Para. 14

It is a pity that there are no entries in Spender’s journals for this precise period. But it is clear that he was leading a rich social life at that time: dinner with Jacqueline Onassis one day, the Rothschilds’ at Mouton a week later—the works. My feeling was that whatever he was thinking of had little to do with this workshop. Somehow, I was getting increasingly annoyed. It was none of my business, I guess, but I had put in a long day, and I felt that Spender owed us more. I didn’t know what—but more.

Q: Did the author have a reason to feel increasingly annoyed?

A: No, especially he had no reason to turn his anger at Spender. This is what we may call transferred anger.

Para. 15

My companion must have sensed that I was about to do something because she began writing furiously in a large notebook that she had brought along. Finally, after one particularly egregious “list”, I raised my hand. Spender looked surprised, but he called on me. “Why was that a poem?” I asked. In reading his journals years later, I saw that this was a question that he had been asked by students several times and had never come up with an answer that really satisfied him. In 1935, Auden wrote an introduce for an anthology of poetry for schoolchildren in which he defined poetry as “memorable speech.” That sounds good until one asks, memorable to whom? Doesn’t it matter? If not, why a workshop?

Para. 16

I can’t remember what Spenser answered, but I then told him that, when I was a student, I had heard T. S. Eliot lecture. After the lecture one of the students in the audience asked Eliot what he thought the most beautiful line in the English language was—an insane question, really, like asking for the largest number. Much to my amazement Eliot answered without the slightest hesitation, “ But look, the morn in russet mantle clad/Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastward hill.” I asked Spender what he thought the most beautiful line in the English language was. He got up form his chair and in a firm hand wrote a line of Auden’s on the blackboard. He looked at it with an expression that i have never forgotten—sadness, wonder, regret, perhaps envy. He recited it slowly and then sat back down. There was total silence in the room. I thanked him, and my companion and I left the class.

Q1: “But look, the morn in russet mantle clad”, where is this line taken from?

A: They were taken from the opening scene of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Act I) when the rising dawn marks the necessary departure of the ghost.

Q2: What was the expression on Spender when he looked at the line of Auden’s?

A: Spender had an expression of sadness, wonder, regret, perhaps envy.

Para. 17

I had not thought of all of this for many years, but recently, for some reasons, it all came back to me, nearly. I remembered everything except the line that Spender wrote on the blackboard. All that I could remember for certain was that it had to do with the moon—somehow the moon. My companion of fifteen years ago is my companion no longer, so I could not ask her. I am a compulsive collector of data from my past, mostly in the form of items that were once useful for tax preparation. Perhaps I had saved the program of the conference with the line written down on it. I looked in the envelops for 1981 and could find no trace of this trip. Then I had an idea—lunatic, lunar, perhaps. I would look through Auden’s collected poems and seek out every line having to do with the moon, to see if it jogged my memory. One thing that struck me, once I started this task, was that there are surprisingly few references to the moon in these poems. In a collection of eight hundred and ninety-seven pages, i doubt if there are twenty. From Moon Landing, there is “Unsmudged, thank God, my moon still queens the Heavens as she ebbs and fulls...” or from The Age of Anxiety, “Mild, unmilitant, the moon rose / And reeds rustled...” or from Nocturne, “Appearing unannounced, the moon / Avoids a mountain’s jagged prongs / And seeps into the open sky / Like one who knows where she belongs”—all wonderful lines, but not what I remembered. The closest was “ White hangs the waning moon / A scruple in the sky...” also form The Age Anxiety. This still didn’t seem right.

Q: “I had not thought of all of this for many years, but recently, for some reasons, it all came back to me, nearly.” What is the role of this sentence?

A: It brings the scene from 1981 to the time of writing. The sentence serves as a transition linking his encounter with Spender in 1981 with the concluding part, the message the author wants to impart to his readers.

Para. 18

Then I got an idea. I would reread Spender’s journals to see if he mentions a line in Auden’s poetry that refers to the moon. In the entry for the sixth of February 1975, I found this: “It would not to be very difficult to imitate the late Auden. [He had died in1973.] For in his late poetry his late poetry there is rather crotchety persona into whose carpet slippers some ambitious young man with a technique as accomplished could slip. But it would be very difficult to imitate the early Auden. ‘This lunar beauty / Has no history, / Is complete and early...’” This, i am sure of it now, it the line that Spender wrote on the blackboard that afternoon in 1981.

Q: Why did Spender think it would not be very difficult to imitate the late Auden?

A: He thought so because in Auden’s late poetry, there is a kind of eccentric appearance which some young people eager for success and with proficient writing skill can pick up, and imitate.

Para. 19

Poor Stephen Spender, poor Robert Oppenheimer, each limited, if not relegated, to the category of the merely very good, and each inevitably saddened by his knowledge of what was truly superior. “Being a minor poet is liking being a minor royalty,” Spender wrote in his journals, “and no one, as a former lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret once explained to me, is happy as that.” As for Oppenheimer, I recall Isidor Rabi once telling me that “if he had studied the Talmud and Hebrew, rather than Sanskrit, hr was brighter than he was. But to be more original and profound I think you have to be more focused.”

Para. 20

As Spender says, W.H. Auden’s poetry cannot be imitated, any more than Paul Dirac’s physics can be. That is what great poetry and great physics have in common: both are swept along by the tide of unanticipated genius as it rushes past the merely very good.

Q: What role do the last two paragraphs play?

A: They play the role of presenting the concluding remark, imparting the key message to the readers.