The Novelist
The Novelist - meaning Summary
Talent Versus Craft
Auden contrasts the visible glamour of poets with the hidden discipline required of the novelist. The novelist must abandon flashy talent to learn plainness and awkwardness, enduring boredom and mundane complaints. Success demands becoming morally available to a wide, sometimes filthy world and bearing ordinary human wrongs in his own person. The poem frames the novelist’s art as steady, unromantic labor and ethical responsibility rather than dazzling inspiration.
Read Complete AnalysesEncased in talent like a uniform, The rank of every poet is well known; They can amaze us like a thunderstorm, Or die so young, or live for years alone. They can dash forward like hussars: but he Must struggle out of his boyish gift and learn How to be plain and awkward, how to be One after whom none think it worth to turn. For, to achieve his lightest wish, he must Become the whole of boredom, subject to Vulgar complaints like love, among the Just Be just, among the Filthy filthy too, And in his own weak person, if he can, Must suffer dully all the wrongs of Man.
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