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Anyway, at least you seem to be enough familiar with my work to determine its relative degree of talent.

Terreson
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I didn’t care much for Shelley–found him wan and dyspeptic. When he fell upon the thorns of life and bled, amidst a thicket of exclamation points, I lost interest.

Ms Millay seemed to me noteworthy mostly for being really good looking. I believe she has lost most of her looks by now.

Weldon Kees is, um, the best poet ever to come out of Nebraska.

I really like John Berryman. I really don’t like Robert Bly.

Thanks for the recommendations. I am considering reading Byron next, but I knew a guy named Byron in jr high, and he wasn’t much of a writer.

RHE
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I highly recommend that you read:

Dylan Thomas
Robert Frost
Wallace Stevens
Robinson Jeffers
William Carlos Williams
T.S. Eliot
Edna St. Vincent Millay
E.E. Cummings
Theodore Roethke
Kenneth Patchen
John Berryman
Weldon Kees
Thomas Merton
Robert Creeley
William Blake
W.B. Yeats
Robert Bly
Percy Bysshe Shelley
and
Walt Whitman

and then seriously reconsider your position.
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RHE
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After reading your post I went straight to my library and retrieved the Auden poems you referenced…and re-read them.

I repeat: (pssst) Auden wasn’t really a poet.

Since I was in the library anyway, I looked in the dictionary. There, right next to the entry ‘poetaster’, was a little picture of W.H. Auden.

Synonyms offered were: ‘fraud’, ‘phony’, ‘versifier’, ‘fake’, ‘scammer’, ‘bamboozler’, ‘charlatan’ and ‘sham’.

What say ye to that?
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It’s always odd and interesting to observe the untalented patronizing the great. I can almost picture Auden saying, “Poor Terreson,” but he’d probably have been too busy writing “The Fall of Rome” and “In Praise of Limestone.”

RHE
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“Brown & Dilke walked with me and back from the Christmas pantomine. I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason…This pursued through Volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes all other considerations, or rather obliterates all consideration.”

By this standard Auden maybe wasn’t a great poet. Shakespeare was. Certainly Goethe was. And Keats intuited what matters the most. Poor Auden. Poor any poet or artist lacking the capacity for the ahistorical. I read an online poet to say once: ‘Poetry is neither comment, complaint, or consolation. It is a seizure and a shiver.’ Makes sense to me.

Terreson
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why can’t I p-o-d the 69 sonnets Auden produced over his lifetime into a volume/pdf

and use the same excuse?”

.
Integrity, honor and simply decency, maybe?

.
P.S. (Pssst…) Auden wasn’t really a poet.

.
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“Seriously, are we not earthlings, as well? Perhaps it’s time for reconciliation with the rest of the family…”

Yes, I agree…and I’ve also been waiting for Congress to pass a law against hurricanes. It should provide for substantial fines and penalties should any hurricane even enter our territorial waters. Imprisonment should they actually dare to hit land!

Wendy, predators and prey can never reconcile.
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It’s a pretty famous poem, and I assumed most folks here would know it; I have confidence in my readers, it’s true!

John already gave the link to the poem at poets.org in a comment above; I didn’t in my blogpost because, frankly, I didn’t know it was available there till John mentioned it.
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You could have — I think should have — linked in your post to the poem in its entirety at peots.org. Or mentioned where it could be found in its entirety, given that the entirety is “absolutely enormous” to the point you make.

The post, I now grok, doesn’t even give the poem’s title, which puzzles me. If you assumed that all your readers would recognize the quotation and the poem from which it was excerpted, all I can say is thank you very much for having such confidence in your readers, but that such is not always warranted with respect to me, personally, and I didn’t know this one here.

P.S. I think the quotation from Levi-Strauss is tremendous.
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Also, of course, I acknowledge that my view may not be the view of a court that would by the ultimate decider, and that the the person or entity that quoted in full would be liable for the Auden copyright holder’s legal costs should the copyright holder take the matter to court and win.

On the other, other hand, reviews and commentary both in print and on-line quote poems in full all the time, and most are not permissioned. I mean, I see it all over. I believe those full poem uses, for purposes of comment and criticisms, for non-profit, educational purposes, do not infringe on copyright.

I’m still curious if this prohibition on quoting in full was placed on Don by Don, or by his Poetry Foundation contract. I know the terms under which Google bloggers blog, what about here? I’m now curious. Are these bloggers paid (byt the post?, word?)?, is the blogger responsible and liable for all content, with no protection from the Foundation? Any such back-story can shed light on the content posted, I do believe. Has any Poetry Foundation blogger posted the terms and condition under which they write, if any? I suggest someone should do that.

And by the way, the Auden copyright holder view — assuming that it is that a full poem can’t be reproduced without permission — is FAR different than the view of copyright expressed by Paul Zukofsky. The latter purports to prohibit ANY quotation, even excerpts; that’s plainly and grossly at odds with the “fair use” doctrine. In contrast, the concern here with Auden involves reproduction of a poem in its entirety. There’s a big difference in the two views. As I acknowledge above, the Auden view, while I reject it, isn’t so certainly at odds with “fair use” as Zukofsky’s.
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I’m just an idle onlooker in this copyright/Net free access conflict,

but what’s going to resolve it? will the Authors League have to bring a class action suit against the ISPs,

and they’ll enforce it (how) ?

and if the robbers of PZ’s copyright justify their theft by asserting it’s beneficial because it increases the value and reputation of the poet,

why can’t I p-o-d the 69 sonnets Auden produced over his lifetime into a volume/pdf

and use the same excuse?

…
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http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15544

Which puts me in mind of Christopher Smart.

Where ask is have, where seek is find,
Where knock is open wide.

(Excerpted here:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=174441 )

Or as chant, led by a woman with a bright flamboyant wild red wig at the WTO protests in Seattle 10 years ago, had it,

What do we want? EVERYTHING
When do we want it? ALL THE TIME
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Might you, if you please, unpack a bit your thinking for concluding that you “can’t legally quote the entire poem.”

I don’t understand why you can’t, or rather, I believe you can. You’d be doing it for an educational, non-profit purpose, it’s but one of hundreds of Auden poems, would have little if no impact on sales of Auden’s work, and despite your disavowal of the same, your essay in fact is a work of criticism and comment, as it sheds light on, offers a perspective on, the poem.

Or maybe when you say you can’t legally quote the entire poem you mean that Harriet.blog and/or Poetry, in an agreement / contract with you, prohibits you from quoting poems in their entirety without permission of the copyright holder, regardless of any interpretation of fair use?

Thanks.
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Parsimony is the lack of willingness to participate in the distributive laws of an economy or the reduction of something to its simplest plausibilities. Parsimony was Aristotle’s method. A polis that does not realize the sociolinguist implications of the simplicity of virtue being one standing by their word allows very little opportunity for enlightening more than what in the popular mind equates to pathology. An economy is responsible for the distribution of resourceful particulars within a boundary i.e. knowing when to conclude a clear thought. Philosophical grammar is dependent on clarifying intentions: Wittgenstein & Kant are useful words to semanticize as well.
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Seriously, are we not earthlings, as well? Perhaps it’s time for reconciliation with the rest of the family…
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Sincerely yours,
the wildlife of the Earth
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At first I thought, nah, the dance floor is the place where that happens, and then I thought, no, it’s blogging! Moritz’s continuation, his meditation on the suffering, desperation, and denunciation of division, and the memory, dream, and prophecy of unity, is evocative, but I would urge people to seek these experiences outside of poetry as well. Poetry makes things happen (and “nothing” is neither a “thing” nor an event, unless perhaps it’s a dramatic metaphor for the experience of a Heraclitan insight into universal impermanence), but there are much more sociable ways of experiencing and bridging divisions. Not saying that poetry is anti-social! Just that it’s marginal, and *nothing* wrong with that.

Anyway, thanks Don — makes me want to read the whole article.
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You have humbled all of us.
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