What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In our third series, The Poems of Others II, twenty-four poets pay homage to the poems that led them to write. Each Monday's delivery brings you the poem and an excerpt from the essay. 
W. H. Auden
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.        
from the book COLLECTED POEMS / Vintage International 
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Photograph of Monica Jones, taken in 1971 by Philip Larkin
Sex, Lies and Despair

Professor John Sutherland is close to finishing a book about Monica Jones, based on the unpublished letters she wrote to English poet Philip Larkin, her lover for four decades. “Describing it as 'the last great exchange of letters in literary history,' he said it was 'like she’s ripping open her soul and her mind, letting it pour out.'"
 
via THE GUARDIAN
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Cover image from W. H. Auden's Collected Poems
What Sparks Poetry:
Jason Schneiderman on W. H. Auden's “Musée des Beaux Arts"

"I remain amazed by how many rules the poem seems to break. The first stanza of the poem is a direct violation of that old dictum, 'show don’t tell.' Auden makes a lot of claims about how the Old Masters depict suffering, and he tells the reader how to interpret the paintings being discussed. The Old Masters might be showing, but Auden is quite definitely telling."
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