An Auden quote on financial crisis
September 28th, 2008,The current financial crisis here in the U.S. has brought to my mind some of W.H. Auden’s lines on the Great Depression. They come from his 1933 poem, “Here on the cropped grass…”:
Europe grew anxious about her health,
Combines tottered, credits froze,
And business shivered in a banker’s winter…
Very few poets can be topical this way and create a successful poem, as Auden does here, I believe (though he did exclude this poem from later collections). The lines preceding these are memorable as well; they provide a wonderful description of the difficult years of the early 1930’s. But because they pertain less directly to today’s financial crisis, I will simply encourage you to find the poem and read it in its entirety. Try a good library and see if they have Auden’s great volume of poems, On This Island (titled Look, Stranger! in Britain), or read it in the wonderful collection of his writings of the 1930’s, The English Auden.
Now we await the unfolding of history to see if this current “banker’s winter” will last - and whether we can stave off a depression.
September 29th, 2008 at 11:06 pm
Beautiful post. I’ll have to dig up the poem tomorrow. After the turmoil of the last 8 years and 18 days, it’s all the stranger that it feels increasingly like we’re living through a world-historical moment. Wars abroad, the election, a collapsing economy, the coming winter…
September 30th, 2008 at 12:40 pm
Hi Bill, and thanks for this. Who knew there was a poem that used “banker’s winter” in it?
October 3rd, 2008 at 3:40 am
Nice to see this, Bill.
Over the seemingly endless winter of Bushism, I’ve come back several times to Auden’s great New Year Letter (January 1, 1940). Especially the passage with its ruminations on what a better society we’d have
If it were easy to be good,
And cheap, and plain as evil…
And just in time for our little election are these uncomfortably relevant lines:
The New Year brings an earth afraid,
Democracy a ready-made
And noisy tradesman’s slogan, and
The poor betrayed into the hand
Of lackeys with ideas, and truth
Whipped by their elders out of youth,
The peaceful fainting in their tracks
With martyrs’ tombstones on their backs,
And culture on all fours to greet
A butch and criminal elite,
While in the vale of silly sheep
Rheumatic old patricians weep.
October 13th, 2008 at 9:17 am
Great lines, Richard. New Year Letter is one of my favorite poems, perhaps the high-water mark of Auden’s skill. The title of this blog, Northern Letter, is a conscious echo of that poem’s title.
October 15th, 2008 at 11:07 pm
Very timely post, Bill - and the situation has only grown worse!
It is both frightening and exciting to imagine what the US might look like on the other side of this crisis.
As a nation, we will have to reassess everything we do in the economic sphere.