Dear W.H. Auden

Dear W.H. Auden:

This one is for you.

Tonight I re-read In Memory of W.B. Yeats. Over the past few months I have been struggling with the lack of creativity that my current way of living has afforded me. The truth is I am unable to find employment doing something that I love and in order to make a living I am doing something that I hate. As much as I despise cliches the one that is standing out in my head most right now is the tried and true saying "find a job that you love and you'll never work another day in your life". While I wait to hear back from the grad schools I have applied to I am frantically trying to figure out just what the hell I am doing with myself.

Nowadays an undergraduate degree is, for the most part, useless. I read an article a couple of months back that compares the undergraduate degree of today with the high school degree of the past. Nobody told me that studying the subject that I am most passionate about would lead to a severe struggle to find employment in that field. Granted I was not disillusioned about the whole starving artist mantra but I genuinely did not see myself still working as a server two years after I graduated.

The one undergraduate class that still stands out for me years later is a second year English literature class in which I was shaken from my hungover stupor with the misquote of the famous Auden poem previously mentioned. "For poetry makes nothing happen..." My professor was using "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" in order to refer to Elizabeth Browning and the poem she had written on the plight of children in England ("Cry of the Children") during the industrial revolution. His point was this: the poem didn't change anything. Working conditions remained the same and life? It moved on.

I had never read "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" before this day and I was so struck by that particular discussion that I mulled over it for several days. Years later I still think about that class and the apparent uselessness of my degree. Writing. Poetry. Why do I feel the need to write when I can hardly hold out hope that I will touch even the smallest or most insignificant life with it?

Looking back history is littered with writers who have committed suicide: Hemingway, Plath, Sexton, Woolf...why is this? Talented writers. Writers who's works outlived their short lives and will outlive mine. The classics we call them. Novels that have stood the test of time that their authors could not bear to face. What do we take away from these stories? From the poetry? What change has happened because these books exist? The art of writing is a daunting, sometimes frightening task. Perhaps these writers took their lives because the immensity of what they know and what they are trying to portray is just too much for them and not enough for the critics. For the readers. The fear of inadequacy, the fear of not being heard or of not being understood overwhelms.

"...From ranches of isolation, and the busy griefs,/Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,/ A way of happening, a mouth."

I continue to hold out hope.