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While decrying phallicised science and technology, poems like this serve the exclusionary purpose of reinforcing the notion that space exploration “would not have occurred to women”. This is the kind of misandrist poem that ends up only reinforcing gendered stereotypes and expectations. The burden of the poem is that the moonlandings are a function of a vulgarised masculinity. In fact, Johnson was not averse to travel, and regarded those who explored the universe with peaceable intentions with respect. The “worth seeing, not worth going to see” quote was apparently Johnson’s response to a suggestion that it would be worth seeing Giant’s Causeway. It’s eminently quotable, though its best line is itself a quote from Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Perhaps his hostility to Apollo 11 was informed by a fear that NASA might launch a mission to land on his face.Ī very late Auden poem, these meditations on the 1969 Moon Landing recycle various aspects of familiar Auden. Liam Neeson is still making action movies at the same age that Auden had already started to resemble something excavated from a Jutland peat bog. A young David Hockney recalls meeting this elderly Auden and exclaiming “my God – if that’s what his face looks like, what must his scrotum look like?” And this Auden was only in his sixties. It’s a meteor-scarred lunar landscape in its own right. Auden went further – he went from 20 to 200 without any clear intervening stage.
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Some people do this – some people leap from 30 to 60 in a single bound. He went from youth to old age (and strictly speaking he never made it to proper “old” old age) before anybody could really figure out what had happened to him. I’m not sure that Auden was ever middle aged. Still have power to scare me: Hybris comes toĬhefs and saints may still appear to blithe it. With His old detachment, and the old warnings Unsmudged, thank God, my Moon still queens the HeavensĪs She ebbs and fulls, a Presence to glop at,
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On August mornings I can count the morning Worth seeing? Mneh! I once rode through a desertĪbout the New, the von Brauns and their ilk, where Worth going to see? I can well believe it. Than our Trio, but more fortunate: Hector The first flint was flaked this landing was merelyĪ matter of time. What does it osse? We were always adroiterĪt courage than kindness: from the moment That primed it were somewhat less than menschlich.Ī grand gesture. The exact time: yes, our sex may in fairness In 1936, he published On This Island.It’s natural the Boys should whoop it up forīecause we like huddling in gangs and knowing In 1935, he married Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika, whom he had never met, to help her escape Nazi Germany. However, he was so appalled by the sacking of Roman Catholic churches that he returned to England. He embraced leftist causes and went to Spain intending to drive an ambulance during the Spanish Civil War. In the 1930s, Auden’s work was highly political. He later worked for a government film bureau. Auden spent a year in Berlin, then worked for five years as a teacher in Scotland and England. Two years later, Auden’s second book, Poems, was published. His friend Stephen Spender published Auden’s first poetry collection in 1928, the year Auden graduated from Oxford. He entered Oxford the following year and befriended several men who became important intellectuals, including Cecil Day-Lewis and Christopher Isherwood. Auden becomes an American citizen on May 20, 1946.Īuden, who was born in 1907 in England, had his first poem published in a collection called Public School Verse when he was 17.