How many words make up a Hay Festival? Well, there are just over 400 events here this week. Each one of them lasts at least an hour. A human being speaks at a rate of approximately 100 words a minute. That works out - at an absolute minimum - at somewhere around 2.5m words being expended by speakers to audiences here this week. To say nothing of all the other words that the 100,000-odd punters speak to one another during the course of a week and the many thousands that people like me write about it: including these few hundred more now added to the muddy swirl of language.
As 2.5m words go, those at Hay are, of course, of the highest quality. Yet only a tiny number of anybody's words have the force and form to stick indelibly in the memory, here or anywhere else, now or at any other time. But that's where poets come in. One of the arts of the poet is to say a great deal in a very little space and to lodge their phrases in your brain until death or senility finally destroy them. And very few poets have the art for it to achieve this effect not just once or twice but again and again.
Yesterday's Hay tribute to WH Auden, 100 years old this year, was appropriately one of the few where the words will stick in the mind of anyone who heard them long after the festival leaves town. The session was part discussion, part poetry reading. John Fuller gave a useful summary of some of the most important things about Auden: that he was a very communicative poet (unlike so many modernists), that he was schooled in the poetry of earlier times, that he revived and explored all the forms of English poetry and that his influence was and is enduring. His lucidity was unrivalled. Much more than Eliot, Auden was "the mysterious conductor of poetry in English in the 20th century", Fuller said.
Simon Armitage made even greater claims. Auden had the common touch, he said. He could appeal to intellectuals and the ordinary reader alike. It was an ability that connected him, consciously, to Hardy and Yeats and, looking further back into the 19th century, to Browning and Tennyson - and even to Shakespeare himself. Listening to such praise one had to remind oneself that Auden's centenary this year has been marked by a certain collective negligence.
But then came the readings - Refugee Blues, Aubade, In memory of Sigmund Freud, Epitaph on a Tyrant among them. There are millions of words in Hay but here were lines that will stick like insects to the flypaper of the brains of those who heard them.
