Epitaph on a Tyrant 4 Aug 2009 Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after, And the poetry he invented was easy to understand; He knew human folly like the back of his hand, And was greatly interested in armies and fleets; When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter, And when he cried the little children died in the streets. W. H. Auden Philosophy Quotes Quotes
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Does any Auden specialist out there know this one? My two cents (from memory of unsystematic reading): “Poetry he invented” – Mao was a poet, while Hitler and Stalin were not. Auden visited China with Isherwood in the 30s, well before Mao was in power; but otherwise Auden didn’t pay too much attention to Asia. Auden flirted with authoritarianism at times – the poem in the late 30s mentioning “necessary murder” reflected leftish influence, though Auden was never much of a political animal. I gather Auden eventually disowned that poem, having been heavily attacked about it, by Orwell inter alia. I suspect that in the poem above, Auden was covering his tracks and not referring directly to any tyrant. Neither Mao, Stalin not Hitler had many “senators” to worry about – the poem might just as easily refer to Tiberius (though he too was no poet).
That’s way more than I knew. I just thought it was a metonymous tyrant. But if pushed I would have gone for Julius Caesar. I merely thought it worth bringing up now, for obvious reasons.