TextSpace

To Write

I, too, must admit that I really didn’t enjoy any of this weeks reading. However, if I have to choose to discuss them, I chose to discuss Auden’s essay. Like most I picked up on his descriptions of the young “would-be writers.” Personally, I took some offense to this because I am a “writer,” though I will admit that when I was young I wanted to be a lawyer. However, when thinking about law, I realized that there were too many criminals for me to take that path. Therefore, here I am writer, poet and doctoral student. 

I have to remember, however, to place this in context which was 1962 and not today because very rarely do I hear someone say that they want to be a writer. In fact, walk into most English classes in high schools across America and many cringe when they have to hear that they need to write anything. Business seems to be where many are heading and that is because that is where the money is at, and this can be seen in the view of education too. Business, capital has really shaped higher education and education in general. Money has taken the place of education where students do not want to learn to be knowledgeable, they want to learn where they can get the money and what it takes to get the money and that is all they want to learn. Students are the consumers, they want to get the good grades, so they pay their tuition to get good grades, then pay with the grades to get good jobs but are they really learning? I think the fault lies within society’s placement of English, poetry and writing at the bottom of the scale. Yet, I liked Rachal’s comments about this where writing becomes the only way to produce something that is all your own, where you can claim responsibility for what you made in a world where that is fast fading away.

Although, after you write that wonderful piece that you hand in to be published doesn’t it get taken away from you and doesn’t it become the property in a sense of the reader, do you lose possession of the piece once it leaves your hands or computer as the case may be? Of course, that is if you are lucky enough to get it published.

The one thing that I did like about Auden’s essay is his reliance on the fact that the poet believes in the human condition and does not treat the human race as statistics. He states on the final page, “Whatever the cultural differences between them, they both sniff in any official world the smell of an unreality in which persons are treated as statistics.”
I think this is truly the best quote of them all because it shows the relation of the poet to the so-called common man, in that they both share concern for humanity where government, big business, etc. doesn’t because all they see is a number and a dollar sign. Writing, poetry in particular, celebrates people, their relations, their lives, their actions and deeds, it celebrates life where as science, as Auden noted, only celebrates things, and their deeds concerned with things (361).

So, I say forget Auden’s discouraging down trodden words to “would-be” writers and I say write because for all the bad out there, there is a lot of good. Write and celebrate living.