In Early Auden, Edward Mendelson points to the lines "And the lie of Authority/Whose buildings grope the sky" in Auden's "September 1" and suggests that "grope" is intended to have an "indecorous undertone", and suggesting that the line alludes to a couplet in John Wilmot, the secon earl of Rochester's A Ramble in St. James's Park - "Whence rows of mandrakes tall did rise/Whose lewd tops fucked the very skies."
Auden's poem "The Platonic Blow" is called by Dan Chiasson "is the dirtiest verse written since Rochester". This verse, like Rochester's poems, was not published right away, but "copies were circulated among friends and fans for years, before Ed Sanders...printed an unauthorized version in 1965." The article goes on to say that "Auden publicly denied authorship" of the poem.
Rochester, as Tom Jones says in Lord Rochester in the Restoration World, "uses obscenity to achieve a poetic questioning and unsettlings". This is perhaps similar to what Nijinsky says of his own writing in his diary, and to what Stephen Burt says of Auden's work in "September 1: Revisited"- Burt says that the speaker's "announcing Auden's, and our own, complicity in "the international wrong" (536) sets the poem apart from others "which do not recognize that wrong, and cannot help us counter it" (536) - that it demands a recognition by the reader that other works do not, simliar to how Rochester's do.
But Burt goes on to add that:
"It is a mistake to ask poems... to perform deliberative work on matters of public consequence, and a mistake to associate the value of a modern poem with the value of the action it recommends. Such an argument need not... imply that poems should not adopt public voices or platforms, only that they should not be judged on how well they do so" (543).
Auden's later position does not mirror his early demand for awareness by the reader - he does not demand action (or awareness) in the same way, and rejected the poems that did, which suggests a later change from views that he may have had in common with Rochester.
Auden's poem "The Platonic Blow" is called by Dan Chiasson "is the dirtiest verse written since Rochester". This verse, like Rochester's poems, was not published right away, but "copies were circulated among friends and fans for years, before Ed Sanders...printed an unauthorized version in 1965." The article goes on to say that "Auden publicly denied authorship" of the poem.
Rochester, as Tom Jones says in Lord Rochester in the Restoration World, "uses obscenity to achieve a poetic questioning and unsettlings". This is perhaps similar to what Nijinsky says of his own writing in his diary, and to what Stephen Burt says of Auden's work in "September 1: Revisited"- Burt says that the speaker's "announcing Auden's, and our own, complicity in "the international wrong" (536) sets the poem apart from others "which do not recognize that wrong, and cannot help us counter it" (536) - that it demands a recognition by the reader that other works do not, simliar to how Rochester's do.
But Burt goes on to add that:
"It is a mistake to ask poems... to perform deliberative work on matters of public consequence, and a mistake to associate the value of a modern poem with the value of the action it recommends. Such an argument need not... imply that poems should not adopt public voices or platforms, only that they should not be judged on how well they do so" (543).
Auden's later position does not mirror his early demand for awareness by the reader - he does not demand action (or awareness) in the same way, and rejected the poems that did, which suggests a later change from views that he may have had in common with Rochester.