Auden and the Limits of Poetry, Part I

By the mid-1930s W.H. Auden was the most famous and most widely imitated young poet in England. His verse was brilliant, ironic, often funny, wide-ranging in its reference—equally at home in the worlds of Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry and the technology of mining—and sometimes impenetrably obscure. His poetic voice was from the beginning so distinctive that in 1933, when Auden was just twenty-six years old, Graham Greene could employ the word “Audenesque” in a movie review, confident that readers would know what he meant. The phrase “the Auden age” was in use before the poet turned thirty. But this widely recognized leader of the British intellectual avant-garde was an unhappy and confused young man.

Auden had been unable to believe in God since his adolescence. His loss of faith and his discovery of poetry had come, interestingly enough, at almost the same time. But in the late thirties, as Auden’s uncertainty about his role as a poet grew (along with political and social tensions in Europe) some odd things began to happen to him. When in Spain during that country’s Civil War, for instance, he was shocked and disturbed to see that supporters of the Republican cause had closed or burned many of Barcelona’s churches—but he could not account for his own reaction. Soon afterward, he met the English writer and editor Charles Williams, and felt himself to be “in the presence of personal sanctity”—though what sanctity meant in a world without God he could not say.

In December 1939 Auden had his most decisive experience of this kind. He went to a theater in what was then a German-speaking section of Manhattan to see a newsreel about the German invasion of Poland, which had occurred three months before. But it was not the film so much as the audience that Auden later remembered. Whenever the Poles appeared on the screen—as prisoners, of course, in the hands of the Wehrmacht—members of the audience would shout in German, “Kill them! Kill them!” Auden was stunned. “There was no hypocrisy,” he recalled many years later: these people were unashamed of their feelings and attempted to put no “civilized” face upon them. “I wondered, then, why I reacted as I did against this denial of every humanistic value.” On what grounds did he have a right to demand, or even a reason to expect, a more “humanistic” response? His inability to answer this question, he explained much later, “brought me back to the Church.” By the fall of 1940 he was going to church again, for the first time since childhood, and would affirm the Christian faith for the rest of his days.

However, the many readers who have rejoiced in the work of Auden’s fellow British Christians, the Inklings—Lewis, Tolkien, Charles Williams, and (peripheral to their circle) Dorothy Sayers—have paid little attention to this remarkable man or the extraordinary work that emerged from his embrace of the Christian faith. This is, as we shall see, an understandable but deeply lamentable state of affairs.

Edward Mendelson’s marvelous recent book about Auden (Later Auden, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 570 pp., $30) ends with the words, “and his work was done.” This conclusion provides the key to understanding Mendelson’s project not only in this book but also in its predecessor, 1981’s Early Auden. In these two rich and resourceful volumes, Mendelson has written the definitive account of one of the greatest poetic careers of the last century. The story he tells is not the story of Auden’s life in the usual sense of the word, though all elements of that life naturally enter into the story; rather, he narrates for us the complex and fascinating history of a body of work, the fruit of a calling. Mendelson gives us the biography of Auden’s vocation.

Not long after he began writing poetry at age fifteen, Auden came to understand that words were the medium in which he should work. But who or what imposed this “should” upon him? And how should he use the words he was called upon to use? In Early Auden—which began with Auden’s first adult poems, written in 1927 when he was twenty years old, and ended with his leaving England in January 1939—Mendelson traced Auden’s oscillations among several divergent and probably irreconcilable descriptions of the poet: conjurer, teacher, servant, prophet, redeemer. Later Auden begins with the poet in a new land, a place famous for encouraging new beginnings. When, with his friend Christopher Isherwood, Auden boarded a ship for America, he was the most celebrated young poet in England, but he knew that his career was at an impasse. All of the models for the writing life which he had tried out in the previous decade had come to seem empty, sterile, and in some cases repulsive. But he had no idea what could replace them. The germ of a new understanding, Mendelson shows, can be found in a word that Auden began using just before he left England: he said that the poet had a gift.

The presence of a gift implies the activity of a giver. But who, or what, gives the gift of poetry? Auden’s conversion, less than two years later, indicated that he had found an answer to that question. But Auden’s conversion did not resolve his puzzlement about his life as a poet: What should he do with the gift that God had given him? During the war years, from his apartment in New York, his pursuit of an answer to that question led him upon a remarkable intellectual and spiritual journey. In reviews and essays commissioned by major American periodicals, he would explore thinkers and ideas that he hoped would help him figure out what he was supposed to do, as a poet and a man: he considered Kierkegaard, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Paul Tillich, along with a host of less well-known figures like the historian Charles Norris Cochrane and, a little later on, the polymathic but eccentric philosopher-historian Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy.

As Mendelson demonstrates, Auden’s essays and reviews consistently depicted these figures as having some significant contribution to make to the interpretation of Western culture at that particular and terrible moment. But in the poems Auden was writing at the same time, Mendelson convincingly argues, he was preoccupied with the questions he could not answer, with the doubts that even the greatest of his intellectual helpers left unassuaged. Among these poems are some of Auden’s finest achievements, including the three long poems he wrote between 1941 and 1947, “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio,” “The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on The Tempest,” and “The Age of Anxiety: a Baroque Eclogue.” The first and last of these, Mendelson contends, have brilliant passages but are flawed in either their concept or execution; and even the masterful “The Sea and the Mirror” fails to offer a clear and satisfying account of the problem it sets out to address, namely, whether art can have spiritual significance. (Auden told his friend Ursula Niebuhr—the wife of Reinhold—that the poem was “really about the Christian conception of art.”)

Mendelson fully recognizes the greatness of this poem, and the extraordinarily intelligent ambitions of the other two. His point is not that the poems are less than they could have been, but rather that none of them satisfied its author. In the thirties, Auden had nurtured hopes that the poet might be a prophet to—or even a redeemer of—a sick and chaotic society. In the aftermath of his conversion, his thinking dominated by what he later called a “neo-Calvinist (i.e., Barthian) exaggeration of God’s transcendence,” he found poetry valuable only when it acknowledged its hopeless, incompetent distance from anything true or good that it tried to represent.

One sees this notion vividly illustrated in one of the concluding speeches of “The Sea and the Mirror,” a poem that adapts and transforms various elements of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In this passage, Auden’s Caliban explains what he thinks to be the only kind of situation in which the artist receives any genuine illumination. He asks us to imagine “the greatest grandest opera rendered by a very provincial touring company indeed.” Paradoxically, it is the very poverty and ineptitude of the production that makes it valuable to its actors, for even though “there was not a single aspect of our whole performance, not even the huge stuffed bird of happiness, for which a kind word could, however patronizingly, be said,” nevertheless it is “at this very moment [that] we do at last see ourselves as we are.” And, more important, “for the first time in our lives we hear . . . the real Word which is our only raison d’être.” At the moment when all pretense to aesthetic achievement helplessly falls away, and the actors are confronted with the authentic selves which they had used their performances to escape, they come to see God precisely in their distance from Him:

. . . we are blessed with that Wholly Other Life from which we are separated by an essential emphatic gulf of which our contrived fissures of mirror and proscenium arch—we understand them at last—are feebly figurative signs. . . . It is just here, among the ruins and the bones, that we may rejoice in the perfected Work that is not ours.

Similarly, Auden’s Prospero, musing on the kind of life he will live after giving up his magical powers, says “I never dreamed the way of truth / Was a way of silence.” But if Prospero is right, what can the poet do except stop writing? One suspects that at this point in his career Auden was contemplating just that—that is, making his adaptation of The Tempest his farewell to poetry, just as The Tempest itself has always been read as Shakespeare’s (and not just Prospero’s) farewell to the dramatic arts. And yet, Auden continued to believe that poetry was the vocation to which he had been called, not just by his temperament or aptitudes, but by God himself, “the author and giver of all good things” (as he wrote in a 1940 poem). But how, given the incapacity of language to grasp the most important things in and beyond this world, could he fulfill that calling?

In thinking through this problem, Auden gained insight from Kierkegaard; he found especially useful the Danish thinker’s notion of “indirect communication.” (This is a theme that Mendelson makes too little of, but since almost every other critic of Auden has made too much of it, the fault is easily pardonable.) Many of Kierkegaard’s works—in fact, all of his most famous ones—are not explicitly Christian. Such books are easily identifiable because Kierkegaard did not sign his name to them: they appeared under various pseudonyms. These works approach the questions with which Christianity is most concerned, but they do not offer Christian answers to those questions; indeed, their failure to produce compelling responses is just what leads the reader toward the Christian faith that alone can provide what we need. “An illusion can never be destroyed directly,” Kierkegaard wrote, “and only by indirect means can it be radically removed.”

Auden adopted this approach, and adapted it to his poetic needs. In the great poems of his maturity, Christianity appears as the missing piece of the puzzle, the answer to a question no one thought to ask. In “The Shield of Achilles,” for instance—one of the greatest poems of the twentieth century—the blacksmith god Hephaestos, watched by Achilles’ mother Thetis, portrays our world as it appears to the carnal eye, the eye unillumined by faith. He inscribes on the shield “three pale figures” being bound to three posts; the poem indicates their condition:

The mass and majesty of this world, all
That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
And could not hope for help and no help came:
What their foes liked to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.
A little later we see another figure:

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who’d never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.

In the Christian understanding, we indeed live in a world where such events occur. But the cold eye of Hephaestos, while it sees with terrifying clarity, is blind to some things: that one of those three bound figures may be different than the other two; that somewhere promises are kept; and that people weep with their brothers and sisters who weep. In Auden’s poem the Christian interpretation of history is evoked all the more powerfully by its absence: the indirect communication of “The Shield of Achilles” has a force more overt testimonials often lack.

The Christian faith helped Auden to keep writing in another way as well, by offering him—though not immediately, and not without years of profound study and reflection—a way of comprehending a problem that had obsessed him for many years: the relationship between freedom and necessity. In almost every major poem he wrote after coming to America, says Mendelson, Auden in some way “incorporated the significant events of his life. But he confronted each time a new variation on his inner debate: whether those events were better understood as the product of involuntary necessity or of free choice.” Mendelson begins his book by reflecting on this obsession of Auden’s, and one of the great achievements of Later Auden is the skillful patience and critical tact with which he explores Auden’s changing views on this vital subject.

Auden came to formulate the problem in this way: alone among the creatures, human beings live in history as well as in nature. In the natural world all obey the laws that govern their being; only we make choices and live out the consequences of them. That’s what history means. In a lovely poem called “Their Lonely Betters,” Auden sits in a chair in his garden, listens, and thinks about what he hears:

A robin with no Christian name ran through
The Robin-Anthem which was all it knew,
And rustling flowers for some third party waited
To say which pairs, if any, should get mated.

Not one of them was capable of lying,
There was not one which knew that it was dying
Or could have with a rhythm or a rhyme
Assumed responsibility for time.

Let them leave language to their lonely betters
Who count some days and long for certain letters;
We, too, make noises when we laugh or weep:
Words are for those with promises to keep.

The robin cannot decide what song to sing; the flowers cannot select their mates. These creatures, living wholly in nature, neither celebrate the wisdom nor lament the folly of their choices, for they have no choices to make. We, on the other hand, must and do choose, and thereby enter into the historical world of accountability (“responsibility for time”). We know what it means to have “promises to keep”—and what it means to break them.

But we are not just historical beings. We are also participants in nature, and in that sense we too are part of the Creation. And Mendelson shows, as no other critic has yet shown, how Auden came to wrestle with—and ultimately to accept, with gratitude—the limits and circumscriptions of our natural, our bodily, lives.

» Continue on to Part II. »