My parents were about to meet in the late 1930s and the world was on the edge of a crisis in which it had been enmeshed since 1914 and from which it has yet to recover. In the 70 years from 1937 to 2007 Letters From Iceland went through 20 editions and the Baha’i Faith grew from an international community of, perhaps, 100,000 members to one of, perhaps, 7 million.-Ron Price with thanks to “Letters from Iceland,” Wikipedia, 31 March 2011.
You died just as I was finding
some pleasure in my vocation
and I really only got ‘into’ you
when I found much pleasure
from my avocation..You always(1)
said that a writer was a maker &
not a man of action; well, W.H.,
after 40 years of action, of being
jobbed, I was happy to be a maker.
You also said that a writer’s private
life should be of no concern to anyone
but his family and friends. I like that,
but on the internet and in our society
this is very difficult to achieve and the
issue is really quite complex, too complex
to deal with in a short poem like this. You
left a great deal of autobiographical words(2)
and me too W.H., me too. And, finally, W.H.,
thanks for The Dyer’s Hand published in ‘62(3)
just as I began my travelling-pioneering for
the Canadian Baha’i community in the very
heart of Ontario's Golden Horseshoe.(4)
1 1973-my first year of enjoyment as a high school teacher. From 1999 to 2011 I learned much more about Auden than the little I had already known in my role as a teacher of literature. These were the first dozen years of my retirement from FT work during which I found pleasure in writing. An avocation is an activity taken up in addition to one’s regular work or profession, and taken up for enjoyment.
2 Humphrey Carpenter, “Preface,” Auden and Biography, George Allen and Unwin, 1981. Readers interested in Auden can now read the Auden Studies Series and go to the internet hyperlink: http://audensociety.org/criticism.html for a list of relevant reading.
3 In Auden's brilliant collection of essays, "The Dyer's Hand" (1962) he makes the fascinating(at least to some) point that:
"The critical judgment "This book is good or bad" implies good or bad at all times, but in relation to the readers future a book is good now if it's future effect is good, and, since the future is unknown, no judgment can be made. The safest guide therefore is the naive uncritical principle of personal liking. A person at least knows one thing about his future, that however different it may be from his present, it will be his. However he may have changed he will still be himself, not somebody else. What he likes now, therefore, whether an impersonal judgment approve or disapprove, has the best chance of becoming useful to him later."
4. The Golden Horseshoe is a densely populated and industrialized region (or urban agglomeration) centred around the Greater Toronto Area at the western end of Lake Ontario in Southern Ontario, Canada, with outer boundaries stretching south to Lake Erie and north to Georgian Bay
Ron Price
31 March 2011
Updated for Artists & Poets Community
Studio Eight
On: 14/4/'11
