-wise politicking & the detestable über-Confessionalism have basically divorced contemporary published poetry from the rudimentary skills needed to even play enough with words & ideas to create the environment where that hidden creative self can spring forth. Need proof? Just look at the horrid poetry on the detestable website www.poetsagainstthewar.org (& see my essay on it & its founder, Sam Hamill), & compare it with the pre-Vietnam War era War (& anti-War) poetry being published. The reason the crap that’s on this website goes unchallenged is 2fold- 1) to criticize it would cut short any hope of an Academic career in poetry, & 2) there are no published essayists &/or critics out there that even have the tools & skill TO PROPERLY CRITICIZE the bad writing!
Thus the desire, if not NEED, to go back & try to retrofit poems from the past (no matter how mediocre or inappropriate) to speak to today’s issues & crises. Let me wrap up this opining of mine by relating a final bit of interesting information regarding 9/11, W.H. Auden, & the Twin Towers. On 9/11/01, itself, I was off from work, & working on another of my Skyline Poems, the Madrigal Of The Bank Of Manhattan Trust, when my wife called me to tell me of the 1^st plane’s crash into the WTC. I finished the poem a few days later, in a different direction than I’d initially planned, but it’s always struck me how eerie it was for me to be writing that poem at that time, as well as the truly visionary nature of The Twin Towers Canon, itself. That said, let me recommend that the next time there is an event that captures the nation’s attention, poets (& artists) in general should be more devoted to the improvement & teaching of art itself, rather than their own petty & ephemeral ‘causes’. Because, years later, do we really want the legacy of what is our contemporary poetry to be the doggerel that the Poets Against The War website has spewn? Or will we want it to be original, great, & visionary works like The Twin Towers Canon? You know where I stand. Then we’ll be ready for what is to come….

as the east meets morning. The skyline would grow smaller,
without you, if our love were to pull, as the night,
what kind of love could it light? Or a new love enter?

What more need be said?

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