Good evening.
I thought I'd begin by reading some early poems
and that I'd also read a couple of early poems by W. H. Auden.
Because Auden and I were at University together and when
I wrote my first poems, the poems
that he was writing very much influenced me.
I think Auden when he was an undergraduate already
had a very strong, a very definite and clear theory
about writing poetry.
And this was that the subject of a poem didn't matter,
and it didn't matter very much what the poem was about.
The point was that you wrote a poetry which is about things
and you made out of these things lines,
lines which in his poetry were very memorable.
But I think that when you listen to this poetry,
you don't really want to know very much what it says,
you really listen for the lines.
So I'll read an early poem of Auden or two early poems
are Auden which he wrote when he was an undergraduate.
He also thought that poems ought to be very detached, that they
ought to be written as it were from an almost
scientific point of view.
And that for instance, if you wrote a love poem,
it shouldn't be a poem about your feelings,
it should be more like a kind of analysis of a situation
like almost like a chemical analysis.
One of his favorite words was clinical,
and another favorite word was symptomatic.
So if you listen to this poem, you'll
see it's a very clinical kind of love poem written by a very
young man aged about 19.
Consider if you will how lovers stand
in brief adherence straining to preserve too
long the suction of goodbye.
Others less clinically minded will
admire an evening like a colored photograph,
a music stultified across the water.
The desert opens here, and if though we
have ligature the ends of a farewell, sporadic heartburn
showing evidence of love and economically slain,
it is for the last time the last look back,
the heel upon the finishing blade of grass
to dazzling cities of the plain where
lust threatened a sinister rod.
And we shall form in us to a study of stones.
Sorry--and we shall turn to our study of stones
to split Eve's apple absorbed content if we can say because.
I'm answerable like any other patent,
like Solomon and Sheeba wrong for years.
I found difficulty in read.
I couldn't read one or two words because I printed this book
on a hand press, this book of Auden's poems
on a hand press which I had when we were students.
And about half the tape broke in the case,
in this of course bringing.
But what was memorable about poems
like this were just lines, an evening like a colored
photograph, a music stultified across the waters.