So Huge a Phallic Triumph: : Why Apollo Had Little Appeal for Auden

As Apollo 11 was heading for the moon, the editors of The New York Times decided to celebrate the landing, scheduled for a few days later, by printing a poem about it on the front page. In an article twenty years later, A.M. Rosenthal, then the managing editor, recalled the editors’ thinking:

What the poet wrote would count most, but we also wanted to say to our readers, look, this paper does not know how to express how it feels this day and perhaps you don’t either, so here is a fellow, a poet, who will try for all us.

It’s natural the Boys should whoop it up for
so huge a phallic triumph, an adventure
  it would not have occurred to women
  to think worth while, made possible only

because we like huddling in gangs and knowing
the exact time: yes, our sex may in fairness
  hurrah the deed, although the motives
  that primed it were somewhat less than menschlich.

A grand gesture. But what does it period?
What does it osse? We were always adroiter
  with objects than lives, and more facile
   at courage than kindness: from the moment

the first flint was flaked this landing was merely
a matter of time. But our selves, like Adam’s,
  still don’t fit us exactly, modern
  only in this—our lack of decorum.

Homer’s heroes were certainly no braver
than our Trio, but more fortunate: Hector
  was excused the insult of having
  his valor covered by television.

Worth going to see? I can well believe it.
Worth seeing? Mneh! I once rode through a desert
  and was not charmed: give me a watered
  lively garden, remote from blatherers

about the New, the von Brauns and their ilk, where
on August mornings I can count the morning
  glories, where to die has a meaning,
  and no engine can shift my perspective.

Unsmudged, thank God, my Moon still queens the Heavens
as She ebbs and fulls, a Presence to glop at,
  Her Old Man, made of grit not protein,
  still visits my Austrian several

with His old detachment, and the old warnings
still have power to scare me: Hybris comes to
  an ugly finish, Irreverence
  is a greater oaf than Superstition.

Our apparatniks will continue making
the usual squalid mess called History:
  all we can pray for is that artists,
  chefs and saints may still appear to blithe it.

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