Books blog
Hay festival: Celebrating Auden
A large crowd joined poets Simon Armitage and John Fuller to pay tribute to WH Auden - despite the science heavyweights next door.
Tishani Doshi
Mon 28 May 2007 12.52 EDT First published on Mon 28 May 2007 12.52 EDT
It's always heartening when a poetry event sells out - especially if it's facing stiff competition from science heavyweights Richard Dawkins, Steve Jones and Martin Rees in the tent next door, discussing whether or not we've abandoned the age of enlightenment. Those more poetically inclined at Hay turned up in large numbers to listen to Simon Armitage and John Fuller pay homage to WH Auden, who would have turned 100 this year, and was perhaps the most important, enlightened English poet of the 20th century.
It's not often that you get to hear poets talking about other poets. Usually, it's all a bit me me me, so it was refreshing to hear what two poets of different generations had to say about a poet who has clearly influenced their work, and also, more importantly, about the legacy that he's left behind.
John Fuller, who was mentored by Auden at Oxford, described him as a poet of wide compass. He was jovial man who'd turn up to dinner parties and sing songs from Pal Joey. Fuller admitted that Auden was difficult, set in his opinions, repetitive, and that his later books weren't as good as his earlier works. Nevertheless, for Fuller, Auden is without a doubt the predominant poetic voice of the last century. "With Eliot and Pound, there is admiration - yes," he said, "but they lost their bearings. Auden brought poetry back to its bearings ... He opened things up."
Armitage, who is a generation younger, came to Auden a little later in his life. "I had no ideas what the poems were about," he said, "but whatever it was, you couldn't take your eyes off it ... It was a poetic that I wanted to get hold off ... the flexing language of those poems."
Both poets pay direct homage to Auden in their books. Fuller, with his seminal WH Auden: A Commentary, and Armitage with Moon Country - written with Glyn Maxwell - which retraces a visit Auden paid to Iceland in 1936 with Louis MacNeice. Both also believed that too much had been made of Auden's moving to America, his homosexuality, his being England's most "overfamous" poet - and not enough had been made of his spirit of adventure and his celebration of friendship.
In the end though, Fuller was probably the more enthusiastic of the two. For him, Auden's ultimate legacy was that he had the common touch - he could appeal to both the academic and the general reader. He explored every poetic form, transcending the page to move into theatre and film. Most importantly though, he was a hard-working poet - he worked nine hours a day, retreating after all the fun and games with his books and his Oxford English Dictionary. Perhaps this is the key to any artist's enduring legacy - to just keep at it.
Guardian Hay festival 2007