Interesting little essay over at big think … here’s the incipit as a bit of a tease:
“What is so distasteful about the Homeric gods,” W. H. Auden complains in his essay “The Frivolous & the Earnest,”
is that they are well aware of human suffering but refuse to take it seriously. They take the lives of men as frivolously as their own; they meddle with the former for fun, and then get bored.
Unlovable as the gods can be, this isn’t quite fair to them. Plenty of evidence in the Iliad and Odyssey contradicts the charge of heartlessness: Zeus, Hera, and the rest take pity on mortals at least as often as they harass them, and far more often than they view human suffering with detachment. A lot depends on their mood (Zeus is notoriously mercurial) and character (Athena, for example, runs more errands of mercy than Ares). But in general, they have an undeniable capacity for decency; they’re just selective and inconsistent in applying it. What seems to bother Auden is not that the Homeric gods are “frivolous” but that they’re no more or less so than we are.
How does all of this bear on Auden’s own poetry? Throughout his career, Auden strove to stay morally engaged with, rather than aesthetically detached from, the wars and genocides of the twentieth century. Because these were immediate rather than historical crises, Auden had a tough line to walk. He wanted to save mankind but also save his work from the trash heap, to address contemporary fears with both urgency and permanence. […]
- via: W. H. Auden and the Comedy of Human Suffering (big think)
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