Hello Everyone!

This week and last week in ASTU, we discussed poetry. I didn’t really appreciate poetry before last week. But when I was reading W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939”,  I became fond of it. I’ve heard of Auden before last week with names like Orwell, Dickens, and Austen, so I thought he was a novelist. I really admire their work and his poem since it felt like I was travelling through time. Maybe it’s because he uses words we don’t often use now or maybe it’s because he mentioned Nijinsky (whose story was very very interesting). I just felt like I gained more knowledge of his era since I had to google what was happening when he was writing this poem.

Even though we associated “September 1, 1939” with 9/11 in class, with how I read it, I didn’t really think there was much association. Sure, there was grieving and fear in both. But then, if we just find poems with grief and fear, then we would find thousands of poems.

The poem also reminded me of Saal’s trauma transfer which is seeing your own suffering from someone else’s perspective. For instance, the victims of 9/11 were reading Auden’s poem and seeing their suffering instead of the suffering of those people during that time. I don’t want to argue that it depreciated the suffering of the people in the past or the victims of Dresden, but I think trauma transfer is just saying that traumas are connected, that maybe World War II victims experienced the same emotions that 9/11 victims are going through.

But the thing is, that idea is still fundamentally wrong. They’re not experiencing the same things. They’re not feeling the same emotions. If Auden’s poem was passed around after 9/11 and the victims can relate, that’s fine. But we have to look further at the poem. For me, it is more than grief and fear. It’s about love. It’s about politics. It’s about Facism, Nationalism, and dictators. It’s about Auden himself. It may even be about New York (which I thought was a bit ironic). Of course, that’s the best thing about poetry (or literature). There’s no right interpretation. But I think it would be fair if we look at the trauma of those people in Auden’s time as well.

Even Saal argued this idea. She mentioned Simon Goldberg who was a Jew during WWII in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close and concluded:

Oskar’s voice might sound the loudest at the end, but underneath it we can—if we choose to—still decipher those other voices haunting the text, defying closure and facile appropriation: the distant voices of grandma and grandpa Schell and, above all, the muted voice of Simon Goldberg (473). 

Oskar here may or can represent 9/11 while Simon Goldberg as a victim of WWII. Both Saal and I urge everyone to consider other victims as well. This doesn’t necessarily mean victims of the past but victims everywhere. We don’t have to look at them equally but at least consider their ‘habit-forming pain, mismanagement and grief’.

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