My Favourite Poem - David Green

I originally intended that this feature would be once a month, or someting like that, but it seems to have got off to such a good start that we might as well have our own little interweb festival right here and right now. So, please, anybody else who feels like contributing, let me know.

There is a crafty way of nominating more than one poem by mentioning one or two that were unlucky not to be one's choice and so podium places, or each way payouts, go to Gunn's Tamer and Hawk or one of Larkin's, like At Grass or Church Going. But I'm not going to desert Auden's Musee des Beaux Arts at this crucial moment.

http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~creswell/auden.html

In reverse order of things that poems probably need to do, it says something I like but, more importantly, it says it in an exceptional way. I can see how Auden has built his casual, conversational tone into a disciplined form but I've never even bothered to analyse the rhyme scheme because in this there's simply no need to. It is full of brilliant observation and phrasing. It obviously contrasts the extraordinary with the very ordinary. It accepts the inevitable while admiring flawed attempts to do the impossible.

And, for anyone who doesn't know the poem or the painting, the leg of the disappearing Icarus is just in front of the boat.

It doesn't seem to have been decided yet who was the greatest poet of the twentieth century in English. When I was considerably younger, it was orthodox to think it was Eliot but the Modernist vogue has receded a bit since then. There is likely to be a big traditional vote for Hardy. It won't ever be Thom Gunn on a wide, popular sweep of opinion whereas Larkin and Betjeman will have their claims. But Auden, with his facility for great lines and beautiful love poems, could turn out to be the right answer.