Swimming at Tooting Lido, under threatening grey storm clouds, reflecting on its lovely 1930s art deco architecture made me think idly think about the 1930s poet W.H. Auden and it began to dawn on me that he and Kipling, whose complete works I’m currently working through, have more in common than you might at first think. Both:
- dominated their decade (the 1890s for Kipling, the 1930s for Auden), influencing everyone, becoming a climate of thought
- are anti-Romantic, external poets, interested in the outside world and in the machinery of modern life, in new technologies, in devices and gadgets – rather than their own personal feelings or spiritual development
- are deeply political poets, writing poems commentating on the great events of their time; compare Kipling’s ‘White Man’s Burden‘ with Auden’s ‘Spain‘ – different in most technical respects, but similar in that they were engaging with the key political issues of their day, and that their writings on these subjects had a huge impact on their contemporaries
- are deeply moral and didactic poets: both strongly promote sets of value – Kipling’s stiff upper lip imperial Duty; Auden’s a) 1930s socialism, then, after the war, b) Christian humanism
- are interested in northern European, Nordic culture, Border ballads, Anglo-Saxon: i.e. they’re both relatively uninfluenced by Mediterranean culture, in particular the French poetry which strongly influenced the poets of the generations before them (the Aesthetes who preceded Kipling, the 20s Modernists who preceded Auden)
- are interested in out-of-the-way vocabulary, technical terms, slangs and argots – Kipling imported hundreds of words from India and Auden used to read the OED for pleasure
- are fluent and prolific, writing what feels like thousands of poems…
- …including what are called occasional poems meaning written for specific public events, from Kipling’s Recessional, written for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, to Auden’s late poem celebrating the Apollo moon landing in 1969
- …partly because they were both untouched by the Aesthetic/Symbolist/Modernist feeling that each poem must be a dauntingly intense masterpiece which creates its own form; instead both were happy to work in traditional forms, knocking out limericks and epigrams and comic verse and dramatic monologues and hymns and exulting in their own virtuosity
- both went to public school, obvz (though worth pointing out that Kipling did not go on to university but straight into a tough job in journalism)
- both were very short-sighted – and possibly this links to their tendency to deploy large, capitalised Abstract words, to fill their poems with argumentation and discussion, to enjoy deploying recherché vocabulary, slangs and argots – all tendencies which led them away from the lush, sensuous descriptions found in Romantic poets
- both had odd first names: Rudyard, Wystan
Books & Boots 