Influential Ghosts: A Study of Auden's Sources (Studies in Major Literary Authors)

Studies in Major Literary Authors

Edited by

William E. Cain Professor of English Wellesley College

A Routledge Series

Studies in Major Literary Authors William E. Cain, General Editor A Singing Contest Conventions of Sound in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney Meg Tyler

Queer Times Christopher Isherwood’s Modernity Jamie M. Carr

Edith Wharton as Spatial Activist and Analyst Reneé Somers

Edith Wharton’s “Evolutionary Conception” Darwinian Allegory in Her Major Novels Paul J. Ohler

Queer Impressions Henry James’s Art of Fiction Elaine Pigeon

The End of Learning Milton and Education Thomas Festa

“No Image There and the Gaze Remains” The Visual in the Work of Jorie Graham Catherine Sona Karagueuzian

Reading and Mapping Hardy’s Roads Scott Rode

“Somewhat on the Community-System” Fourierism in the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne Andrew Loman Colonialism and the Modernist Moment in the Early Novels of Jean Rhys Carol Dell’Amico

Creating Yoknapatawpha Readers and Writers in Faulkner’s Fiction Owen Robinson No Place for Home Spatial Constraint and Character Flight in the Novels of Cormac McCarthy Jay Ellis

Melville’s Monumental Imagination Ian S. Maloney

The Machine that Sings Modernism, Hart Crane, and the Culture of the Body Gordon A. Tapper

Writing “Out of All the Camps” J.M. Coetzee’s Narratives of Displacement Laura Wright

Influential Ghosts A Study of Auden’s Sources Rachel Wetzsteon

Here and Now The Politics of Social Space in D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf Youngjoo Son “Unnoticed in the Casual Light of Day” Philip Larkin and the Plain Style Tijana Stojković

Influential Ghosts A Study of Auden’s Sources

Rachel Wetzsteon

Routledge New York & London

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 270 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 2 Park Square Milton Park, Abingdon Oxon OX14 4RN

© 2007 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business Printed in the United States of America on acid‑free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 International Standard Book Number‑10: 0‑415‑97546‑8 (Hardcover) International Standard Book Number‑13: 978‑0‑415‑97546‑9 (Hardcover) No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging‑in‑Publication Data Wetzsteon, Rachel. Influential ghosts : a study of Auden’s sources / Rachel Wetzsteon. p. cm. ‑‑ (Studies in major literary authors) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN‑13: 978‑0‑415‑97546‑9 (alk. paper) 1. Auden, W. H. (Wystan Hugh), 1907‑1973‑‑Criticism and interpretation. 2. Hardy, Thomas, 1840‑1928‑‑Influence. 3. Kierkegaard, Søren, 1813‑1855‑‑Influence. 4. Allusions in literature. I. Title. PR6001.U4Z895 2006 811’.52‑‑dc22 Visit the Taylor & Francis Web site at http://www.taylorandfrancis.com and the Routledge Web site at http://www.routledge‑ny.com

2006025490

Contents

List of Abbreviations

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Permissions

xi

Introduction: Auden and Allusion Chapter One Hawk’s Visions and Revisions: Auden’s Debt to Hardy

xiii

1

Chapter Two Influential Ghosts: Structural Allusion in Auden’s Early Poetry

31

Chapter Three Burying and Praising: Auden’s Anti-Elegiac Elegies

57

Chapter Four In Health and in Sickness: Auden and Kierkegaard’s Stormy Marriage

83

Notes

109

Works Cited

119

Index

123

v

List of Abbreviations

EA

The English Auden

CP

Collected Poems

CPr

Collected Prose

J

Juvenilia

vii

Acknowledgments

I must begin this study by thanking many influential ghosts of my own. My dissertation advisors, Edward Mendelson and George Stade, provided unlimited advice and encouragement along the way, restoring my wit and will too many times to count. At a later stage, James Coulter, Richard Howard and John Rosenberg offered thoughtful comments as well. My interest in Auden—and in poetry generally—would never have taken root without the wisdom and enthusiasm of Marie Borroff and John Hollander. I have profited enormously from the kindness of my colleagues at William Paterson University. I also want to extend my thanks to everyone at the Unterberg Poetry Center of the Ninety-Second Street Y. My deep gratitude to Max Novick at Routledge. Thanks, of course, to my family, especially my mother, Sonja Wetzsteon, my late father, Ross Wetzsteon, my grandmother, Lotte Frenkel, and my stepmother, Laura Ross. “Digit friends and dear them all,” the subject of this book once wrote. At Columbia, Camille Cauti, Nadia Herman Colburn, David Damrosch, Sarah Hannah, Melanie Hubbard, Jonathan Levin, Julian Levinson, Lisa Makman, Jill Muller, John David Rhodes, and Catherine Siemann helped keep my writing on track and my spirits high. Other friends—Sarah Arvio, Lorna Blake, Robert Clark, Will Cohen, Mary DiLucia, Sharon Dolin, Jeff Goldstein, Rachel Hadas, Daniel Hall, Amy Kantrowitz, Phillis Levin, Rika Lesser, Charles McNulty, Tannya Mendelson, David Mikics, Jacek Niecko, Eva Salzman, Eric Steinhart, Aidan Wasley, and Christopher Yu—did the same. This book could never have been written without the guidance and generosity of all these people.

ix

Permissions

From Selected Poems, New Edition by W.H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson, copyright © 1979 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith and Monroe K. Spears, executors of the Estate of W.H. Auden Preface copyright © 1979 by Edward Mendelson. Used by permission of Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc. “At the Grave of Henry James,” copyright 1940 and renewed 1969 by W.H. Auden, “Academic Graffiti,” copyright © 1960 by W.H. Auden, “The Art of Healing,” copyright © 1976 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith and Monroe K. Spears, Executors of the Estate of W.H. Auden, “Atlantis,” copyright 1945 by W.H. Auden, “The Cave of Making,” copyright © 1964 by W.H. Auden, “Consider,” copyright 1934 and renewed 1962 by W.H. Auden, “Dover,” copyright © 1976 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith and Monroe K. Spears, Executors of the Estate of W.H. Auden, “Eleven Occasional Poems,” copyright © 1976 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith and Monroe K. Spears, Executors of the Estate of W.H. Auden, “Elegy for JFK,” copyright © 1976 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith and Monroe K. Spears, Executors of the Estate of W.H. Auden, “Family Ghosts,” copyright © 1976 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith and Monroe K. Spears, Executors of the Estate of W.H. Auden, “For the Time Being,” copyright 1944 and renewed 1972 by W.H. Auden, “Homage to Clio,” copyright © 1976 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith and Monroe K. Spears, Executors of the Estate of W.H. Auden, “I am Not a Camera,” copyright © 1972 by W.H. Auden, “In Memory of Ernst Toller,” copyright 1940 & renewed 1968 by W.H. Auden, “In Memory of Sigmund Freud,” copyright 1940 and renewed 1968 by W.H. Auden, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” copyright 1940 & renewed 1968 by W.H. Auden, “In Praise of Limestone,” copyright 1951 by W.H. Auden, “In Sickness and In Health,” copyright 1945 by W.H. Auden, “Ischia,” copyright © 1976 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith and Monroe K. Spears, Executors of the Estate of W.H. Auden, “Bucolics,” copyright © 1976 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith and Monroe K. Spears, Executors of the Estate of W.H. Auden, “Law Like Love,” copyright 1940 & renewed 1968 by W.H. Auden, “Leap Before You Look,” copyright 1945 by W.H. Auden, “Letter to Lord Byron,” copyright 1937 by W.H. Auden, “Like a Vocation,” copyright © 1976 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith and Monroe K. Spears, Executors of the Estate of W.H. Auden, “Lullaby (70 lines),” copyright © 1972 by W.H. Auden, “The Maze,” copyright © 1976 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith and Monroe K. Spears, Executors of the Estate of W.H.Auden, “Memorial for the City,” copyright 1951 by W.H. Auden, “Moon Landing,” copyright © 1969 by W.H. Auden, “New Year Letter,” copyright 1941 & renewed 1969 by W.H. Auden, “1929,” copyright 1934 and renewed 1962 by W.H. Auden, “Nocturne,” copyright © 1974 by The Estate of W.H. Auden, “No, Plato, No,” copyright © 1976 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith and Monroe K. Spears, Executors of the Estate of W.H. Auden, “O Tell Me the Truth About Love,” copyright 1940 & renewed 1968 by W.H. Auden, “O Where are you Going,”

xi

xii

Permissions

copyright 1934 & renewed 1962 by W.H. Auden, “Ode to Gaea,” copyright © 1976 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith and Monroe K. Spears, Executors of the Estate of W.H. Auden, “Ode to the Medieval Poets,” copyright © 1971 by W.H. Auden, “Ode to Terminus,” copyright © 1968 by W.H. Auden, “On This Island,” copyright 1937 and renewed in 1965 by W.H. Auden, “Oxford,” copyright © 1976 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith and Monroe K. Spears, Executors of the Estate of W.H. Auden, “Paid on Both Sides,” copyright 1934 by The Modern Library, Inc. & renewed 1962 by W.H. Auden, “Paysage Moralise,” copyright © 1976 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith and Monroe K. Spears, Executors of the Estate of W.H. Auden, “The Sea and the Mirror,” copyright © 1976 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith and Monroe K. Spears, Executors of the Estate of W.H. Auden, “The Secret Agent,” copyright 1928 by W.H. Auden, “Shield of Achilles,” copyright 1952 by W.H. Auden, “Shorts,” copyright © 1974 by The Estate of W.H. Auden, “A Summer Night,” copyright 1937 by Random House, Inc. and renewed 1965 by W.H. Auden, “Taller To-day,” copyright © 1976 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith and Monroe K. Spears, Executors of the Estate of W.H. Auden, “A Thanksgiving,” copyright © 1976 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith and Monroe K. Spears, Executors of the Estate of W.H. Auden, “This Loved One,” copyright © 1976 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith and Monroe K. Spears, Executors of the Estate of W.H. Auden, “Uncle Henry,” copyright © 1976 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith and Monroe K. Spears, Executors of the Estate of W.H. Auden, from Collected Poems by W.H. Auden. Used by permission of Random House, Inc. “After the Burial,” “After Reading Keats’ Ode,” “Allendale,” “Belief,” “Frost,” “He Revisits the Spot,” “In a Train,” “Landscape,” “The Mail-Train, Crewe,” “The Miner’s Wife,” “The Old Colliery,” “Ploughing,” “The Pumping Engine,” “Stone Walls,” “To a Toadstool,” “The Traction-Engine,” “Two Triolets,” from Juvenilia by W.H. Auden. Copyright © 1994 by the Estate of W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Excerpts from Get There if You Can and Spain by W.H. Auden. Copyright © 1931 by Estate of W.H. Auden, © 1937 by Estate of W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.

Introduction: Auden and Allusion

In his 1973 poem “A Thanksgiving,” W.H. Auden affectionately but systematically lists the writers whose work has most influenced his own. The list, a characteristically catholic one ranging from Horace to Hardy, Brecht to Kierkegaard, culminates in Auden’s fond statement that “Fondly I ponder You all,” since “without You I couldn’t have managed/ even my weakest of lines” (CP 892). And in the earlier long poem New Year Letter, Auden imagines a “summary tribunal” in front of which all poets must appear; each poet, he writes, “May choose whom he appears before,/ Pick any influential ghost/ From those whom he admires the most” (CP 203). Using the clues scattered throughout Auden’s work, I have written a study that examines some of the “influential ghosts” haunting his poetry. To anyone interested in exploring the sources of Auden’s poetry, however, these two quotations serve as both a spur and a warning. Auden’s immense selfconsciousness about his forbears invites, in fact demands an interpretation of his work that takes them into account. And yet the sheer profusion of names in both poems also gives these would-be interpreters pause: since Auden’s influences include the whole of English poetry, and a lot else besides, isn’t the task of tracking down all his influences an impossibly ambitious one? As another twentiethcentury poet asked in a very different context, “And should I then presume?/ And how should I begin?”1 I would like to begin this study by presuming to state some of its weaknesses, strengths and aspirations. First, it is by no means a comprehensive survey of Auden’s sources. Several other books on Auden—most notably Edward Callan’s Auden: A Carnival of Intellect and John Fuller’s Auden: a Commentary—fit this description splendidly well, rendering further attempts unnecessary. But I do hope that I have helpfully supplemented these works by focusing more closely on several authors and modes of allusion that obsessed Auden throughout his career; consequently, perhaps my study will gain in depth what it may lack in breadth. xiii

xiv

Introduction

The four chapters of this book examine, respectively, Auden’s careerlong interest in Thomas Hardy, his use of what I have called “structural allusion,” his elegies, and his debt to Kierkegaard. In the first and last of these chapters I try to demonstrate how Auden’s ambivalent feelings toward his sources—his sometimes-accepting, sometimes-critical attitude toward them—shaped his relationships with the writer and the philosopher who were, I argue, most significant to his work. But I also want to show how Auden’s ambivalence was reflected in his innovative handling of a literary device (allusion) and a poetic genre (the elegy). Although the four chapters tell a roughly chronological story, it’s also my hope that they can be read on their own. I believe this study is a valuable contribution to modern poetry criticism for several reasons. Most obviously, my in-depth comparisons between Auden and his most important predecessors will by a useful addition to Auden studies. I also feel that my expansion of the term sources to include not only individual authors, but literary techniques and genres as well, will make possible a more nuanced and sophisticated view of the term. But more broadly, I hope that my methods and conclusions will serve as models for future studies of literary influence. Throughout this study I suggest that Auden’s most crucial precursors were those with whom he argued most intricately. Auden once wrote that love “Needs more than the admiring excitement of union,/ More than the abrupt self-confident farewell” (CP 49), and I’ve tried to show how this statement can be applied to his own poetry, since the complex process of sifting through a particular writer’s oeuvre, and deciding what to keep and what to discard, was what produced some of his greatest work. In this sense my dissertation might be considered a contribution to “Anxiety of Influence” criticism, which argues that a poet becomes “strong”—the term favored by Harold Bloom—by waging a lifelong battle against one poetic predecessor. But on the contrary, I would like to suggest that Auden is such a forceful poet because he argued so variously and so continually with so many great writers and thinkers. Aidan Wasley, in a recent study of Auden, proposes a view of his work, and his relation to his sources, that I wholeheartedly endorse: Auden achieves originality, Wasley writes, “not through the agonistic sublimation and overthrow of influences, but through the conscious and professional acknowledgment, deployment, and utilization of them.”2 It’s my sincere hope that this study demonstrates, on the one hand, the limits of Anxiety-of-Influence-influenced criticism, and reveals, on the other, the enormous rewards of source criticism. If it does both of these things, as well as—most importantly of all—giving readers new insight into the greatness of Auden’s poetry, I’ll have achieved my goal.

Chapter One

Hawk’s Visions and Revisions: Auden’s Debt to Hardy

If Auden’s poetic career is a testament to the many ways in which one writer can creatively respond to others, then his lifelong interest in Thomas Hardy is proof of how various and subtle these responses can be. Many poets and thinkers—Thomas, Frost and Eliot early on, and later, figures like Kierkegaard, Goethe and Horace—may have influenced the way Auden thought and wrote, but no other writer exerted the profound sway over him that Hardy did. Because of this complex relationship, a close look at Auden’s debt to Hardy reveals many things about his attitude toward both poetry and influence. As Auden himself pointed out, Hardy was his first literary love, and drastically changed the course of his early poetry. But unlike other early models such as Thomas and Frost, Hardy’s shade remained with Auden until his very last poems. The most striking thing about the connection between the two writers, in fact, is the way it altered and evolved according to whatever happened to be Auden’s particular concerns—whether formal or thematic—at the time. Studying the relationship between Hardy and Auden also helps show that, for Auden, the most valuable precursors were the ones with whom he could argue most elaborately. Auden’s arguments with Hardy span the course of his entire career, giving his Hardy-inspired poems an edge and a tension that many of his other poems, written under the influence of other poets, do not share. While certain poems in his Juvenilia may read like faithful copies of Eliot, Thomas, or any number of other poets, his early Hardy-esque poems are never merely imitative. Rather, Auden’s characteristic use of Hardy’s poetry, from the time he began what Katherine Bucknell has called his “pattern of obsession and assimilation” (J xxxiii), is to retain some of Hardy’s poetic trademarks—his elaborate stanza forms, his barren landscapes—and to discard others, such as his distrust of the modern age and his frequently world-weary tone. The fact that Hardy provided Auden’s poetic mill with so 1

2

Influential Ghosts

much grist probably helps explain why Hardy remained such a strong influence on him, while other poets like Thomas and Eliot—although Auden lovingly apprenticed himself to them for a time—did not. Auden’s debates with Hardy take many forms. In several poems written in 1924, Auden places his speakers in Hardy-esque settings—wintry towns, industrial waste lands—only to have them comment on how “noble” or beautiful such settings really are. While many of these early poems initially look and sound like Hardy poems, they are actually loaded with forceful critiques of Hardy’s pessimistic views. Starting in the late twenties, Auden begins to make much use of what he called Hardy’s “hawk’s vision,” his ability to survey people and places from a great height and a timeless, godlike perspective. In a poem like “Consider,” Auden uses this hawk’s vision to call attention to the problems of his own era; but although the poem is certainly indebted to Hardy, it goes its own way as well. Auden may not yet be critical of Hardy’s hawk’s vision, but he is nonetheless updating it to fit the needs of his own poetry and his own time: Hardy’s hawk, after all, looked down on 1 “starlit Stonehenge” and the Napoleonic Wars, while Auden’s looks down on “the first garden party of the year” (CP 61). In poems written during the thirties, one can observe Auden trying out other uses for the hawk’s vision. “A Summer Night,” written in 1933 2 about what seems to have been a genuine visionary experience, contains a section in which he remarks of “Those I love” that, despite the coming war, “the moon looks on them all” (CP 117). Here Auden uses the image of the moon to give him the same distant, all-seeing perspective as Hardy’s hawk. But as the poem continues, Auden’s attitude toward this perspective becomes more suspicious: he implies that it is a refuge from historical crisis rather than a way of casting judgment on it. Auden also modifies the hawk’s vision in poems like “Dover” and “Oxford,” using it as a descriptive tool rather than a method of condemning the scenes being described. In several poems written in the late forties and after, Auden again takes up the hawk’s vision, but with the very different purpose of showing that it is a harmful and reductive way of viewing the world. In doing so, he implicitly questions Hardy’s and his own earlier use of it as a means of social critique. The 1949 poem “Memorial for the City,” for example, opens with the stern pronouncement that “The eyes of the crow and the eye of the camera open/ Onto Homer’s world, not ours.” These hawk-like crows and cameras may, Auden goes on, “magnify earth,” but if they notice real live individuals, “It is only in passing” (CP 591). And in other poems of this period, such as “I am Not a Camera,” Auden has even harsher things to say about the superhuman perspective he once employed so enthusiastically.

Hawk’s Visions and Revisions

3

Tracing the various ways in which Auden’s poetry can be seen as a criticism of Hardy’s might seem to imply that their relationship fits the pattern described by many recent theorists of poetic influence, whereby an ambitious poet wages a lifelong battle against an overwhelming predecessor. But I hope to show that Auden’s ongoing dialogue with Hardy was hardly a battle, and that their relationship therefore serves as a healthy corrective to critics who tell the story of poetic influence as one of bitter rivalry and helpless, involuntary servitude. While a careful reading of Auden’s work reveals how he adapted, then altered, then finally attacked Hardy’s hawk’s vision, it also demonstrates how much technical instruction he received from him. In the early twenties, Auden’s precocious use of complex stanza forms reflects his enormous technical debt to Hardy—a debt he went on incurring throughout his career. So while Auden often criticized Hardy’s ideas, he seems to have found little fault with his use of poetic form. His on-again, off-again love affair with Hardy therefore helps show that poetic influence is a far more intricate, benign, and—above all—conscious process than it is often taken to be. (Of course, this defense of peaceful poetic co-existence can only go so far: proponents of the poetry-as-battlefield theory would no doubt agree that Auden’s relationship to Hardy was, overall, a serene one, and would then label Auden a weak poet for this very reason. But at this point the argument becomes circular and is best abandoned.) Auden’s 1940 essay “Thomas Hardy: a Literary Transference” makes a helpful starting-point for a close look at the relationship between the two poets. The essay begins startlingly: Auden claims that “I cannot write objectively about Thomas Hardy because I was once in love with him” (CPr 42). But despite this opening disclaimer, the essay is a lucid and moving description of his first poetic love. Auden writes that in March, 1922, he decided to become a poet, but spent the next year scouring his school library “without finding what I really wanted.” In the summer of 1923, though, he discovered Hardy’s poetry, and “for more than a year I read no one else” (CPr 42–3). Auden claims that there is always one poet whose effect on adolescents is such that he “awakens a passion of imitation, and an affection which no subsequent refinement or sophistication of his taste can ever entirely destroy” (CPr 43)—and Hardy was such a poet. But what about Hardy’s work gave Auden this “passion for imitation”? On the one hand, Hardy’s universe was one that Auden could recognize, since “the properties of Hardy’s world were the properties of my own childhood: it was unsophisticated and provincial, and it was the England of the professional classes, clergymen, doctors, lawyers, and architects . . . above all a world which had nothing to do with London, the stage, or French literature” (CPr

4

Influential Ghosts

44–5). But although Auden “was fortunate indeed in finding the only poet who wrote of my world” (CPr 45), he was also lucky to discover a writer who could provide him with crucial links to the English poetic tradition: he pays Hardy the dubious compliment of calling him “both my Keats and my Carl Sandburg” (CPr 44), and remarks that Hardy helped carry him from a world that was Tennysonian in outlook to one where the values of The Waste Land predominated. Hardy, in short, was “old-fashioned enough to come within my comprehension, and modern enough to educate”(CPr 46). After giving some general reasons why his discovery of Hardy came as such a pleasant shock, Auden lists the specific attributes of his poetry that mattered most to him. Not surprisingly, the hawk’s vision comes first on the list, and Auden’s remarks on this technique are important enough to be quoted in full: What I valued most in Hardy then, as I still do, was his hawk’s vision, his way of looking at life from a very great height, as in the stage directions of The Dynasts, or the opening chapter of The Return of the Native. To see the individual life related not only to the local social life of its time, but to the whole of human history, life on the earth, the stars, gives one both humility and self-confidence. For from such a perspective the difference between the individual and society is so slight, since both are so insignificant, that the latter ceases to appear as a formidable god with absolute rights, but rather as an equal, subject to the same laws of growth and decay, and therefore one with whom reconciliation is possible (CPr 46-7).

Although Auden’s reference to Hardy’s “self-confidence” and hope for divine “reconciliation” is puzzling—and seems more like a hint of his own later revisions of Hardy than an accurate account of his master’s voice—his singling out of the hawk’s vision is extremely revealing. And while it is odd that Auden omits examples of this technique from his list, surely the end of a poem like “Channel Firing”—with its guns of war “roaring their readiness to avenge/ As 3 far inland as Stourton Tower,/ And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge” —was in his thoughts when he wrote this passage. He goes on to state three more important things he learned from Hardy. “It was Hardy,” he writes, “who first taught me something of the relations of Eros and Logos” (CPr 47). But if Hardy could ask hard questions, he could not always answer them: “To the questions, ‘Where does the Logos—the consciousness the will informing till it fashion all things fair—come from? Is it an external gift of grace or is it itself created by Eros?’ Hardy gives no answer” (CPr 47). Even so, Auden implies

Hawk’s Visions and Revisions

5

that Hardy’s very uncertainty taught him a crucial lesson, for “we can only put such a question to ourselves because Hardy and others have made us see that it exists” (CPr 47). Auden then describes “an even more important debt,” that of “technical instruction” (CPr 47). In this respect Hardy was a good master to have because he wasn’t too threatening: “Hardy’s faults as a craftsman, his rhythmical clumsiness, his outlandish vocabulary were obvious even to a schoolboy, and the young can learn best from those of whom, because they can criticize them, they are not afraid”(CPr 47). But despite Auden’s slightly condescending tone here, he has only praise for Hardy’s technical inventiveness: not even Donne or Browning, he writes, “employed so many and so complicated stanza forms” (CPr 47). Finally, Auden remarks that “Hardy . . . taught me much about direct colloquial diction, all the more because his directness was in phrasing and syntax, not in imagery” (CPr 48). And most important of all, this “directness” was something Auden could really use: “Here was a ‘modern’ rhetoric which was more fertile and adaptable to different themes than any of Eliot’s gas-works and rats’ feet which one could steal but never make one’s own” (CPr 48). Auden’s essay gives one a good idea of the general reasons why he was drawn to Hardy. But thanks to the recent publication of his Juvenilia, it is now possible to examine the specific ways in which he both learned and diverged from Hardy’s poetry. In her Introduction to these early poems, Katherine Bucknell speculates on why Hardy would have appealed to Auden in the first place. Hardy, she claims, was an ideal role model for Auden because many of his great themes and preoccupations—vanished faith, hesitation before nature—were ones Auden had written about before he ever read Hardy. “To a poet whose earliest compositions show uncertainty before the natural world and ambivalence about his attachment to the earth,” Bucknell writes, “Hardy offered a key to the baffling maternal landscape” (J xxxiii). She also suggests that, in addition to giving Auden such subjects as “disillusioned modern scepticism” and “the limitation of human insight,” Hardy provided him with a literary technique—the hawk’s vision—with which to explore them. “The hawk’s vision,” Bucknell suggests, “was a substitute for Romantic vision, replacing the advantages of intimacy with the advantages of distance, of intensity with panoramic perspective, of intuition with judgement” (J xxxv). Auden’s reading of Hardy in 1923, then, seems to have been a poetic boon for several reasons. If Hardy wrote about subjects and ideas that were already on Auden’s mind, he also did so—as Auden himself suggests—in a tone that was modest enough to be unthreatening, and a style that was adaptable enough to borrow. But a poet as precocious and ambitious as Auden could not remain a mere apprentice for long, and soon he was

6

Influential Ghosts

writing poems which, while still Hardy-esque in style, form and theme, also began to question many of his ideas. All this can be demonstrated by a close inspection of some of Auden’s earliest poems. Auden’s first poems, written in 1922, present the reader with a strange contradiction: while the fifteen-year-old poet is both stunningly prolific and technically virtuosic, he also writes poem after poem about how he doesn’t feel like a real poet. A characteristic device of Auden’s is to mention an earlier poem, poet or traditionally poetic image, and then claim that he cannot measure up to them. In his very first preserved poem, “California,” he describes a dreamy moonlit scene in two confident, rapt stanzas: The twinkling lamps stream up the hill Past the farm and past the mill Right at the top of the road one sees A round moon like a Stilton cheese A man could walk along that track Fetch the moon and bring it back Or gather stars up in his hand Like strawberries on English land. (J 3)

Auden presents this pleasant scene—with its “twinkling lamps” and “round moon,” and its speaker’s rare ability to “gather stars up in his hand”—without irony or scepticism, but in the poem’s third and last stanza, the speaker’s self-assurance breaks down: ‘But how should I, a poor man dare To meet so close the full moon’s stare?’ For this I stopped and stood quite still Then turned with quick steps down that hill. (J 3)

By admitting that he is unable to “meet so close the full moon’s stare,” Auden’s narrator is probably indicating that he can’t be the kind of person or poet that he seems to be in the poem’s first two stanzas. The speaker, much as he would like to gain access to the moon and all its lofty, poetic associations, can’t “walk along that track”; instead, he admits his inadequacy and timidly retreats “down that hill” as if descending from Parnassus after a rash, doomed attempt to mount it. In many other early poems, Auden confesses his doubts and fears in the face of poetic tradition. “To a Toadstool,” written in 1922 or 1923, begins,

Hawk’s Visions and Revisions

7

boldly enough, with a lush Keatsian invocation: “O Scarlet Beauty with thy milk-white eyes/ See! I have plucked thee up thou lovely thing” (J 4). Perhaps “plucked” is even an echo of the nakedly ambitious moment in “Lycidas” when the poem’s speaker “come(s) to pluck” the “Berries harsh and crude”4 of the laurel trees. The toadstool, Auden’s speaker goes on, will give him the visionary powers that all young poets need: For he, I know, who eats thee shall be wise And see the fairies dancing in a ring Shall learn to read the willow’s lonely sighs And share the passion of the nightingale. (J 14)

So far, so good; eating the toadstool will transform Auden’s speaker into a latter-day Romantic poet with both natural and supernatural powers. But as in the case of “California,” the poem ends on a grimly realistic note rather than a dreamily poetic one; Auden’s speaker admits that “I have read too oft men’s tales and lies/ So now with hand pressed close to lip, I quail” (J 14). Auden describes his “quailing” at the prospect of joining the ranks of great poets in several other poems written around the same period. But what makes these poems even more striking than poems like “California” and “To a Toadstool” is how indebted they seem to Hardy for their gently ironic tone and their attitudes toward poetry and belief; even though Auden had probably not yet read his poetry, one has the feeling, reading these poems, that since Hardy didn’t yet exist for Auden, it was necessary to invent him. In “After Reading Keats’ Ode,” the poem’s speaker contrasts an earlier union with a ravishing bird to his own painful separation from it: Quietly I lay awake upon my bed As night was sweeping down the vale A whisper came to me that said, ‘O listen to the nightingale!’ But I remembered thy immortal ode The matchless glories of thy poesy. What if her song that rode The night should not so beauteous be As thou didst hear it. So I be bereft Thy wondrous vision of the divine bird. So closing fearful eyes I turned and slept And somewhere the nightingale sang on unheard. (J 15–6)

8

Influential Ghosts

Auden’s speaker’s confession that he can’t experience “The wondrous vision of the divine bird” is eerily similar to Hardy’s guilty admissions that he can’t see or hear anything special about the birds in his poems. In “Shelley’s Skylark,” for example, Hardy sadly reports that the bird “That moved a poet to prophecies” is really only “A pinch of unseen, unguarded dust”; more depressing still, “the lark that Shelley heard,/ And made immortal through 5 times to be” is nothing more than “A little ball of feather and bone.” And in the better-known “A Darkling Thrush,” Hardy describes his wintry encounter with “An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small”: although the thrush, singing “In a full-hearted evensong/ Of joy illimited,” seems to have access to some kind of higher meaning, it never lets Hardy in on its secret: So little cause for carolings Of such ecstatic sound, Was written on terrestrial things Afar or nigh around That I could think there trembled through His happy good-night air Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew And I was unaware.6

Hardy, unlike Auden, does not refer directly to Keats’ nightingale; nevertheless, the bird certainly hovers in the background of this poem, making the similarities between “The Darkling Thrush” and “After Reading Keats’ Ode” unignorable.7 In still another early poem, “Belief,” Auden expresses his troubled faith, coupled with his firm wish to believe, in a manner that is strikingly reminiscent of Hardy: We do not know If there be fairies now Or no. But why should we ourselves involve In questions which we cannot solve. O let’s pretend it’s so And then perhaps if we are good Some day we’ll see them in the wood. (J 16)

Although Auden may not yet know it, his refusal to bother himself with “questions we cannot solve,” and his desire instead to “pretend” that fairies

Hawk’s Visions and Revisions

9

exist, echo Hardy’s religious stance in a poem like “The Oxen.” In this poem, Hardy describes a Christmas Eve in his childhood, during which it never occurred to him to doubt the story of Christmas. But such conviction, he goes on, is no longer available to him: “So fair a fancy few would weave/ In these years!” Despite his lost faith, however, Hardy wants to believe in the same way that Auden wants to pretend he does, and the poem ends with Hardy’s poignant admission that If someone said on Christmas Eve, ‘Come; see the oxen kneel ‘In the lonely barton by yonder coomb Our childhood used to know,’ I should go with him in the gloom, Hoping it might be so.8

These are only two of numerous poems in which Auden’s thoughts on poetry, nature and belief seem inspired by Hardy’s. Although Auden did not read Hardy until 1923, and although—as Bucknell claims—his poetry did not start directly reflecting Hardy’s influence until several months later (J xvi), he had already spent several years writing as though he had given Hardy’s poetry much thought and attention. Their eventual collision therefore seemed inevitable. When Auden finally did read Hardy, he quickly started making use of many of his poetic trademarks: his attitudes toward nature, his stanza forms, his word choice, and his poems’ settings. Although Auden’s early poems never sink to the level of the derivative, they nevertheless reflect Hardy’s influence in ways both large and small. To cite just one example, in the last stanza of “Stone Walls” (written in 1925), Auden uses a highly Hardy-esque diction: They’ve no bud-bursting feats in Spring To stir up vain hopes in one’s head In Autumn no unblossoming To remind one of the dead. (J 81)

While it is true that, at this time in Auden’s career, Hardy’s influence had already subsided, giving way to the likes of Thomas and Frost—Bucknell even suggests that “Auden’s understated, colloquial tone in this poem was probably influenced by Robert Frost, and the subject may have been suggested to him by Frost’s 1914 poem ‘Mending Wall’”(J82n)—it is also likely

10

Influential Ghosts

that the word unblossoming shows the lingering influence of what Auden called Hardy’s “outlandish vocabulary.” Throughout his poetry, Hardy often attaches the prefix un- to a common verb or noun in order to make the familiar appear newly strange—as in the poem “Hap,” when he asks “why 9 unblooms the best hope ever sown?” —and this eccentric technique must have appealed to the young, experimenting Auden. Many of Hardy’s phrases and images also show up, often barely disguised, throughout Auden’s Juvenilia. In two early poems, Auden alludes to a line from “Afterwards,” a poem of Hardy’s that must have been one of his favorites, since he both included it in his 1935 anthology The Poet’s Tongue and referred to it in his essay “Making, Knowing, and Judging” as an example of a “rite of homage to sacred objects which are neither gods nor objects of desire . . . ”10 In the poem, Hardy wonders whether people will remember his sensitivity to the natural world after he is dead: When the present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay, And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings, Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say, “He was a man who used to notice such things”?11

Hardy’s skill at noticing—whether from the perspective of a hawk or a human being—appears to have been one of the things that Auden most wanted to learn from him, judging from the fact that he paraphrased this line in two early poems. In “Frost,” written in 1925 or 1926, Auden describes a happy winter scene, only to rebuke himself for forgetting the scene’s bleaker aspects: We do not notice every thing in our delight The frozen buzzard caught upon the mill-hatch bars Forget, what the farm dogs do not, this starry night All who must walk the lanes of darkness blind to stars (J 113)

And in “Ploughing,” a poem that seems more indebted to Edward Thomas than Hardy, Auden nevertheless uses the line again in order to draw a contrast between innocent enjoyment of nature and horror at its darker side. In the poem, the speaker and a friend languidly sit “Watching what an ant would find to do when/ Stones blocked its path,” and are “lulled and pleased” until a ploughman—recently widowed, and “gone/ To his day’s work and old age spent alone”(J 115)—crosses their path. At this point, the two boys “rose and walked back to the village,” observing a world that has grown suddenly

Hawk’s Visions and Revisions

11

cold: “a greenfinch sang but not loudly,” the wind reminds them of “The many mysteries of Death and Birth,” and (in a very Hardy-esque detail) “A hawk soared up in huge curves in the blue/ Then poised outspanned and motionless—He too/ Perhaps forgot just then his sorrowings/ As I my Joy in noticing such things” (J 116). These four lines are some of the most interesting ones in Auden’s Juvenilia, since they contain not only multiple debts to Hardy’s poetry (the hawk, the paraphrased line), but also, possibly, a hint of criticism to come: if hawks can see things from an “outspanned and motionless” perspective, they may also allow this privileged vantage point to blind them to the sorrows of the world. Hardy’s influence on Auden’s Juvenilia takes many other forms. Often, Auden places one of Hardy’s images in a new context, as in the poem “Landscape,” whose “bleak atmosphere,” as Bucknell observes (J 96n), may be indebted to Hardy. This two-stanza poem begins with a description of a horse that “could scarcely pluck its stumbling heel/ Out of the mire which floored the dreary way”—a moment that recalls the “old horse that stumbles and nods” in the first stanza of Hardy’s “In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations.’” Bucknell notes, in fact, that this poem is “One of the many poems Auden marked in his 1925 edition of Hardy’s poems” (J 96n). In Hardy’s poem, of course, the horse is a good thing, a steadfast and timeless alternative to “War’s annals.”12 But just because Auden has changed the context doesn’t mean he hasn’t been influenced by the image. In other poems, like the 1924 poem “The Miner’s Wife,” he seems to be trying to capture Hardy’s ability to narrate an elaborate story in a few pithy stanzas: She sat in her cool parlour While the sun streamed through and through The kettle sang on the hob And a small fly buzzed and flew There came a knock at the door. And a young man white and pale Stood at the threshold silent Then quickly told his tale. “An accident at the mine The pumping rod broke,” he said. “Your husband, he was climbing, And it caught him; he is dead”

12

Influential Ghosts She watched him down the garden Then gently she latched the door And hummed to herself a tune As she bent to work once more. (J 52–3)

This brusque little poem owes much to a Hardy poem like “The Newcomer’s Wife,” which condenses a sordid tale of marriage, betrayal and suicide into five stanzas—only one more than “The Miner’s Wife.”13 Auden’s poem may also be further evidence that one of the things he learned from Hardy was, in John Bayley’s words, his ability to tell a “sung short story,” one “in which the detail of prose is combined with the feeling traditional to verse or ballad.”14 Many of Hardy’s poems are about coming back to a particular place after time has elapsed, or bad things have happened, or both. A typical poem of this kind is “He Revisits His First School,” in which Hardy recounts the “awkward, unseemly” experience of going back to a place where he was “fresh,/ Pink, tiny,”15 and morbidly decides that he should have visited it as a ghost instead. And Hardy divides “The Walk,” a wistful poem from “Poems of 1912–13,” into two stanzas: in the first, he describes walking up a hill alone because his wife is sick, and in the second, he reports how, now that she is dead, “I walked up there to-day/ Just in the former way;/ Surveyed around/ The familiar ground.”16 Auden found this scenario a promising one for his own poems, using it so often that it can even seem like self-parody; one poem is simply called “He Revisits the Spot,” and reads like Hardy at his gloomiest: Few people will guess, If they chance to fare To this lonely place, That a woman’s face Was scored with grief, And a man’s whole belief Was shattered here. (J 78)17

Another poem, “The Last Time,” is also divided into two stanzas, and contains a similar contrast between visiting a spot in happy and unhappy times: in this case, the cause of sorrow is the end of a love affair. In yet another, more interesting poem, “In a Train,” Auden’s speaker looks at a landscape where some unspecified event—most likely another affair—took place, and proceeds to compare his passionate old emotions to his lukewarm new ones:

Hawk’s Visions and Revisions

13

Who’d have dared to say There would come a day When, passing this spot, I should not stay, But go on my way? (J 53)

Elsewhere in his Juvenilia, Auden makes use of poetic forms that could have been lifted directly from Hardy, and show how eager he is to achieve a similar technical mastery. As if paying tribute to Hardy’s “complicated stanza forms,” Auden writes several poems in which he appears to be making his stanzas as elaborate as possible. Since it is also about a highly Hardy-esque subject, perhaps the best example is “After the Burial,” the first stanza of which runs as follows: Words have been said, well polished by use, Your name befriending; A sense of impotence made me muse, As we laid the earth, On the ultimate worth Of all those things that men fear to lose Here, at an ending. (J 66)

The poem becomes even more Hardy-esque as it goes on, and the speaker’s fluency gives way to a salvo of overwhelming questions: “What are we men but puling and small,/ Fit for derision,” the second stanza begins. Because “After the Burial” resembles Hardy’s poetry so closely, it is not an especially memorable poem; but it certainly demonstrates how determined Auden is to make himself—at least technically speaking—Hardy’s heir. Auden also wrote several early poems in sapphic stanzas, a demanding classical form that Hardy had used for such poems as “The Temporary the All”; and these poems further reveal Auden’s desire to try his hand at the various forms that Hardy, before him, had mastered. As well as being in a form that Hardy admired, these poems tend to include subject matter that he would have approved of: abandoned machinery, indifferent nature, and so on. Auden’s 1924 poem “Allendale,” for example, opens with this stark scene: The smelting-mill stack is crumbling, no smoke is alive there, Down in the valley the furnace no lead ore of worth burns; Now tombs of decaying industries, not to survive here Many more earth-turns.

14

Influential Ghosts The chimney still stands on top of the hill like a finger Skywardly pointing as it were asking “What lies there?” And thither we stray to dream of those things as we linger, Nature denies here. (J 70)

With its depiction of a confused present hopelessly cut off from a kinder past, the poem surely owes something to “The Temporary the All,” in which Hardy’s speaker tells the story of a “flowering youthtime” which, despite all his hopes and ambitions, was “Never transcended!”18 And certainly a line in the poem’s last stanza—“So under it stand we, all swept by the rain and the wind there”—could not have been written without the example of Hardy’s “During Wind and Rain.” Perhaps Christopher Isherwood was right when he cited this poem as an example of Auden’s “competent but entirely imitative” first poems.19 But another poem in sapphic stanzas, “The Traction-Engine,” is more provocatively original: Auden begins with a similar scene of dilapidated machinery—“Its days are over now, no farmyard airs/ Will quiver hot above its chimney-sack”—but ends with the revelation that, even though the scene is “Unfeeling, uncaring,” it nevertheless “seems . . . well to deserve the love we reserve/ For animate things”(J 67). Anthony Hecht has written of these lines that “Auden captures here a gentle ruefulness about the past that was truly Hardy’s.”20 But there is more to the poem than this: Auden’s upbeat coda to an otherwise Hardy-esque poem is a portent of later poems in which he modifies Hardy’s pessimism about the modern world by coming to his own conclusion that it is richly worthy of our affection. Taken as a whole, Auden’s early sapphic poems also help to show the continuities in his work. Much later in his career, Auden began to write poems in sapphic stanzas again; the best-known examples are “River Profile” and “Fairground.” These poems are usually taken as signs of Horace’s influences on his work, and of course Horace often did write in this form. But the fact—demonstrated by the publication of the Juvenilia—that Auden first got the idea of writing sapphics from Hardy, not Horace, demonstrates that Auden could be under the sway of many writers at once, and that although his poetic career can certainly be divided into phases—Hardy-esque, Horatian, or whatever—he never played the cowed latecomer to one all-powerful, overwhelming predecessor. In Auden’s poetic pantheon, there was always room for people to meet and mingle. In its gentle softening of Hardy’s pessimism, “The Traction-Engine” is also typical of several other poems of this period. One way in which Auden questions Hardy’s views is to take up a typical Hardy stanza—one he used throughout his career—in order to write about his own ideas and

Hawk’s Visions and Revisions

15

convictions; in these poems, Auden’s main divergence from Hardy takes the form of replacing Hardy’s weary world-view with his own guarded optimism. In an earlier poem like “Belief,” Auden may have borrowed Hardy’s tone of religious doubt. But now, writing in Hardy-esque forms, Auden is eager to point out that, unlike Hardy, he is not bothered by his lack of belief, and even finds it possible to take great pleasure in things of this world. The triolet, for example—an eight-line poem with two rhymes in which the first line is repeated as the fourth and seventh lines, and the second line comes back as the last line—was a favorite form of Hardy’s, and so Auden, not surprisingly, tried his hand at it around the time that he was first reading Hardy. His “Two Triolets,” however, reflect a love of the natural world and a refusal to worry about vanished faith that make this diptych, though formally so indebted to Hardy, otherwise very different: I What need has man of heavenly things When earth is lovely past belief? E’en now the youngest blackbird sings What need has man of heavenly things A snowdrop nods, a catkin swings, Dew shines on the wild strawberry-leaf What need has man of heavenly things When earth is lovely past belief? II Come Love! We’ll play; just you and I Without one thought of the Hereafter On yonder bubbling hill we’ll lie Come Love, we’ll play. Just you and I We’ll watch the bees go droning by And make the daisies fill with laughter Come Love! We’ll play; just you and I Without one thought of the Hereafter. (J 38)

Perhaps because of its relentless repetitions, Hardy used the triolet for particularly bleak subjects. “How Great My Grief,” for example—a poem from his Poems of the Past and the Present—is a meditation on the hopelessness of love; Hardy’s repeating lines are “How great my grief, my joys how few,/ Since first

16

Influential Ghosts

it was my fate to know thee.”21 In two other triolets from the same volume— “Birds at Winter Nightfall” and “The Puzzled Game-Birds”—Hardy comes to equally grim conclusions about the natural world, observing in one poem that “Around the house the flakes fly faster,/ And all the berries now are gone!” and complaining in the other that “These shapes that now bereave and bleed us” are not “those who used to feed us,/ For did we then cry, they would heed us.”22 Auden’s triolets, then, give further evidence of his habit of criticizing some aspects of Hardy’s work and making enthusiastic use of others. (Of course, it would be reductive to claim that all of Hardy’s poems are as gloomy as these triolets, or that he never had anything good to say about a world from which God had fled. One of his poems, after all, is titled “He Prefers Her Earthly.” Even so, Auden seems to have written his Hardy-esque “Two Triolets” as a way of finding fault with one important facet of Hardy’s poetry and ideas.) The most interesting poems in Auden’s Juvenilia are the ones, like “The Traction-Engine,” in which his arguments with Hardy are most explicit. These poems all have a similar structure, which is probably proof that Auden was sufficiently concerned with composing an anti-Hardy poem that he wrote it over and over until he got it right. The three poems in which he articulates his differences from Hardy most clearly, all written in 1924, are “The Old Colliery,” “The Pumping Engine, Cashwell,” and “The Mail-Train, Crewe.” In these poems, Auden describes lonely scenes of run-down machinery and religious doubt only to end on a ringing note of affirmation: these scenes, he tells us at the poems’ conclusions, are just as deserving of our love as the traction-engine was. “The Old Colliery” begins by depositing us in a place every bit as desolate as Tennyson’s moated grange: The iron wheel hangs Above the shaft Rusty and broken Where once man laughed. The boards over the shaft Are gnawed and rotten. The engine lies Dismantled forgotten. (J 59)

As the poem ends, however, Auden does not give way to a Hardy-esque outburst of doubt or despair, but instead mentions a nearby thorn which, though “Stunted, forlorn/ And scarcely green,” often houses a thrush “Whose singing blesses Man’s handiwork” (J 60). Like the traction-engine, Auden implies,

Hawk’s Visions and Revisions

17

this dismal scene deserves our respect and admiration. Moreover, Auden’s decision to end the poem with a bird—which, for both Hardy and the earlier Auden, had tended to represent poetic stagnation—must be significant. In earlier poems by the two poets, birds had stood for everything that people were not: mirthful, transcendent, capable of song. But in this poem, the bird’s presence at the scene enables “Man’s handiwork” to continue and prosper. The poet, Auden suggests, can now derive inspiration by writing about the modern world in all its riotous chaos and confusion. “The Old Colliery” is therefore both a critique of Hardy’s pessimism and a hint of Auden’s poems to come: his late poem “Precious Five,” to name just one example, is another hymn to the things of this world, and contains a command very similar to the thrush’s benediction: “Bless what there is for being” (CP 591). In “The Pumping Engine, Cashwell,” Auden makes a similar movement from bitter nostalgia to gentle praise. “It is fifty years now,” the poem begins, “Since the old days when/ It first pumped water here.” But then the rot set in: “the workings were stopped” and the engine “lay underground/ Twelve years about” (J 74). At the end of the poem, however, Auden’s speaker takes his cue from the speaker of “The Colliery Engine,” remarking that As it groans at each stroke Like a heart in trouble, It seems to me something In toil most noble. (J 75)

“Noble,” in fact, seems to have been a favorite word of Auden’s at this time, since he uses it in another poem, “The Mail-train, Crewe,” to present a similar change of heart on the part of the poem’s speaker. As the poem begins, the speaker watches a train depart, and gives way to a flurry of Hardy-esque uncertainty: he does not know whether the train is “sinister or kind,” or “Wherefore the world is ordered in this sort.” But instead of ending here, the poem shifts gears: the speaker resolutely declares that “Crying small comfort ever brings,” and that “Of little worth/ Are wild and sullen questionings,” since “No man on earth/ Can cast a spoke into the wheel of things.” But if absolute knowledge is not available to us, then at least something else is: And if the waters grow not less Nor ever will, Of human sorrow, nobleness Is with us still, And here and there a sail of tenderness. (J 77)

18

Influential Ghosts

Katherine Bucknell writes that this poem contains both echoes of Hardy and hints of Auden poems to come: “Through the Hardy-esque clumsiness of this carefully rhymed poem, the themes of train travel and communication by post look forward to Auden’s preoccupations of the 1930s” (J 77n). But the significantly transitional nature of “The Mail-train, Crewe” derives from its speaker’s evolving attitude as much as from its modern references: just as the content of Auden’s early poems span the gamut from nightingales to trains, the tone of the poems ranges from Hardy-esque pessimism to what can only be called Auden-esque affirmation. Although, in his essay on Hardy, Auden cited the hawk’s vision as one of many things he had always valued about Hardy’s work, he did not begin to make systematic use of it until the late twenties. This delay was probably because the largely apolitical nature of his earliest poetry had no use for a poetic device that had such obvious political overtones. When Auden finally did try out the hawk’s vision, his uncritical and enthusiastic borrowing of it was very different from his attitude toward other aspects of Hardy’s work. A poem like “Consider” gains much of its force from the speaker’s trust in the hawk’s vision and what it can reveal about the sorry state of modern England. But in other poems of the thirties, Auden employs the hawk’s vision, or slightly altered versions of it, as an effective way of neutrally describing scenes from a great height. And in still other poems of this period, he starts to write poems in which he subjects the hawk’s vision to much closer scrutiny, exploring its defects as well as its merits, its ability to distort as well as its power to reveal. After the late thirties, Auden was never again able or willing to use it as wholeheartedly as he had done in a poem like “Consider,” and tended to allude to sweeping, panoramic perspectives only to find fault with them. In Auden’s poems, Hardy’s hawk sometimes takes the form of an actual hawk, but more often appears, in slightly disguised form, as an airplane, a moon, a camera, or various other superhuman shapes. But whatever the hawk may look like, and however it may happen to function in a particular poem, the very fact that it appears so often, and in so many different guises, makes Auden’s use of the hawk’s vision by far his most sustained and noteworthy engagement with Hardy’s poetry. Auden’s 1930 poem “Consider” is both his most famous and most forceful use of the hawk’s vision. The poem opens with a strict command to “Consider this and in our time/ As the hawk sees it or the helmeted airman” (CP 61), and proceeds to sweep, hawklike, over modern England in order to display what is wrong with it: a sterile garden party, people who are “Supplied with feelings by an efficient band,” and so on. In this poem,

Hawk’s Visions and Revisions

19

the hawk is hardly a poetic convenience whose function is to take us from one sterile scene to another; rather, Auden’s fervent injunctions (“look there”) (CP 61) and apocalyptic statements (“It is later than you think”) (CP 62) throughout the poem make it clear how urgent and necessary its presence is. The hawk’s vision, in this poem at least, is something that will provide people with a literal overview of their country’s problems, and galvanize them into finding solutions. In other poems written around this time, however, Auden appears much less confident about the ability of this superhuman perspective to solve all the dilemmas of the modern world, and explores its various drawbacks and possibilities in ways that anticipate his later, more overt attacks on it. In many early poems, Auden uses images of hawks, or other highflying birds, in order to show both how desperately people want some kind of higher perspective, and how this gift of special sight can be terribly reductive, escapist and misleading. Paid on Both Sides, Auden’s 1928 “charade” about the ancestral conflict between two families, ends with a hopeful prophecy that, even if “no man is strong” and babies are doomed from the second they are born (“His mother and her mother won”), there will someday come a time of “Big fruit, eagles above the stream” (CP 26). Eagles are to this poetic coda, then, what the hawk was to “Consider,” providing people with a bird’s-eye alternative to being “Supplied with feelings” or subject to forces beyond their control. Auden admits as much in “Family Ghosts,” a poem written a year later, when he declares that “This longing for assurance takes the form/ Of a hawk’s vertical stooping from the sky” (CP 41).23 But what if the hawk’s vision conceals as well as reveals, comforts us only because it gives us a falsely reassuring picture of what we look like? Auden began to explore this question in other poems written during the thirties. In the 1932 poem beginning “The chimneys are smoking, the crocus is out in the border,” he contrasts his speaker’s local concerns with a broader perspective: Over the town now, in for an hour from the desert A hawk looks down on us all; he is not in this; Our kindness is hid from the eye of the vivid creature; Sees only the configuration of field, Copse, chalk-pit, and fallow, The distribution of forces, The play of sun and shadow On upturned faces. (EA 117)

20

Influential Ghosts

Auden’s tone here is hardly hostile, but his description of the hawk is hardly laudatory either: it has flown in, after all, from a desert, is by nature unable to see human “kindness” (surely Auden, with a nod to Macbeth, intended a pun here), and will only stay “for an hour.” In “A Summer Night,” written about a year later, the far-sighted hawk becomes an omniscient moon, and appears—at least on a first reading of the poem—to be worthy of our awe precisely because it knows and sees so much. Gathered with a group of friends on a lawn during a beautiful, balmy evening, Auden’s speaker describes the moon in the kindest, gentlest terms imaginable: Now North and South and East and West Those I love lie down to rest; The moon looks on them all: The healers and the brilliant talkers, The eccentrics and the silent walkers, The dumpy and the tall. She climbs the European sky; Churches and power-stations lie Alike among earth’s fixtures: Into the galleries she peers And blankly as a butcher stares Upon the marvellous pictures. (CP 118)

But as the poem goes on, and Auden shifts his focus from a ring of people enjoying a summer night to the terrors of the coming war, the language of these stanzas starts to seem deceptively pretty, a rose-colored prologue to a much more sober reality. And in the poem’s next stanzas, Auden begins to find fault with the same moon he has just described so lovingly: To gravity attentive, she Can notice nothing here, though we Whom hunger does not move, From gardens where we feel secure Look up and with a sigh endure The tyrannies of love: And, gentle, do not care to know, Where Poland draws her Eastern bow, What violence is done;

Hawk’s Visions and Revisions

21

Nor ask what doubtful act allows Our freedom in this English house, Our picnics in the sun. (CP 118)

The message of the poem now becomes clear: the moon’s all-seeing, all-forgiving perspective is also blind to nasty realities like hunger and war. As the poem continues, the speaker reminds us of all the chaos taking place outside the lawn’s safe space and the moon’s calm gaze: we are alerted to the “doubtful act” that allows “Our freedom in this English house,” and to “The gathering multitudes outside.” “A Summer Night” may end with a happy prophecy—that this special moment on the lawn is something we will remember when things get rough— but at the poem’s literal and moral center lies a stark parable about fate versus choice, the moon’s myopia versus our powers of observation. These opposites resurface in several of Auden’s other poems of this period, most interestingly in some of the choruses of The Dog beneath the Skin. In the poem beginning “You with shooting-sticks . . . ,” the chorus first instructs us to see a world lit by the moon (“Look left: The moon shows locked sheds, wharves by water . . . ”), but soon changes direction and commands us to do likewise: “And now, enter:/ O human pity, gripped by the crying of a captured bird, wincing at sight of surgeon’s lance . . . ” (EA 279). The division here between the moon’s perspective and that of “human pity” is one that Auden will make much use of in his later poems, often employing the very same vocabulary. But to claim that, from this point on, Auden always uses the hawk’s vision in order to criticize it would be to simplify his poetry—and his imagination— enormously. In several poems written during the thirties, he treats a superhuman perspective as neither a helpful thing (as in “Consider”) nor a destructive one (as in “A Summer Night”), but simply another way of viewing and describing the world. Toward the end of the 1937 “Dover,” both airplanes and a moon make appearances, and serve the function of dwarfing human beings without actually judging them: Above them, expensive, shiny as a rich boy’s bike, Aeroplanes drone through the new European air On the edge of a sky that makes England of minor importance; And tides warn bronzing bathers of a cooling star With half its history done. High over France, a full moon, cold and exciting Like one of those dangerous flatterers we meet and love When we are utterly wretched, returns our stare . . . (CP 149)

22

Influential Ghosts

And in the last stanza of “Oxford,” written in the same year, Auden includes a detail straight out of The Dynasts: “Over this talkative city like any other/ Weep the non-attached angels” (CP 147). But despite his more or less neutral use of the hawk’s vision in these two poems, Auden became increasingly dissatisfied with it as his career went on. 1939 is usually cited as the year in which Auden’s life and art changed most drastically: he moved to America, met Chester Kallman, and began going experimentally to church. The fact that, around this time, he also began to launch his most serious attacks so far on the hawk’s vision, is just another sign of how decisive this year was. One of last poems Auden wrote during this period, the 1938 sonnet sequence “Sonnets from China,” ends with a long “Commentary” in which he expresses considerable scorn for the hawk’s vision, even seems to be mocking it in several places. The sequence, very crudely paraphrased, is a capsule history of mankind that ends with the proud pronouncement that we are creatures of choice, “A mountain people dwelling among mountains” (CP 194), so it should be no surprise that, in the poem’s “Commentary,” the hawk’s vision comes in for some serious abuse. Throughout the “Commentary,” Auden contrasts a passive natural world with one of human agency, and reaches the conclusion—as he has done in the sonnet sequence itself—that however comforting the former may be, the latter is the one in which, for good or ill, we really live. The poem begins with an opposition between “the planets” and “the galaxy” on the one hand, and “man” on the other: Season inherits legally from dying season; Protected by the wide peace of the sun, the planets Continue their circulations; and the galaxy Is free for ever to revolve like an enormous biscuit: With all his engines round him and the summer flowers, Little upon his little earth, man contemplates The universe of which he is both judge and victim; A rarity in an uncommon corner, gazes On the great trackways where his tribe and truth are nothing. (EA 262–3)24

In an earlier poem, Auden might have steered these lines toward a very different conclusion, perhaps using the panoramic vista of the first tercet in order to launch a huge, harsh judgment on society. But here, he no sooner

Hawk’s Visions and Revisions

23

presents us with a hawk’s vision of the galaxy than he derisively leaves it “to revolve like an enormous biscuit,” and turns his attention instead to “man” and “The universe of which he is both judge and victim.” Toward the end of the poem, he presents us with a similar contrast: . . . the moon looks down On battlefields and dead men lying, heaped like treasure, On lovers ruined in a brief embrace, on ships Where exiles watch the sea: and in the silence The cry that streams out into the indifferent spaces, And never stops or slackens, may be heard more clearly, Above the everlasting murmur of the woods and rivers, And more insistent than the lulling answer of the waltzes, Or hum of printing-presses turning forests into lies; As now I hear it, rising round me from Shanghai, And mingling with the distant mutter of guerilla fighting, The voice of Man: ‘O teach me to outgrow my madness. (EA 269)

Auden’s “Commentary” may be a disappointing poem, a prosaic let-down after the poetic heights of “In Time of War.” And in fact Auden later rejected it, telling friends it was “too New Deal.”25 But the poem’s very weaknesses—its chattiness, its redundancy—make it more revealing, at least on the subject of the hawk’s vision, than many other poems of this period: Auden states here what he only suggests elsewhere. Whatever the merits of “Commentary,” it is this “voice of Man” that will serve as the running contrast to all of Auden’s subsequent uses of Hardy’s hawk. Edward Mendelson has remarked that when Auden arrived in America, he “set to work on what was virtually a new career, recapitulating his earlier one in a drastically different manner.”26 Each of his later long poems, Mendelson claims, served as a “replacement” of an earlier one: thus the 1941–2 Christmas Oratorio For the Time Being was a radical revision of the 1928 Christmas charade Paid on Both Sides, the 1940 verse-epistle New Year Letter was a Christianized version of the 1936 Letter to Lord Byron; and so on. If Auden wanted to rewrite his pre-1939 work so systematically, it is likely that he would want to revisit short poems as well as long ones; and in several later poems he seems to be doing just this, taking back his earlier endorsements of the hawk’s vision with poems in which he finds it severely lacking. Two

24

Influential Ghosts

poems of the forties, “Ischia” and “In Praise of Limestone,” read very much like updated versions of earlier poems like “Dover” and “Oxford,” since (on the one hand) all these poems are about specific places, but (on the other) only the early ones feature anything resembling a hawk’s vision. From start to finish, “In Praise of Limestone” is an anti-hawk poem, a celebration of “short distances and definite places” (CP 540) and “the local needs of valleys/ Where everything can be touched or reached by walking” (CP 541). In “Ischia,” Auden’s process of replacing one poem or one outlook with another becomes even more explicit, and he describes the Italian island—his summer home from 1949 to 1957—in a way that both evokes and attacks his earlier, sweeping perspectives of his former homes. “Changes of heart should . . . occasion song,” Auden writes two stanzas into the poem; then, remarking that “at all times it is good to praise the shining earth,” he thanks Ischia for teaching him how to do this: How well you correct our injured eyes, how gently you train us to see things and men in perspective underneath your uniform light. (CP 543)

If Auden’s eyes have been “injured” by all his previous uses of the hawk’s vision, then Ischia “corrects” them by showing them how to appreciate the virtues of a particular place—just as “the voice of Man” was a sorely needed alternative to the galaxy’s “enormous biscuit.” In several other poems of this period, the moon becomes a sort of hawk stand-in for Auden, and another image with which he can both allude to a superhuman perspective and call it into question. It is worth considering why Auden would have chosen the moon as a means to this end; certainly the poetic tradition would have provided him with countless lunar precursors, but it is also likely that his own references to the moon in earlier poems—like “Commentary,” “A Summer Night” and the lovely “This Lunar Beauty”—would have goaded him into reusing the image and, in doing so, “replacing” his early poems with later ones. It is also possible that Auden had several Hardy poems in mind as he was writing his own poems, for like Auden, Hardy occasionally uses the moon as a substitute hawk. In the dramatic monologue “The Moon Looks in,” for example, the moon peers into a man’s room and guesses exactly what he is thinking: I have risen again, And awhile survey

Hawk’s Visions and Revisions

25

By my chilly ray Through your window-pane Your upturned face, As you think, ‘Ah, she Now dreams of me In her distant place!’27

The moon then looks into this woman’s room, and reads her mind: she is not, in fact, dreaming of the man, but wondering instead “Won’t the men be sweet?” on an upcoming journey. Another poem, “To the Moon,” consists of a dialogue between an anonymous questioner and an omniscient moon; a typical stanza reads as follows: ‘What have you mused on, Moon, In your day, So aloof, so far away?’ ‘O, I have mused on, often mused on Growth, decay, Nations alive, dead, mad, aswoon, In my day!28

Whether or not Auden’s moon poems are meant to recall Hardy’s, they certainly condemn the sort of perspective that lets one muse on “Growth, decay,/ Nations alive, dead, mad, aswoon,” but at the same time removes one from the local habitations one claims to be describing. Auden’s 1951 “Nocturne” begins with the sudden appearance of the moon in “the open sky,” and the rest of the poem is a meditation on what the speaker should make of her presence there. He first worships her because of her power to “make/ Or break you as Her fancy choose.” But then he changes his mind, deciding that “The Goddess, clearly, has to go,/ Whose majesty is but the mask/ That hides a faceless dynamo.” But what if the only alternative to the moon’s haughty unconcern is his own “baser frankness”? Don’t both extremes reduce him “To a small functionary whose dreams/ Are vast, unscrupulous, confused”? (CP 586) As the poem winds to its close, the speaker tries to transform the moon into a symbol that reconciles the personal with the abstract, the close-up with the faraway: Supposing, though, my face is real And not a myth or a machine, The moon should look like x and wear

26

Influential Ghosts Features I’ve actually seen . . . That gushing lady, possibly, Who brought some verses of her own, That hang-dog who keeps coming back For just a temporary loan; A counter-image, anyway, To balance with its lack of weight My world, the private motor-car And all the engines of the State. (CP 587)

Just as “In Praise of Limestone” and “Ischia” read like emendations of, or apologies for, earlier poems, “Nocturne”—with its conclusion that the moon should represent neither the grand forces of history, nor the speaker’s private concerns, but something in between these two extremes—reads like a revision of earlier poems like “This Lunar Beauty” and “Commentary,” in which the moon (as Auden puts it in the former poem) “has no history” (CP 55). In this case, though, the revision is even more subtle, since Auden seems to be interrogating his own earlier attacks on hawk-like, panoramic perspectives. His goal in “Nocturne,” in short, is to find a middle ground between having “no history” and seeing all history. The moon, in this poem, becomes the cosmic equivalent of “Ischia”’s landscape: local but not strictly personal, large and impressive but with a human face. (John Fuller rightly observes that the poem “is a tribute to the purely human, somewhere between myth and machine.”29) The 1969 poem “Moon Landing”—in which Auden dismisses the big event as a “phallic triumph” and claims that he prefers a place where “I can count the morning/ glories, (and) where to die has a meaning” (CP 843–4)—also reads like a modification of his earlier views, with the vital difference that he is now considering current events rather than timeless philosophical questions: Auden seems so eager to reject his once-treasured hawk’s vision that he keeps approaching the subject from as many angles as he can. Along with the hawk and the moon, the camera is a symbol that Auden often explores, but ultimately rejects, throughout his later poetry. Sometimes explicitly connecting the “camera’s vision” with the hawk’s vision, Auden criticizes it for similar reasons—most notably in the poems “Memorial for the City” (1949) and “I am Not a Camera” (1969). These two poems make a pair similar to “Nocturne” and “Moon Landing” in that the former is about a concrete historical event—the worldwide chaos following World War

Hawk’s Visions and Revisions

27

Two—while the latter is a more general meditation on vision and perception. But the message of both poems is the same: the camera’s vision, though it can record everything, cannot account for real time or human choice. Auden makes this message so clear in the opening lines of “Memorial for the City” that the poem almost seems like a deliberate rebuttal of an earlier poem like “Consider”; the hawk and the helmeted airman may have helped Auden diagnose England’s ills, but he now realizes that The eyes of the crow and the eyes of the camera open Onto Homer’s world, not ours. First and last They magnify earth, the abiding Mother of gods and men; if they notice either It is only in passing . . . (CP 591)

As if this opening polemic were not enough, Auden repeats it, in slightly modified form, two times: not only do “The crow on the crematorium chimney/ And the camera roving the battle/ Record a space where time has no place,” but “The steady eyes of the crow and the camera’s candid eye/ See as honestly as they know how, but they lie” (CP 592). “I Am Not a Camera,” a collection of haiku-like fragments, is much more whimsical in tone, but carries the same blunt message: two typical fragments tell us that “The camera records/ visual facts: i.e.,/ all may be fictions,” and that “The camera may/ do justice to laughter, but must/ degrade sorrow” (CP 841). In a trilogy of poems written in the fifties and sixties, Auden puts three more nails in the collective coffin of hawk, moon and camera. Although these poems are less polemical than poems like “Moon Landing” or “I am Not a Camera,” they still contain many of the same ideas and images, and therefore show that Auden found time and space to criticize the hawk’s vision even when not writing poems—like “Memorial for the City”—primarily devoted to such a critique. In “Ode to Gaea” (1954), Auden hails “this new culture of the air” and admits that “the spell/ of high places will haunt us/ long after our jaunt has declined” (CP 553–5), but he also fills the poem with instructions about what lowly, earthbound people must do to make life bearable: cultivate good manners, preserve order, and perform various other terrestrial tasks. In “Homage to Clio” (1955), Auden praises Clio, “Muse of the unique/ Historical fact,” for her ability to notice and nurture the very things that hawks, moons and cameras cannot: “I have seen/ Your photo, I think, in the papers,” he writes, “nursing/ A baby or mourning a corpse” (CP 612). These lines alone constitute a powerful critique of the hawk’s vision: Clio, ever attentive to life’s minute particulars, cares for one person at a time, in

28

Influential Ghosts

one place at a time, whereas in earlier poems—“the moon looks on us all,” “Over the talkative city like any other”—the hawk’s vision reduced people and places to a vague, anonymous composite of buildings and faces. Finally, in “Ode to Terminus” (1968), Auden condemns the hawk-like “High Priests of telescopes and cyclotrons” because they are “too gigantic or dwarfish/ to be noticed by our native senses,” and goes on to praise the virtues of “the world we/really live in” as well as the eponymous “God of walls, doors and reticence” (CP 809–11). When all these late poems are considered together, it becomes clear just how consistent Auden’s revisions of Hardy’s hawk’s vision are: in poem after poem, hawks, moons and cameras—or their numerous variants, such as crows and telescopes—make way for cities, people, time and choice. But what makes Auden’s relationship to Hardy so complex is that even as he undertakes a thorough critique of one aspect of Hardy’s work, he continues to learn from and make use of many others. Auden’s habit of writing poems with alternating stanzas—most famously in “The Shield of Achilles,” but already present in some of his earliest poems—surely derives from Hardy’s influence, since some of his most tragic and affecting poems also employ this alternation. His poem “Heiress and Architect,” for example, contains two narrators—the two people of the title—who take turns speaking, and Hardy gives each of them a different stanza form: the young, giddy Heiress bosses the Architect around in long, confident lines (“‘Shape me,’ she said, ‘high halls with tracery/ And open ogive-work, that scent and hue/ Of buds, and travelling bees, may come in through . . . ’”), while the older, wiser Architect responds in cropped lines that make a perfect formal counterpart to his cynicism (“‘An idle whim!’/ Broke forth from him/ Whom naught could warm to gallantries”).30 Hardy also puts this technique to majestic effect in “The Voice,” a poem that Auden must have known and loved, since he chose it as one of only thirteen poems by which to represent Hardy in Poets of the English Language.31 Unlike “Heiress and Architect,” this poem has only one speaker, but Hardy uses alternating stanzas in a very similar way: his speaker’s breathless address to a “woman much missed” takes the form of passionately expansive lines (“Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,/ Standing as when I drew near to the town/ Where you would wait for me . . . ”), while his rueful commentary on the sad truth of the situation—for the dead woman does not appear—stutters out in shorter, slower ones (“Thus I, faltering forward, / Leaves around me falling . . . ”).32 In “The Shield of Achilles,” Auden creates a similar dialogue between naive optimism and harsh reality by using two very distinct stanza forms, with the intriguing difference that, in this poem, it is the longer lines that represent the latter: thus, in the poem’s stanzas with short lines, Achilles’

Hawk’s Visions and Revisions

29

mother keeps looking over Hephaestos’ shoulder at the shield, hoping to find “vines and olive trees,/ Marble well-governed cities,/ And ships upon untamed seas,” but seeing instead “A plain without a feature, bare and brown,/ No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,/ Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down” (CP 596). Auden may be modifying Hardy’s technique slightly here, but can hardly be said to be criticizing it. Another disturbing motif that Auden seems to have borrowed from Hardy is his use of what Hardy, in a poem called “Heredity,” called “the family face,” the “eternal thing in man,/ That heeds no call to die” and lingers on into subsequent generations, preventing both choice and change. This is the first stanza of Hardy’s poem: I am the family face; Flesh perishes, I live on, Projecting trait and trace Through time to times anon, And leaping from place to place Over oblivion.33

Since choice and change were the very things that Auden’s mature poems were all about, it makes sense that he would have put the idea of “the family face” to both major and minor use: it is both the overwhelming theme of Paid on Both Sides, and the partial subject of poems like “Family Ghosts” (which contains a reference to “the ancestral face”)(CP 40) and “This Loved One” (which reminds us that “Before this loved one/Was that one and that one,/ A family/ And history/ And ghost’s adversity”) (CP 36). Though Auden’s rendering of “the family face” is much more psychologically up-to-date than Hardy’s—and perhaps more closely resembles Freud’s family romance than Hardy’s evolutionary pessimism—it still shows how carefully Auden must have scoured Hardy’s poems for themes and images to use in his own work. Yet another connection between Auden and Hardy, and one that deserves a study all its own, is what Donald Davie has called Auden’s “topophile” tendency, his method of letting “specific landscapes . . . serve as the provocation for (his) imagination, and the focus of some of his most delicate and feelingful writing.”34 The list could go on, but the point holds: although Auden may have wholeheartedly borrowed certain elements of Hardy’s poetry and subjected others to the most thorough scrutiny, the very fact that he made such lifelong, strenuous and resourceful use of Hardy’s work makes it safe to claim that Hardy is the most important single influence on Auden, and the one with whom he argued loudest and longest.

Chapter Two

Influential Ghosts: Structural Allusion in Auden’s Early Poetry

Any intelligent list of the most important features of modern poetry will include allusion somewhere near the top. But any intelligent study of allusion in modern poetry will also pay careful attention to the vastly different uses to which it has been put. A comparison of, for example, Eliot’s violent yoking together of quotations, Pound’s wholesale appropriation of medieval sources, and Auden’s voracious assimilation of literary, philosophical and religious works will reveal not only the important similarities between these poets, but also their enormous differences—with regard to the poetry of the past, its relation to their own work, and (much more generally) the role of the poet in the modern world. Since Auden’s poetry is so consistently, and yet so complexly allusive, a study of his many different kinds of allusion sheds an especially bright light on all these matters. In keeping with the restless experiments with form and subject matter that earned him the nickname “the Picasso of modern poetry,” Auden even seems to have invented a new kind of allusion in which he reuses not individual lines from, but the very form and structure of an earlier poem, and then proceeds to revise its ideas and values from within this broad borrowing. In some cases, as will be seen, Auden retains the form of a poem but subjects its contents to the harshest scrutiny; he may also take up different features—its setting, cast of characters, dominant tone or imagery—in order to gain a firmer foothold for criticizing them. Although Auden’s 1933 poem “A Summer Night” is not one of his most interesting structural allusions because it is not so much a critique as an elaboration of its original, it provides a helpful example of this kind of allusion. The poem’s celebratory tone, as well as its stanzaic structure—two pairs of rhymed tetrameter lines separated by two lines of rhyming trimeter—strongly recall Christopher Smart’s “A Song to David.” And Auden’s description of summer’s delights that are “Tough in their patience to surpass/ The tigress her swift motions” (CP 119) probably 31

32

Influential Ghosts

echoes Wilfred Owen’s reference to the “swiftness of the tigress” in his poem “Strange Meeting.”1 The latter allusion could be found in the collected works of almost any twentieth-century poet, but the former is Auden’s own important innovation. Auden’s structurally allusive poems may not be his best or most memorable ones, but they demonstrate a process that is central to an understanding of his work. Like his lifelong engagement with—and dramatically evolving feelings about—Hardy’s poetry, Auden’s use of structural allusion shows that his most interesting poems result from a deeply ambivalent attitude toward the poetry of the past. And just as he often employs Hardy’s “hawk’s vision” in order to correct it—just as, for that matter, Jane Austen launches her scathing social critiques within traditional marriage plots, or a double agent dons a disguise the better to fit in with the people he will ultimately betray—Auden often alludes to entire poems in order to revise them on their own terms. An investigation of Auden’s structural allusions also helps reveal the significant continuities in his work. It has become a critical commonplace to separate Auden’s poetic output into a series of hermetically sealed phases: English versus American, political versus religious, and so on. And of course there is some truth to these, as to most generalizations. But to divide Auden’s poetry into two groups—the dense, allusive, politically committed early poems and the relaxed, accessible, apolitical later ones—is to fall prey to the same agitprop/Mallarmé false choice that he himself hated. This reductive account of Auden’s career also makes it tempting to regard his early work as a long process of “finding a voice” which culminates in a new kind of poetry, roughly coincident with his move to America in 1939. But while it is true that, as Auden’s career progressed, his faith in poetry’s ability to be overtly political diminished, so that by 1939 he could write that “poetry makes nothing happen” (CP 248), it is also true that he began to take up some of the same concerns in more subtle ways, in particular by his use of structural allusion. A close look at certain poems that Auden wrote in the twenties and thirties will therefore show that his early poems are not only separated from his later poems by great gaps, but also connected by unmistakable similarities. But even more importantly, a study of Auden’s use of structural allusion goes a long way toward illuminating his ideas about the relationship between poets of the past and poets of the present. Auden may transform earlier poems in order to find ethical or ideological fault with them, but his structural allusions also allow him to remain within a literary tradition. His intricate, adventurous use of allusion in general, and structural allusion in particular, enables him to maintain certain ties to the poetic tradition while severing others, to show that a poet’s need for forbears and new ideas are

Influential Ghosts

33

not mutually exclusive, and to suggest, by his poetic example, a connection to literary history that is one of wide-eyed and wide-ranging dialogues, not unconscious disputes with a few frightening rivals. By alluding to other poems with poems of his own, Auden is also able to recast his political, historical and aesthetic beliefs as poetic principles: the poems do what they urge us to do. Francesco Binni puts it well: “‘Technique becomes, for the poet, a kind of moral standpoint because, in its various forms, it seeks to reestablish an existential and ethical connection.”2 And Cleanth Brooks, discussing Auden’s early poems, writes that “His attitude is one which accommodates in a dramatic unity the various elements which in our practical oversimplification are divided and at war with each other.”3 Auden included a passage from Goethe in his commonplace book, A Certain World, which could serve as another powerful summary of his own views: I had towards the poetic art a quite peculiar relation which was only practical after I had cherished in my mind for a long time a subject which possessed me, a model which inspired me, a predecessor who attracted me, until at length, after I had moulded it in silence for years, something resulted which might be regarded as a creation of my own.4

But the best description of his method comes from Auden himself. In his essay “Yeats as Example,” Auden remarks that “in poetry as in life, to lead one’s own life means to relive the lives of one’s parents and, through them, of all one’s ancestors; the duty of the present is neither to copy nor to deny the past but to resurrect it”(CPr 384).5 Obviously the term “structural allusion” is a broad one—and one that could plausibly describe many poems other than the ones under discussion. So it may be helpful to narrow the field a little. “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” could certainly be considered a structural allusion of sorts—to numerous poems by Yeats, as well as to Yeats’s career and, beyond that, the entire elegiac tradition. Because of its many similarities to Auden’s other elegies, though, a close study of the poem is probably best kept for a separate discussion of these elegies. Many of Auden’s parodies could also be considered structural allusions. His early poem “Uncle Henry,” for example, retains the form of Thomas Campion’s “Rose-cheekt Laura”—four stanzas of four lines each—in order to mock Campion’s lush Neoplatonic description of a woman’s beauty (“Sing thou sweetly with thy beawties/ Silent musick, either other/ Sweetely gracing”)6 with his own arch portrait of a lisping homosexual (“Weady for some fun,/ visit yearly Wome, Damascus,/ in Mowocco look for fwesh a-/ musin’ places”) (CP 60). But Auden’s parody, though amusing, is so broad

34

Influential Ghosts

that it not especially interesting as a critique of Neoplatonism—which, to be fair to Auden, hardly seems the goal of the poem.7 Auden’s most successful and complex structural allusions, on the other hand, are poems in which an earlier poet’s form and content offer him a chance to articulate his disagreements with that poet. But in order to understand the ways in which Auden uses structural allusion, it is first necessary to look at the ways he experiments with allusion in his earliest poems. In poems of the late twenties, Auden presents his speakers and protagonists as lonely figures forever poised between two worlds. What makes these poems compelling but often confusing is that Auden tends to discuss many different kinds of isolation at once, exploring his personal and poetic aloofness at the same time that he laments his failure to draw connections between an idealized past, a stymied present and an uncertain future. This tendency can be seen in “The Secret Agent,” an unrhymed sonnet written in 1928. In the poem’s first quatrain, a spy broods on his failure to do what his job requires of him: Control of the passes was, he saw, the key To this new district, but who would get it? He, the trained spy, had walked into the trap For a bogus guide, seduced by the old tricks. (CP 32)

Auden’s language is allusive enough to be able to refer to many problems— or many offshoots of one large problem—at once. The fact that the spy is “trained” could mean that he is acquainted with all the rules and ruses a modern spy needs to know. But “trained” may also be a hint on Auden’s part that this is a poem about his own status as an aspiring poet. The poet/spy is “trained” in the “old tricks” of a poetic/military “guide,” but he is also “seduced,” and therefore ruined by them. Auden’s language is so general that this guide could be Virgil, a high-ranking member of a covert operations squad, or both. But whoever the guide is, he is “bogus” and therefore prevents the spy from getting “Control of the passes . . . to this new district.” In the poem’s second quatrain, the spy remains ineffectual: everyone ignores his “wires” and “bridges” remain “unbuilt” (CP 32). These wires can obviously refer to Auden’s poetry as well as to coded telegraphs, but whatever they are, their failure to communicate results in a faulty connection between two deliberately unspecified areas. Are the bridges supposed to help an advancing army advance? Or do they suggest Auden’s desire to “bridge” the poetic past with his poetic future? Auden avoids answering these questions directly, and therefore (perhaps) implies that both meanings are intended. This broad

Influential Ghosts

35

allusiveness continues in the poem’s last section, in which the spy, sensing his doom, is tormented by an image of water running just out of reach: Woken by water Running away in the dark, he often had Reproached the night for a companion Dreamed of already. They would shoot, of course, Parting easily two that were never joined. (CP 32)

The spy’s mission—and possibly, by implication, the poet’s—are shrouded in a veil of ignorance that no amount of training can lift. The spy finds fault with reality because it cannot match his vivid dream of water with a comforting “companion.” And because he has failed to communicate, he knows his end is near. But strangely, the poem’s last line points to a separation that the poem itself does not share; it has “joined” two painful predicaments—poetic and political isolation—all along by means of its richly allusive language. Auden’s spy is like Hegel’s Geist or Auerbach’s figura in that he is many things at once, the protagonist of a poem about military operations and the symbol of Auden’s poetic uncertainty.8 In this sense, the poem may pose a quiet solution to the very problems it raises. We can begin to draw connections, to find “companions,” Auden seems to imply, if we can find ways of writing about several different things at the same time. And the fact that the poem is an unrhymed sonnet is a palpable reminder that, for Auden, poetic chaos is not the answer to disorder at large. But Auden’s isolation continues. In Paid on Both Sides, written in the same year as “The Secret Agent,” a spy also figures prominently and is also shot. In the context of the play, his death is not entirely tragic, since it is signals the demise of certain conflicts in the protagonist John Nower’s brain. Still, Nower dies not long after the spy, so while some strife has ended, more remains, and the final Chorus can look forward to a time of “Big fruit, eagles above the stream” (CP 26) but not welcome its arrival. Much of the play’s language is as general as that of “The Secret Agent”; the Man-Woman’s speech about love, for example, lampoons the failure of the characters to know a real union when they see one (“Because I’m come it does not mean to hold/ An anniversary, think illness healed,/ As to renew the lease”) (CP 14). Similarly, the marriage at the end of the play is more than just the wedding of John and Anne, and Seth’s murder of John another symbolic parting of “two that were never joined.” Like “The Secret Agent,” Paid on Both Sides derives much of its poetic power from the wide allusiveness of its language. But the play’s references—echoes of Greek drama, diction derived from Old English and

36

Influential Ghosts

Icelandic sagas, and a mini-love poem with Renaissance antecedents—never affect its actual structure. In these two early works, then, Auden can hint at a glorious world elsewhere (the distant water) and to come (“Big fruit”), but cannot poetically demonstrate ways of attaining it. Despite the many parallels in both works between form and subject matter, Auden has not yet found a way of referring to his alternate world, with its water and fruit, in such a way that his poetry itself will be an example of how to get there. Auden’s poems of the next few years convey a similar sense of rootlessness. In “Taller To-day,” written two months after “The Secret Agent,” Auden again describes water distantly running water, only this time the distance is temporal rather than spatial: an unidentified “we” express nostalgia for evenings of “Walking together in a windless orchard/ Where the brook runs over the gravel, far from the glacier” (CP 30). Auden’s language is deliberately vague, but the poem’s title is a clue as to how to read it. The speaker and his partner in isolation are “taller today,” most obviously because they have grown up, but also because they have come into history late: they are “dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants” who know more and see farther than their precursors but are also somehow diminished by their belatedness. The end of “Taller To-day” promises “peace,” but it is a very precarious one because of the speaker’s failure to find a lasting alternative to the nostalgia described in the poem. The peace that is “sufficient now” (CP 30) cannot erase a wistful recollection of eternally running water; the world remains covered in snow, and the speaker and his friends are “happy . . . though no nearer each other” (CP 30) than they were when the poem began. In “This Loved One,” written a year later, Auden describes love in the same way he has described spying. Looking at a beloved’s face only conjures up a tumult of images (“Before this loved one/ Was that one and that one/ A family/ And history/ And ghost’s adversity”) (CP 36), and as such is “no real meeting” (CP 37). Lovers may touch, but they are only “shaking hands/ On mortgaged lands” (CP 36); their union is a fragile one because they are so uneasily reconciled to the past. In “Family Ghosts,” written a month later, hopes that “an ancestral face” will come out of the clouds inspire both artistic creation and political foment (“The strings’ excitement, the applauding drum”) (CP 40), but are revealed as paltry compensations for a lost sense of wholeness (“Loquacious when the watercourse is dry”) (CP 41), and dashed altogether by the poem’s final lines, which paint a decline into chilly modernity with a few quick strokes: “A Golden Age, a Silver . . . rather this,/ Massive and taciturn years, the Age of Ice” (CP 41). Later in the year, in Part IV of the poem “1929,” Auden states that “love/ Needs more than the admiring excitement of union,/ More than the abrupt self-confident farewell”

Influential Ghosts

37

and requires “death, death of the grain, our death,/ Death of the old gang” (CP 49). This apocalyptic ending seems like a recourse to the deaths of “The Secret Agent” and Paid on Both Sides without even the latter’s vague hints of future redemption. At the end of the poem, the speaker looks forward to a time when he will see “deep in clear lake/ The lolling bridegroom, beautiful, there” (CP 49), and thus learn to reconcile the opposing views he has just rejected. But the end of “1929” is unsatisfying, because its subject— the lolling, blissful bridegroom, both eternally “beautiful” and temporally “there”—is contradicted by the poem’s structure, a four-part cyclical account of the seasons. John Fuller has suggested that the bridegroom is “a periphrasis for the dead Christ (the bride would be the church)”9 and that the poem is therefore not contradictory, since Christ gives meaning to the seasons in the first place. This interpretation is clever, but lacks enough support from the poem to be fully convincing. It seems more likely that the poem is, finally, a divided one: Auden knows and says what he wants, but he has not yet found a way of strengthening his message by means of his poem’s very structure. Early in 1930, however, Auden wrote two poems—“Consider” and “Get There if You Can”—in which he began to explore possible ways out of this dilemma. “Consider” begins with the famous, enigmatic command to “Consider this and in our time/ As the hawk sees it or the helmeted airman” (CP 61). Since the poem’s language is mostly straightforward, why is its first line so syntactically confusing? For dramatic effect alone? This is of course impossible to prove, but it seems highly likely that the poem is a structural allusion to Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poem “The Sea-Limits,” which Auden included in his anthology of Nineteenth Century British Minor Poets, and the first stanza of which runs as follows: Consider the sea’s listless chime: Time’s self it is, made audible,— The murmur of the earth’s own shell. Secret continuance sublime Is the sea’s end: our sight may pass No furlong further. Since time was, This time hath told the lapse of time.10

The poem is an extended meditation on eternity and death, both of which find an appropriate image in the timeless sea. Rossetti argues that “Our sight may pass no furlong further” than the sea because we are swallowed up in it, and goes on to describe the sound of men’s voices as mere components of a louder, more powerful surge: “Hark where the murmurs of thronged men/

38

Influential Ghosts

Surge and sink back and surge again,—/ Still the one voice of wave and tree.” The poem ends with Rossetti’s command to “Gather a shell from the strown beach/ And listen at its lips”; this action will prove to the shell’s holder that “all mankind is thus at heart/ Not anything but what thou art:/ And Earth, Sea, Man are all in each.”11 Although the poem finds no place for human agency or social change, its conclusion is not an unhappy one, for Rossetti suggests that time-bound Man derives meaning on Earth by being subsumed under the changeless rubric of the sea. Rossetti’s poem would have been a perfect starting-point for Auden, since water had already played an important role in his poetry for some time, as in “The Secret Agent” and “Taller To-day.” Auden’s use of Rossetti as a model may also have a precedent in his title “Paid on Both Sides,” a line that comes from Beowulf,12 but the precise phrasing of which may be indebted to Rossetti’s sonnet “Lost on Both Sides.” There is further evidence of this debt in the play itself: the Chorus’ reference to travelers who “may meet at inns but not attach” and “Reach villages to ask for a bed in” (CP 19) recalls Rossetti’s “separate hopes” who, long at war, are finally reconciled and end the sonnet “knocking at dusty inns” together.13 And Rossetti’s personification of “separate hopes” into weary travelers has a good deal in common with many of the characters of Paid on Both Sides, who are as much facets of one mind as they are distinct individuals. But even if the ties between Paid on Both Sides and “Lost on Both Sides” are tenuous, “Consider” reads like one long response to “The Sea-Limits.” Perhaps Auden is syntactically offbeat in the poem’s first line in order to allude to Rossetti, yet criticize him at the same time: replacing “the sea’s listless clime” with “this and in our time” gives Auden’s poem the historical specificity that Rossetti’s lacks. Furthermore, the “hawk” and “helmeted airman” may be swipes at Rossetti’s passive acceptance of the “listless” sea: Auden wants a perspective that will elevate him to the all-seeing status the sea enjoys in Rossetti’s poem. Only the hawk and the airman are modern and critical where the sea was timeless and senseless (though of course, later in his career Auden would condemn this same hawk with structural allusions to his own early poems like “Consider”). The rest of the poem, while less blatant in its revision of Rossetti, replaces his easy submission to fate with a new emphasis on action and choice: Auden’s privileged vantage-point takes him briskly from a “garden party” to the exterior of a “Sport Hotel” to its decadent interior where “insufficient units” are “Supplied with feelings by an efficient band” (CP 61), whereas Rossetti relegates all human action to “the sea’s end” and only describes actions—like picking up a shell—that will be means to this transcendent goal. When Rossetti gave commands, they were commands that

Influential Ghosts

39

would apply to anyone anywhere: you can always “consider” the sea in the same way because it never changes. But Auden’s commands are aggressively contemporary: the reader to whom he addresses the poem must be modern to know what a “helmeted airman” is, and the “Financier” of the poem’s final stanza has a typist. The poem’s last two lines are warnings about what will happen if the financier does not “consider”: he will either “disintegrate on an instant in the explosion of mania/ Or lapse forever into a classic fatigue” (CP 62). This ominous prediction sounds like a new version of the union/farewell dichotomy of “1929,” but Rossetti’s ghost may also be lurking behind the “classic fatigue.” In any case, by revising Rossetti’s poem while retaining its central themes and images, Auden performs the very active, critical stance— toward life and literature—that he urges. For the first time in Auden’s work, a poem’s form is an enactment of its message. “Get There if You Can,” written a month later, is another extended allusion, this time to Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall,”14 and like all of Auden’s structurally allusive poems contains both striking similarities to and notable differences from its prototype. A fast-paced dramatic monologue about youth, nostalgia and the fickleness of women, “Locksley Hall” is narrated by a soldier who has temporarily been left alone by his comrades. The soldier wistfully remembers his childhood home; he then recounts a youthful love affair with his cousin Amy which collapsed time for him (“Love took up the glass of Time, and turn’d it in his glowing hands”),15 but soon ended for the usual reasons (“O my cousin, shallow-hearted!”).16 Having awakened an unpleasant memory, the soldier asks to return to his blissfully ignorant youth: “Make me feel the wild pulsation that I felt before the strife,/ When I heard my days before me, and the tumult of my life.”17 But since even he knows that he cannot go back in time, he decides that traveling to exotic lands is the next best solution, and the poem ends with yet more idyllic descriptions of a world elsewhere: “Droops the heavy-blossom’d bower, hangs the heavyfruited tree—/ Summer isles of Eden lying in dark-purple spheres of sea./ There methinks would be employment more than in this march of mind,/ In the steamship, in the railway, in the thoughts that shake mankind.”18 The soldier thinks he is leaving Locksley Hall behind, but he has only replaced one utopia with another, and the poem ends on an escapist note as dubious as it is beautiful. Auden’s poem is considerably shorter, but shares Tennyson’s main themes and preoccupations, as well as his octameter couplets. Anthony Hecht has helpfully listed several ways in which the poems resemble each other: “Both poems shift in tone from nostalgia and regret to fierce and violent outrage; both are at points slightly hysterical in ways that invite us to

40

Influential Ghosts

regard their speakers with reservations and suspicions . . . Both poems bristle with condemnations and achieve moments of nearly suicidal passion, mitigated by an invitation to suspect that neither poet is highly serious.”19 But apart from their tonal and rhetorical similarities, the two poems are extremely different. Just as he criticized Rossetti’s “Sea-Limits” by writing another poem modeled on it, Auden revises Tennyson’s poem from within, replacing the three parts of “Locksley Hall”—nostalgic memory of idealized home, intrusive memory of thwarted love affair, salvation in travel—with three parts of his own. The poem begins with Auden’s injunction to “Get there if you can and see the land you once were proud to own/ Though the roads have almost vanished and the expresses never run” (EA 48). Several related stanzas follow, describing the decay of a once-treasured home in minute detail. Only whereas Tennyson’s speaker was rudely forced into maturity by a false woman, Auden describes, in the poem’s second section, the “boon companions” who have led him and his kind astray, with Newman, Plato, Freud, Flaubert and others taking the place of Tennyson’s treacherous Amy. They are even described in sexual terms as “These who have betrayed us nicely while we took them to our rooms” (EA 48). But in its third section, “Get There if You Can” radically diverges from “Locksley Hall.” The speaker of Tennyson’s poem retreats from an unpleasant memory by resolving to travel far and wide; Auden alludes to a similar retreat, but only to associate it with his “boon companions” and, in doing so, to condemn it: “When we asked the way to Heaven, these directed us ahead/ To the padded room, the clinic and the hangman’s little shed” (EA 48). Tennyson’s speaker does not realize that escapism can lead to madness and death, and therefore sets sail expecting smooth seas. Auden’s communal speakers, on the other hand, end the poem by staring out “dully at the rain which falls for miles into the sea” (EA 49), but do so in order to reject it, not plunge headlong into it. Auden also concludes the poem by killing off healers (“Lawrence, Blake and Homer Lane”) who were as seductive as Amy and the purple sea. And whereas Tennyson’s poem ended with its speaker’s decision to travel, leaving readers to draw their own conclusions, Auden makes the consequences of overzealous flight much more explicit: Drop those priggish ways forever, stop behaving like a stone: Throw the bath-chairs right away, and learn to leave ourselves alone. If we really want to live, we’d better start at once to try; If we don’t it doesn’t matter, but we’d better start to die. (EA 49)

Influential Ghosts

41

It is possible, of course, that Auden is not as critical of his speaker’s excesses as the poem initially suggests. John Bayley has written, along these lines, that Auden’s “picture of desolation gives the reader a thrill of gratified excitement: he seems to be sharing in a vicarious Schadenfreude, and indulging too in the thoughtless pleasures of youth.”20 But even if Auden’s overt attacks on false prophets and addle-brained escapists are softened by covert sympathy for them, the poem’s surface statements surely count for something. In “Get There if You Can,” then, Auden uses the form and content of “Locksley Hall” as weapons with which to criticize and correct its speaker’s views. The fact that Auden’s poem is shorter than Tennyson’s while going further in its capacity to offer concrete alternatives to “boon companions” is itself a comment on Tennyson’s speaker, who was long-winded precisely because he needed lavish rhetoric to sustain his nostalgic stupor and ill-advised fantasies. Auden’s narrator is thick-skinned and to the point, but speaks in Tennysonian verse so that Auden can place the poem in context for his readers, and then surprise them with unexpected gibes at his source. And again, the fact that the poem is in a traditional form is a silent testimony to Auden’s belief that going in the opposite direction from Tennyson’s speaker—by, say, staying at home and starting a bloody revolution—would be just as harmful to the speaker, and certainly more destructive to society at large. One changes history and poetry, Auden implies, by working subtly and craftily within their rules, not by welcoming them uncritically or perilously bidding them farewell. “O Where Are You Going” (1931), the Epilogue to The Orators, is based on the anonymous medieval poem “The Cutty Wren,” which Auden included in his Oxford Book of Light Verse. Monroe Spears claims that Auden may have first encountered the poem in Walter de la Mare’s anthology Come Hither,21 even though—as Anthony Hecht points out—“only two stanzas of the ballad, and in a form significantly varied from the one Auden would quote in his anthology, are to be found, not in the body of de la Mare’s collection, but buried as a snippet among the notes.”22 Although the original figures less prominently in this poem than “Locksley Hall” does in “Get There if You Can,” its influence is still significant. These are the first stanzas of both poems: O where are you going, says Milder to Malder, O, I cannot tell, says Festel to Fose, We’re going to the woods, says John the Red Nose, We’re going to the woods, says John the Red Nose.23 ‘O where are you going?’ said reader to rider, ‘That valley is fatal where furnaces burn,

42

Influential Ghosts Yonder’s the midden whose odours will madden, That gap is the grave where the tall return.’ (CP 59)

Auden has transformed Milder and Malder into generalized human types, but he has preserved the vowel shift that links the two names, and repeats this device in the first line of each of the following stanzas: reader/ rider becomes fearer/ farer, and then horror/ hearer. But the similarity between the two poems stops there; everything else about Auden’s poem seems designed to improve its original by rewriting it. His use of “said” rather “says” may appear unimportant, but drastically alters the way we read the poem, since it is an immediate clue that the occurrence about to be described no longer occurs. The author of “The Cutty Wren,” by contrast, tells his story as though it were either a proverbial, eternally recurring phenomenon or a onetime event over which he has no critical distance. The story itself is gruesomely comic: the bewildered Milder, Malder, Festel and Fose go into the woods with the more self-assured John the Red Nose, where they will, as John announces, “shoot the Cutty Wren.” The rest of the poem is a perverse exercise in one-upmanship: John proposes that they kill the bird with “arrows and bows,” but Milder and Malder flinchingly respond “O that will not do,” and so John decides on “big guns and cannons”; “knives and forks” are suggested as utensils with which to cut up the Cutty Wren, but get passed over in favor of “hatchets and cleavers,” designated cooking appliances are first “pots and kettles,” then “brass pans and cauldrons,” and so on. The poem ends ironically: the four would-be killers agree to give the bird’s “spare ribs” to the poor, but they have still not done the dirty deed itself. Auden anthologized “The Cutty Wren,” so he clearly admired it, but his own poem reads like a lacerating critique of its characters’ moral weakness. John and the other three men differ, of course, in that John is aggressive and the others are timid, but all four have the same problem: they spend so much time talking about their upcoming slaughter that they never even get into the woods. Auden’s characters, however, fall into two distinct groups: reader, fearer and horror, who balk at the notion of setting out anywhere, and rider, farer and hearer, who respond curtly to these fears in the poem’s last stanza, and then charge briskly away from the spectacle of indecision. Auden has retained “The Cutty Wren”’s debate between weak-willed and strong-willed characters, but by giving his two groups vying objectives—staying meekly at home versus trekking boldly onward—he has changed the static nature of the original poem, in which no full-fledged debate could emerge because all four characters were essentially on the same side. Milder and Madder try to top John’s suggestions

Influential Ghosts

43

for killing and eating the Cutty Wren, but their debate over niceties will no make no difference to the doomed bird; Auden’s characters, however, confront each other in ways that will affect the course of things at once: “rider,” for example, goes “Out of this house,” leaving “reader” at home to worry (CP 60). Auden’s take-charge characters become even more active in the poem’s last line, where, adapting John the Red Nose’s lines for his own purposes, Auden merges them into one departing figure: “As he left him there, as he left him there” (CP 60). By saving John’s emphatic double lines for the end of the poem, and by revising “The Cutty Wren” within its own form and content, Auden again has it both ways, alluding to a poem in order to criticize it in its own language. Since we have no idea exactly what “rider” is leaving “reader” for, the poem’s conclusion is not fully satisfying, and consequently The Orators, like Paid on Both Sides, hints at a later, greater world without being able to say what it looks like. But Auden’s subtle revisions of “The Cutty Wren” make “O Where Are You Going” at least a partial answer to its own unanswered question: one finds out where one needs to go by engaging in a lively, fruitful debate with readers, horrors, fearers, and earlier poets. Auden wrote in a late poem that he often wanted to write poems on themes that medieval poets had tackled, “but (was) forbidden by the knowledge/ that you would have wrought them so much better” (CP 863). As “O Where Are You Going” demonstrates, this is not entirely true. “Paysage Moralisé,” a 1933 poem, is the greatest and most complex of Auden’s structural allusions. Auden once remarked that the poem’s governing principle—the use of landscape to discuss human traits—was indebted to Rilke.24 But an even stronger influence on the poem is Sir Philip Sidney’s double sestina “Yee Gote-heard Gods,” a despairing outburst on the part of two shepherds whose love, Urania, has departed. The poem seems to have been a special favorite of Auden’s, since he included it in both The Poet’s Tongue (under the title “Strephon and Klaius”) and the first volume of Poets of the English Language. Critics have noted the connection between the two poems, but their commentary usually stops with the fact that Auden used two of the same end-words (valleys and mountains) as Sidney, or with the suggestion that he merely wanted to prove he could write a sestina. John Fuller, for example, writes that “Paysage Moralisé” “looks like a conscious effort to rebuff Empson,” who claims in Seven Types of Ambiguity that “the capacity to conceive such a large form as the sestina as a unit of sustained feeling had been lost since the age of Sidney.”25 But since Auden had already written a sestina at this point in his career—“Have a Good Time,” from The Orators—this reason is unconvincing. “Paysage Moralisé” is not just an

44

Influential Ghosts

attempt to pick up where Sidney left off; it is a sustained critique of the various laments of his two distraught shepherds, and the manner in which they project their troubled emotions onto the natural world. Sidney’s shepherds, Strephon and Klaius, complain in alternate stanzas, but their complaint is the same: Urania is gone. But we do not find this out right away. Instead, the shepherds express their despair by imaginatively transforming their bucolic landscape into a topographical nightmare; as David Kalstone remarks, “Strephon and Klaius move away from the ordinary experience of pastoral joys, transforming them ever more rapidly into symbols of desire and suffering.”26 The poem’s pastoral landscape is symbolic from the start: Strephon laments that he is “banished now upon among the mountains/ Of huge despair, and foul affliction’s valleys,” and “grown a scrich-owl to myself each morning.”27 His enormous grief gives him a connection to nature, but it is one of entrapment, not possibility, since the outside world has become a huge and hellish reproduction of his sorrow. And Klaius is so mad with grief that “molehills seem high mountains”; he transforms a hackneyed phrase into a daunting physical prospect. As the poem progresses, the shepherds’ world becomes even darker. Strephon thinks he sees “the high and stately valleys/ Transform themselves to low dejected valleys”28 and grimly supposes that “The nightingales do learn of owls their music”; Klaius sees a “filthy cloudy evening” wherever he looks, and listens to “sweet music” only to hear “The dreadful cries of murdered men in forests.” The shepherds then turn violent, thinking that mayhem and rage will at least provide a release from the sorrow they see and hear everywhere: Strephon threatens to “fire the trees of all these forests,” and Klaius hints that he will commit suicide (“I wish no evening more to see, each evening”). Finally, they reveal the cause of their distress: Urania has gone, “taking her two suns from these dark valleys” and “Turning to deserts our best pastured mountains.” But the shepherds’ love of Urania only results in another allegorized landscape, and an equally destructive one. Their sorrow, they believe, has darkened the world, but her sunny presence would light it up again. Sidney’s shepherds are like manic depressives for whom life is either radiant or repellent, a magnificent mountain or a bottomless valley, and it is this inability to face reality head-on which drives them deeper and deeper into grief, and which Auden criticizes in “Paysage Moralisé.” The first two end-words of Auden’s sestina, valleys and mountains, are the only two he retains from “Yee Goate-herd gods,” but their inclusion in the poem—in the reverse order in which they occur in Sidney’s poem—is an early hint that “Paysage Moralisé” will be indebted to Sidney for its central

Influential Ghosts

45

images and concerns. (Of course, as in other poems by Auden, catching the allusion isn’t necessary for an appreciation of the poem; it only enhances an appreciation already there.) Sidney’s poem, like Rossetti’s, would have been especially inviting for Auden since its dominant images—mountains, deserts, water—had been hallmarks of his verse for years. The first two lines of “Paysage Moralisé” pick up where Sidney’s shepherds left off: “Hearing of harvests rotting in the valleys,/ Seeing at end of street the barren mountains” (CP 119). Auden’s poem is similar to Sidney’s in its emphasis on the destructive results of all this hearing and seeing, but different in that it shows us how to find a way out of it, all the while remaining in the realm of the senses. Our immense nostalgia for the past, the poem argues, arises from our hatred of current reality, with all its rotting harvests and barren mountains. But the past we imagine—like the landscape Sidney’s shepherds encounter—is only a projection of our psychological state: We honour founders of these starving cities Whose honour is the image of our sorrow, Which cannot see its likeness in their sorrow That brought them desperate to the brink of valleys (CP 119)

When we define our cities’ proud founders in contrast to ourselves, we are merely inverting our present misery. Instead, Auden argues, our founders were spurred on by the same dilemmas that haunt us now. They were as hopelessly escapist as we are (“Each in his little bed conceived of islands”) and as ill-equipped to face the challenges of real life (“But hunger was a more immediate sorrow”) (CP 119). “Waving pilgrims” tempted the founders to sail off to islands where they could forget “The shadow cast across your lives by mountains” (CP 120), but the founders, like Sidney’s unstable shepherds, took measures that may have seemed different but actually resulted from the same denial of reality: they either “perished in the mountains,/ Climbing up crags to get a view of islands,” or remained “wretched” because they “would not leave their valleys” (CP 120). The founders also serve a function similar to Urania’s, since they lend meaning to the exploits of the poem’s protagonists, but only in a twisted and destructive way. Up to this point in the poem, Auden has used “allegorized landscape” just as Sidney did, though with the addition of a critical perspective running throughout the stanzas in the form of a level-headed third-person narrator. But in the poem’s envoi, Auden takes Sidney’s poem a step further. While the double sestina closes on a note of defiant despair—Klaius’ “Our morning

46

Influential Ghosts

hymn this is, and song at evening”—Auden proposes a cure for the stunted, stagnant waste land he has portrayed in the previous six stanzas: It is our sorrow. Shall it melt? Then water Would gush, flush, green these mountains and these valleys, And we rebuild our cities, not dream of islands. (CP 120)

“It” is the human condition, but it is also the elaborate symbolic landscape that both Sidney and Auden have described. It “melts” rather than disappears because if it vanished altogether, we would have suffered for no reason; this way, we can “melt” our nostalgia into something productive—a flowing river which, as in Auden’s earlier poems, carries personal, poetical and historical implications. Critics have remarked that the second line of the envoi is indebted to Hopkins for its onrush of emphatic verbs, but Auden may also be referring to Sidney’s poem here, replacing the shepherds’ turn to violent verbs late in the sestina (Strephon’s “I wish . . . I give . . . I curse . . . I do hate”) with verbs that are more active and affirmative. “Our cities” is doubly significant: it is the first time in “Paysage Moralisé” that Auden attaches a first-person plural pronoun to the plural noun, but it may also be an allusion to the last line of Sidney’s poem, in which the shepherds unite to say “our morning hymn,” but are still cut off from the landscape that they have transformed into a terrifying mirror of their lovesickness. Sidney’s poem ends in the same way that it began, on a note of complete (if shared) isolation; Auden’s ends with a change of heart and a suggestion that if we let our rigid, crippling sorrow melt, we can use it to “rebuild our cities.” And “Paysage Moralisé,” by “rebuilding” Sidney’s poem, is a poetic enactment of exactly the kind of change Auden wants. In the five years after “Paysage Moralisé,” Auden wrote two more poems in which he alluded structurally to earlier poems. Although less directly influenced by their originals than “Paysage Moralisé,” they provide strong evidence that Auden had found a mode of allusion with which he wanted to continue experimenting. In the case of “On This Island” (1935), Auden’s poetic starting-point is Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.” While John Fuller claims that “The poem bears the sort of relationship to . . . ‘Dover Beach’ as a postcard does to a letter,”29 the poems’ similarities cannot be dismissed so easily, nor is the difference only one of tone; moreover, the poem’s peculiar mix of borrowings from, and attacks on, Arnold’s poem are what make it such a challenging and original poem. Auden’s ambivalence also makes perfect sense in the light of his other references to Arnold’s work. Like his relationship with most poets, this one had its ups and downs. Fuller observes

Influential Ghosts

47

that Auden employs the meter used by Arnold in “Heine’s Grave” and “Rugby Chapel’ for a section of “The Age of Anxiety” narrated by Emble.30 But there were also aspects of Arnold’s poetry that Auden disliked. In “Letter to Lord Byron,” Auden states that even as a young man he was “ready to refute” Arnold’s “verdict” (CP 110), and in “Lakes” he reports that he prefers lakes to “Anything bigger . . . like Michigan or Baikal,/ (which) Though potable, is an ‘estranging sea’” (CP 562). “Estranging sea” is an allusion to the last line of Arnold’s “To Marguerite—Continued” in which the sea is described as “estranging” Arnold from his beloved, who is in France.31 In the lines from “Lakes,” Auden may accept Arnold’s negative account of the sea, but he also seems to be mocking the high solemnity of his language. He also, far more harshly, observed in his essay “Whitman and Arnold” that Arnold was a “prig” of “fastidious highbrow aloofness” whose “poems are literary in a bad sense, because the abstractions with which they were concerned no longer corresponded to the facts” (CPr 12–13). In the context of these remarks, then, it would be surprising if Auden wrote an Arnold-inspired poem that did not express mixed feelings. Both “Dover Beach” and “On This Island” are in three parts. Both begin with a person either looking at, or being told to look at, the sea. In Arnold’s poem the speaker hears its “eternal note of sadness,”32 while Auden’s begins with the command to Look, stranger, at this island now The leaping light for your delight discovers, Stand stable here And silent be, That through the channels of the ear May wander like a river The swaying sound of the sea. (CP 130)

“Channels” may be a veiled reference to the English Channel, the implied backdrop to Arnold’s poem (“On the French coast the light/ Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand”). But otherwise Auden’s opening lines are much more optimistic than Arnold’s; the poem, after all, takes place during broad daylight, an immediate contrast to the gloomy nighttime setting of “Dover Beach.” Auden may also be suggesting a distinction, as Edward Callan has claimed, between his own “leaping light” and Arnold’s bleak opening description of light that “gleams and is gone.”33 In the poem’s second stanza, Auden continues to affirm the pleasures of passively perceiving the world: whereas Arnold’s “Sea of Faith” retreats “down the vast edges drear/

48

Influential Ghosts

And naked shingles of the world,” Auden’s sea can “knock” at but not destroy the “tall ledges” of a “chalk wall” (CP 131) which, like the stranger of the poem’s first stanza, offers itself to the sea because it will not be hurt or even changed in the process. “On This Island” and “Dover Beach” differ most, however, in their respective last stanzas. Arnold’s speaker, having declared that the Sea of Faith is dry, turns to his love and shouts, “let us be true/To one another!” The result, though extremely moving, is what John Rosenberg has called a “gorgeous non sequitur,”34 since throwing out one kind of certainty does not necessarily mean that another will now do the job. More depressing still, if Arnold’s speaker has to search for reasons for being in love, then can he really be in love? Auden, perhaps sensing the inadequacy of Arnold’s last stanza, replaces it with a quiet call to action in his own poem, which ends as follows: Far off like floating seeds the ships Diverge on urgent voluntary errands, And this full view Indeed may enter And move in memory as now these clouds do, That pass the harbour mirror And all the summer through the water saunter. (CP 131)

“Dover Beach” starts by giving up faith and concludes, rather unconvincingly, by bringing it back in the form of love. Arnold’s speaker has not done anything about the “eternal note of sadness”; he has only turned away from the window to look at his beloved. But “On This Island” begins with one view (that passive, solitary acceptance of reality is good) and ends with a forceful contradiction of this view (that “urgent voluntary errands” on behalf of others are better and more necessary). Auden’s implicit message here is that renunciation of one way of life should not lead—as it does in “Dover Beach” and the beginning of “Paysage Moralisé”—to a facile grasping at whatever straws happen to be available: romantic love, for example, or a perfect past. Rather, it should prompt “urgent voluntary” thought and action. Once again, Auden’s structural allusion—with its simultaneous debt to and rebellious revision of its precursor—makes “On This Island” a model of this urgency. “O Tell Me the Truth About Love,” a delightfully giddy poem written in 1938, is loosely based on Winthrop Mackworth Praed’s “Good-night to the Season.” Auden included selections from Praed’s work in A Certain World, and

Influential Ghosts

49

chose this poem in particular for both Poets of the English Language and The Oxford Book of Light Verse, remarking in his Preface to the latter that Praed’s “serious poems are as trivial as his vers de societé are profound.”35 (And as if to give readers a hint as to what he was up to, Auden even placed “Good-Night to the Season” right before “The Cutty Wren” in the light verse anthology. Praed’s poem ends on page 392; then, separated from “Good-Night to the Season” by two very short anonymous lyrics, “The Cutty Wren” appears on page 393.) The two poems are superficially quite similar. Both feature an excited, panting tone, proceed at breakneck speed, and contain crammed lists of everything under the sun. In addition, the jaunty rhyme and meter of both poems create richly comic effects, though Auden shortened Praed’s stanzas from twelve to eight lines and changed his rhyme scheme from abab to abcb. In a characteristic stanza, Praed lists the trifles he is leaving behind in order to “cultivate rural enjoyment,/ And angle immensely for trout36; he describes, for example, “The breaches, and battles, and blunders,/ Performed by the Commons and Peers,” and “The pleasures which Fashion makes duties,/ The praisings of fiddles and flutes,/ The luxury of looking at beauties,/ The tedium of talking to mutes.”37 In Auden’s first stanza, he gives an account of what others have said about love (“Some say that love’s a little boy,/ And some say it’s a bird”) (CP 143); later, he asks what it looks like, sounds like, and where it can be found, breathlessly asking each big question with a multitude of smaller ones. But the most striking similarity between the two poems is their last stanzas. Praed’s runs as follows: Good-night to the Season!—another Will come with its trifles and toys, And hurry away like its brother, In sunshine, and odour, and noise. Will it come with a rose or a briar? Will it come with a blessing or curse? Will its bonnets be lower or higher? Will its morals be better or worse? Will it find me grown thinner or fatter, Or fonder of wrong or of right, Or married,—or buried?—no matter, Good-night to the Season, Good-night!38

And this is Auden’s: When it comes, will it come without warning

50

Influential Ghosts Just as I’m picking my nose? Will it knock on my door in the morning, Or tread in the bus on my toes? Will it come like a change in the weather? Will its greeting be courteous or rough? Will it alter my life altogether? O tell me the truth about love. (CP 145) 39

“O Tell Me the Truth About Love” has been described as “Cowardesque,” but given the many parallels between these two poems, it’s hard to think of it as anything but Praed-esque. Even so, there is one crucial difference between the two poems: “Good-Night to the Season” is a jaded farewell to the false pleasures of society, whereas “O Tell Me the Truth” is a selfconsciously naive series of questions about what love is and what it does. Praed’s poem, however stubbornly cheerful, is nevertheless about the end of something, whereas Auden’s poem—however desperate, however panicky—is all about beginnings.40 Auden’s structural allusions to Rossetti, Tennyson, “The Cutty Wren,” Sidney, Arnold and Praed allow him a vast range of poetic possibilities. They enable him to maintain formal and thematic ties to earlier poets while productively finding fault with the contents of certain of their poems. Often Auden’s poetic revisions have a polemical intent, as in “Consider”; other times, as in “On This Island,” they start in apparent agreement with their originals but, as they gather momentum, begin to differ; sometimes, as in “O Tell Me the Truth About Love,” they are good-hearted (but purposeful) send-ups or borrowings. But in all these cases, Auden’s poems say hello to something to which their originals bid an explicit or implicit farewell: history, action, love, and rebuilding our cities. The formal and thematic allusiveness of these poems makes them enactments on a small scale of whatever Auden happens to be calling for in a poem. In addition, a close look at Auden’s use of structural allusion helps demonstrate that he often expressed his sometimes-enthusiastic, sometimes-critical attitude toward particular authors—as in the case of Hardy—by his choice of form as well as his selection of content. These poems also paved the way for Auden’s experiments with allusion in his later, longer poems. In Letter to Lord Byron (1936) and New Year Letter (1940), Auden’s use of structural allusion shifts slightly. Although written in rhyme royal, a close approximation of Byron’s beloved ottava rima, Letter to Lord Byron is not an allusion to one poem, or even a group of poems, by Byron; rather, it is an example of the kind of poetry Auden praises in the poem:

Influential Ghosts

51

As long as art remains a parasite On any class of persons it’s alright; The only thing it must be is attendant, The only thing it mustn’t, independent. (CP 101)

This forthright credo recalls Auden’s earlier complaint against “abrupt selfconfident farewell,” except that now, having discovered structural allusion as a powerful poetic device, Auden shows as well as tells. Letter to Lord Byron is a perfect example of “attendant” poetry; Auden is writing explicitly about himself and his time, but uses an older form and a long-gone addressee so that he can locate his poem in a tradition of thought. New Year Letter is written in the iambic tetrameter couplets of the seventeenth century, but it may also contain an extended allusion to John Suckling’s “A Session of the Poets,” in which the most popular poets of the day—Carew, Jonson, Waller, and others—assemble to decide which among them will receive “The laurel that 41 had been so long reserv’d.” Each poet comes forward and presents an argument for why he should get the laurel. In New Year Letter, Auden describes a “summary tribunal which/ In a perpetual session sits,” and whose “intense interrogation” (CP 202) he must answer. He notes that the poets’ voices— those of Blake, Hardy, Rilke, etc.—are “considerate and mild and low,” and that they “delegate to us/ Both prosecution and defence,” but he also reveals his nervousness over having to face them at all: O who can show convincing proof That he is worthy of their love? Who ever rose to read aloud Before that quiet attentive crowd And did not falter as he read, Stammer, sit down, and hang his head? Each one, so liberal is the law, May choose whom he appears before, Pick any influential ghost From those whom he admires the most. (CP 203)

Auden’s mixture of confidence and awestruck unease over having to face his predecessors would not have been as convincing if, like Suckling, he had made the members of the tribunal his peers. But by alluding to Suckling, and writing the poem in a self-consciously old-fashioned form, Auden again has it both ways: he writes a poem on highly topical themes like war and politics while simultaneously expressing a belief that writing poetry is not only a

52

Influential Ghosts

debate with one’s peers, but also a summoning of “influential ghosts.” These ghosts, Auden implies, are deliberately chosen and can only respond when we ask them questions, but the trial works both ways: we take our place among them only if we have learned from them and measured up to their standards. Like Auden’s other structurally allusive poems, New Year Letter carries out the very trial it describes. As previously mentioned, Auden’s use of structural allusion also helps show that there are strong connections between his English and American years, as well as the more frequently mentioned ruptures. While his later poetry certainly took up new concerns—most significantly Christianity— his long poems of the forties, fifties and sixties would not have been possible without his earlier work, from broadly allusive poems like “The Secret Agent” to the structural allusions of “Consider” onward. All of Auden’s long poems involve a complex interplay of form and content, and a use of models—whether literary or religious—that owes a great debt to these earlier poems. In For the Time Being (1942), for example, he retells Biblical stories by using some characters we would expect (Joseph, Mary, Herod) and others we wouldn’t (Thought, Intuition, Sensation and Feeling), and the pairing of old and new characters reflects the double meaning of the poem’s title: it is aggressively intended for the contemporary era, but it is also cautiously provisional. In this long poem, Auden places his characters in the same relationship that his earlier poems had to other poems, implying that true progress of any kind involves—literally here—a dialogue with the past. The Age of Anxiety (1946)—like “Paysage Moralisé,” “Get There if You Can” and others—channels utterly contemporary content into the formal framework of alliterative verse. “Bucolics” (1952–4) is a series of timely meditations within a timeless structure: each poem is dedicated to a friend of Auden’s, but titled after a natural phenomenon (winds, woods, mountains, etc.). “Dichtung and Wahrheit” (1959) takes its title from Goethe’s autobiography, but is also highly personal and specific: Auden, awaiting the arrival by train of a loved one, tries to figure out just what he means when he says the words “I love you.” “Thanksgiving for a Habitat” (1958–64) is also divided into sections, each of which has a dedicatee and is about one room in Auden’s house, but Auden’s local and contemporary framework gives him a chance to take up general questions of friendship, work and mortality. Structural allusion plays an important role in The Sea and the Mirror (1944) and “Horae Canonicae” (1952–4), but with a new twist. Auden’s earlier allusions, though sometimes used in poems that expressed doubts over art’s power to make things happen, were never implicated by these doubts. Even if Auden didn’t believe, like Yeats, that poetry could bring the

Influential Ghosts

53

soul of man to God, he showed in his poems what poetry was capable of doing. But as these two long poems show, the connection between religious verse and poetic allusion is not as clear-cut. The Sea and the Mirror alters many aspects of The Tempest by continuing the lives of its characters, and in this sense is similar to earlier poems like “Paysage Moralisé” which revised other poems in order to set them right. But since The Sea and the Mirror ends by renouncing art’s power in the face of religion’s higher “restored relation” (CP 444), its allusions must show how the characters of The Tempest end the play with inadequate relations to spirituality. Prospero, who concludes Shakespeare’s play with a plea for applause couched in spiritual terms (“Let your indulgence set me free”),42 and who received harsh words from Auden in several essays,43 is the main suspect. Consequently, Auden gives him the first speech in the poem only to show how his ostensible renunciation of artifice leaves room for the intrusive, garrulous figures of Antonio and Caliban. Part Two of the poem, in which members the Supporting Cast describe how their lives have been spiritually uplifted by the events of The Tempest, shows just how fragile their brave new world really is: the demonic Antonio finishes all their poems for them. So while allusion is more prevalent in The Sea and the Mirror than in any other poem by Auden, Auden uses it, paradoxically, as artifice that will unveil artifice. Auden has Caliban speak on such issues, but his effusive Jamesian prose is only an indication that the more true-to-life art tries to be, the more “indescribably inexcusably awful” (CP 443) and artificial it will become. And while the poem’s Postscript half-heartedly restores Ariel and Caliban to their places among mankind, it is the highly allusive last stanza of the poem’s Preface that, oddly enough, gets the last word in advance. The Stage Manager, having spoken of art’s myriad powers to charm, takes back what he has said with the reminder that art leaves a gap, a “lion’s mouth whose hunger/ No metaphors can fill” (CP 403) and which cannot hope to do justice to “the smiling/ Secret” of divinity. Finally, the Stage Manager tries to prove his point by quoting Shakespeare: the Bard Was sober when he wrote That this world of flesh we love Is unsubstantial stuff: All the rest is silence On the other side of the wall; And the silence ripeness, And the ripeness all. (CP 404)

54

Influential Ghosts

The allusions begin with a word, “unsubstantial,” which is borrowed from Prospero’s renunciation of art in Act Four of The Tempest. But more allusions follow: “The rest is silence” are Hamlet’s dying words,44 and “Ripeness is all” is what Edgar says to Gloucester when, beaten and blind, the old man threatens to lie down and die.45 In context, though, Hamlet’s and Edgar’s words mean very different things: Hamlet, having suffered through five acts, passively submits to death, but Edgar will not let himself or his father give in so easily, and gives the fatalistic statement that “Men must endure/Their going hence even as their coming hither” an existential twist by adding that “Ripeness is all”: men are doomed to die by God from the day they are born, but must struggle against fate with “ripeness,” or a combative spirit that will wage war against God’s decrees for as long as it can. Hamlet’s silence, then, is not Edgar’s ripeness, but Auden yokes the two quotes together by means of a middle term constructed specifically for this purpose: “All the rest” is “silence,” and “silence” is “ripeness,” so “ripeness” must be “all.” The allusions combine to give credence to the unspeakable Secret of which the Stage Manager has just spoken, and Shakespeare’s words revolve in the closed circle that is denied to the wedding party of Part II—an advance hint on Auden’s part that the only proper circle is a religious one. But by joining two very different quotes from Shakespeare with a line of his own (“And the silence ripeness”), Auden performs an artistic feat that he later makes Caliban—who claims that the “facile glad-handed highway” and the “virtuous averted track” (CP 442) cannot be reconciled on earth—unable to perform. The Sea and the Mirror is, finally, a poem against artifice, but Auden lets artifice in the guise of allusion creep into the poem at one of its most devotional moments. Like The Sea and the Mirror, “Horae Canonicae” has a foreground and a background: Auden uses liturgical hours as formal devices for telling a sweeping story of religious and historical sacrifice. As in his very earliest poems, one figure or event can stand for many things; thus the Crucifixion becomes an image for any kind of sacrifice, not simply a religious one. But in contrast to The Sea and the Mirror, both levels of “Horae Canonicae” are sacred; Auden uses the hours of prayer not as a chance to frame, say, pagan fertility rites within a Christian context, but rather to show how we reenact Christian history over the course of one Christian day. Still, whatever the differences between the literary debates of Auden’s early poems and the spiritual pyrotechnics of his later ones, both kinds of poetry are alike in that they rely heavily on allusion to reinforce their beliefs. Auden’s use of allusion isn’t the most important thing about his poetry, but it is an effective way of comparing him to other poets. Stephen Spender has said of Auden that “The truth of (his) poetry rests partly in the fact that,

Influential Ghosts

55

however dazzling the effects, it offers at every point a paraphrasable prose meaning.”46 But while it is true that one can go through almost any Auden poem—say “Paysage Moralisé”—giving line-by-line explanations, and that catching the “dazzling effects” created by his allusion to Sidney is not necessary for a rudimentary grasp of the poem, it is also true that Auden’s use of Sidney enhances the poem precisely because it is not reducible to “prose meaning.” A summary of the poem’s moral as, for example, “the failure of romanticism to foster civic well-being,” would only be partly correct, since it would not be able to show how the poem’s structural allusiveness was a vital vehicle for delivering this moral. And the fact that this paraphrase seems simpleminded when compared to “Paysage Moralisé” is demonstrable proof that its form, as well as its content, contributes to its meaning. Some of Spender’s poems, on the other hand, suffer when compared to Auden’s precisely because they are so easy to paraphrase. The conclusion of Spender’s poem “Us,” to cite just one example, recalls Auden’s insistence that we “rebuild our cities,” and much of Spender’s imagery is the same: “Oh comrades . . . advance 47 to rebuild and sleep with friend on hill.” Forceful though Spender’s poem is, it pales in comparison to “Paysage Moralisé” for the very reason that it is all impassioned and paraphrasable content, without a formal framework that would serve as a running parallel to, or commentary on, this content. Richard Hoggart, comparing Spender’s poem “The Sad Standards” to Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” puts it well: “Whereas Spender is terribly involved in it all, Auden watches with the disciplined artist’s hand and notetaker’s eye.”48 The formal rigor and sly allusiveness of “Paysage Moralisé” simultaneously distance Auden from his material and enable him to approach it from more directions, and the result is an arguably better poem than Spender’s. This is not to say that poems must be allusive to be good; and a comparison of Auden’s great sestina to this particular poem of Spender’s may be unfair. But a competition between two poems whose subjects are so similar must consider other aspects of the poems if a winner is to be chosen. In the case of these two poems, the additional aspects are form and allusion, and Auden’s poem simply succeeds on more levels than Spender’s. “Paysage Moralisé” is such a good example of so many things that it may as well be compared to two more poems. Ezra Pound’s “Sestina: Altaforte” and John Ashbery’s sestina “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape” are very different poems, with regard to their respective uses of allusion, their attitudes toward the past, and almost everything else. Pound is determined to write a sestina that sounds as medieval as possible; his poem is steeped in archaic phrasing (“You whoreson dog, Papiols, come!”),49 and although it does not actually allude to anything—except insofar as its

56

Influential Ghosts

speaker is a character from Dante—it reads like one big, mysterious allusion to something readers feel they ought to know. Ashbery, on the other hand, wants to write a kind of anti-sestina that demonstrates the foolishness of trying to accumulate meaning by using the same words over and over again. His poem, with its surrealistic title, unusual end-words (thunder, scratched, spinach) and nonsensical plot (Popeye and friends relax in the country), starts off cryptically, and only baffles us further as we make our way through the poem.50 Obviously this is Ashbery’s intention, and both his sestina and Pound’s have their merits. But “Paysage Moralisé,” as well as Auden’s use of structural allusion throughout his long career, is a happy medium between Pound’s and Ashbery’s all-or-nothing approaches, resurrecting—to recall a passage cited earlier—the poetry of the past rather than copying or denying it, and for this reason serving as a valuable and exemplary moment in modern poetry.

Chapter Three

Burying and Praising: Auden’s Anti-Elegiac Elegies

Many of Auden’s poems—from his very famous tributes to Yeats and Freud to his lesser-known homages to other artists, public figures and friends—are elegies. As might be expected from a poet as versatile as Auden, the elegies differ in many significant ways. In fact, after reading them for the first time, one might conclude that the only thing they have in common is that they are elegies. Obviously the best way to understand the poems is to examine them separately, considering Auden’s relationship to his subjects, which aspects of their life and work he chooses to emphasize, and so on. But the poems also profit enormously from being studied together. Strangely, this approach has been absent from the large critical output already devoted to Auden’s elegies. Perhaps this absence exists for the sake of honoring Auden himself, whose career could be described as a lifelong attempt to give special cases and particular events their proper place in poetry. Grouping Auden’s elegies together, one certainly faces the danger of erasing the special distinctions of Auden’s subjects—the very features and quirks that probably caused him to write his elegies in the first place. One also runs the risk that by studying Auden’s poems by genre, one will give short shrift to the very important chronological developments of his poetry. But these objections can be countered in several ways. First, Auden’s most important elegies—for Yeats, Freud, and Henry James—were written only two years apart. Therefore it seems possible to discuss these elegies as a group without much fear of overlooking the changes in Auden’s thought. The other objection—that by considering Auden’s elegies together, one overlooks their individual structural and stylistic features—is an equally serious one, but one to which an answer can also be given. Deciding what Auden’s elegies have in common, so long as one realizes that each elegy must ultimately be considered on its own, helps one understand each poem better. And finally, a study of Auden’s elegies is a necessary and instructive part of a study of 57

58

Influential Ghosts

his sources, showing as it does—like his relationship to Hardy and his uses of structural allusion—how his deep ambivalence toward these precursors resulted in some of his greatest poetry. In Auden’s elegies, his sources are twofold: he draws for inspiration on the subjects of the elegies, but he also combs the entire elegiac tradition for images, themes and tropes to retain or revise. Mark Antony, speaking at Caesar’s funeral in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, notoriously declares that he has “come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.”1 Anthony’s words, if rewritten slightly, make a good starting-point for a discussion of Auden’s elegies. One can almost picture Auden standing at the grave of Yeats, Freud or whomever he is preparing to write about, saying “I come to bury (subject of elegy) and to praise him.” That Auden was extremely fond of the elegy as a genre can be easily demonstrated by the fact that he anthologized so many of them.2 But Auden’s elegies stand in a class of their own because of their unique blend of reverence and suspicion, admiration and scorn toward their subjects and earlier elegies alike. When we read these poems, we are surprised to be told that Yeats was “silly” (CP 248) and that Freud “wasn’t clever at all” (CP 274). But at the same time we learn that Yeats’s “gift survived it all” (CP 248) and that Freud is “no more a person/ now but a whole climate of opinion” (CP 275). In his elegies, Auden is also careful to place his subjects in whatever context they seem to demand, thereby using his tributes to consider not just individual lives, but greater questions of self, community and history as well. For this reason one can divide the set marked “Elegies” into a variety of subsets: poems that evaluate the writer’s role in society (Yeats, James, MacNeice); poems that place their subjects against the backdrop of the coming war (Yeats, Freud, Toller); and poems in which Auden examines, with varying degrees of directness, his own relation to other writers (Yeats, James Toller, MacNeice). In these and many other respects, Auden’s elegies are also very different from earlier English elegies. Specific comparisons are best saved for discussions of specific poems, but it is also possible, and profitable, to contrast Auden’s elegies as a group to two earlier elegies. “Lycidas” concludes with Milton’s triumphant statement that “Lycidas your Sorrow is not dead,”3 while Shelley declares near the end of “Adonais” that Adonais has, by dying, simply “awakened from the dream of life.”4 All of Auden’s elegies, on the other hand, feature subjects who are unquestionably dead, however alive their legacies may be. They do not end with resurrection, stellification, or any other kind of glorification, as in elegies by Milton, Shelley and others. Instead, Auden refers, throughout his poems and at their conclusions, to his subjects’ survivors—those who have learned from or rebelled against them or both.

Burying and Praising

59

Coming from someone who once wrote that the role of poetry is to disenchant,5 this kind of elegy seems like the only one that Auden could realistically write. But this fact should not diminish the originality or the impact of the elegies themselves. Since Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” is his most complex elegy, it is probably the best introduction to his elegies as a whole, and the one that demands most attention. The biographical circumstances surrounding the poem’s composition, the markedly mixed feelings for Yeats that Auden displays in the poem, Auden’s treatment of poetry’s role in society, his references to the coming war, and his significant revisions of the poem all make “In Memory of W.B.Yeats” his most fascinating, and arguably his best elegy. But because Auden’s relation to Yeats in the poem is so obviously problematic, it may make sense to take a step back from the poem in order to find out what he wrote and said about him elsewhere. In media other than poetry, Auden expressed both ardent admiration and stern distaste for Yeats. This ambivalent attitude is most apparent in a brief prose work, “The Public v. The Late Mr. William Butler Yeats,” which first appeared in Partisan Review in the spring of 1939. In this essay, Auden impersonates two people: a Public Prosecutor and a Counsel for the Defence. Both speakers are subtle rhetoricians and polite people, but something serious is at stake: the question of whether Yeats was a great poet. The Public Prosecutor, who speaks first, vents his considerable distrust of Yeats by using the ancient rhetorical device of praeterita: he does not intend to dwell, he says, on Yeats’s “affectations of dress and manner, his inordinate personal vanity, traits which caused a fellow countryman and former friend to refer to him as ‘the greatest literary fop in history’” (CPr 3). Yet by listing these traits he of course does dwell on them—and implies that we should as well. But then the Prosecutor throws subtlety to the wind and closes in on his victim. First he draws up a list of the traits a great poet must have: “firstly a gift of a very high order for memorable language, secondly a profound understanding of the age in which he lived, and thirdly a working knowledge of and sympathetic attitude towards the most progressive thought of his time” (CPr 3). Then, after declaring that Yeats did not possess any of these things, he goes on to attack him for being excessively fond of “the world of noble houses, of large drawing rooms inhabited by the rich and the decorative, most of them of the female sex” (CPr 4)—a coterie that recalls the “parish of rich women” (CP 248) of Auden’s poem. Yeats, moreover, had a “feudal mentality” and wrote too often about “legends of barbaric heroes with unpronounceable names” (CPr 4). But the Prosecutor saves his harshest words for last: Yeats, he says, “reject(ed) social justice and reason, and pray(ed) for war” (CPr 5).

60

Influential Ghosts

The Counsel for the Defence, to whom Auden gives slightly more space, begins by remarking that the Prosecutor has addressed Yeats’s character, not his poetry. He condemns the Prosecutor for having unfair expectations about Yeats; poetry, in the Prosecutor’s foolish account, is “the filling up of a social quiz; to pass with honors the poet must score not less than 75%” (CPr 5). The Counsel then gives a prose paraphrase of the most famous line of “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”; poetry, he says, should not be expected to answer society’s problems. “Who reads the poetry of the past in this way?” (CPr 5), he asks, concluding that, while art does not exist independently of society, a poet’s most important task is to respond excitedly, and in an artistic form, to the world around him. This capacity for excitement, the Counsel assures the jury, existed in Yeats until the day he died. He ends his defense on a cynical, but ultimately upbeat note: while “The case for the prosecution rests on the fallacious belief that art ever makes anything happen,” there is nonetheless “one field in which the poet is a man of action, the field of language, and it is precisely in this that the greatness of the deceased is most obviously shown. However false or undemocratic his ideas, his diction shows a continuous evolution towards what one might call the true democratic style” (CPr 7). It could be argued that many features of the Counsel for the Defence’s speech—not least his paraphrase of many of Auden’s remarks about poetry in the Yeats elegy—make him the winner of the debate. But as in “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” the fact that Auden is so careful to give each side its say also hints at his own contradictory feelings for Yeats—feelings which to try to reconcile would be to produce an unrealistically one-sided view of the late great poet. Auden’s two-man debate about Yeats seems even more like a debate between his own clashing attitudes when it is viewed in the light of other remarks about Yeats that are scattered throughout his poems, prose remarks, and conversations. On the side of the Defence, there is Auden’s late poem “A Thanksgiving,” in which he lists the writers and thinkers who have influenced him most. While his earliest influences were “Hardy and Thomas and Frost,” this roster had to be updated when he fell in love, at which point “Yeats was a help, so was Graves” (CP 891). Humphrey Carpenter has even noted that an Augustus John etching of Yeats was one of only three portraits that adorned the walls of Auden’s house in Austria (the other two were drawings of Stravinsky and Richard Strauss).6 Along the same lines, Edward Callan has argued that the tone and imagery of many of Auden’s early poems show the strong influence of Yeats. Callan compares the opening of Yeats’s 1918 poem “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory” (which Auden admired enough to include in The Poet’s Tongue):

Burying and Praising

61

Now that we’re almost settled in our house I’ll name the friends that cannot sup with us Beside a fire of turf in th’ ancient tower, And having talked to some late hour Climb up the narrow winding stairs to bed7

to the first lines of a poem from Auden’s hand-printed Poems of 1928: “Tonight when a full storm surrounds the house . . . many come to mind.”8 The fact that an elegy by Yeats has influenced Auden here should not be surprising, for in an interview that appeared in The Kenyon Review nine years after “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” was written, Auden admitted that Yeats had played an important role in shaping his thoughts on what elegies could do. Yeats, Auden remarked, “transformed a certain kind of poem, the occasional poem, from being an official performance of impersonal virtuosity or a trivial vers de société to a serious reflective poem of at once personal and public interest.”9 And in the essay “Yeats as an Example,” Auden favorably contrasted Yeats’s elegies to earlier ones, writing that “A poem such as ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’ is something new and important in the history of English poetry. It never loses the personal note of a man speaking about his personal friends in a particular setting—in Adonais, for example, both Shelley and Keats disappear as real people—and at the same time the occasion and characters acquire a symbolic public significance.”10 (Yeats, in a striking contrast, had earlier denounced Auden’s poetry precisely because he felt that it could not give weighty subjects such as death the gravity they deserved.11) But the Prosecutor also has his fair share of supporters. Auden’s Academic Graffiti—a series of clerihews, limericks and other short poems about famous figures—is probably too flippant, both formally and thematically, to be taken too seriously. Nevertheless, the last poem in the series is too pointed to be ignored: To get the Last Poems of Yeats, You need not mug up on dates; All a reader requires Is some knowledge of gyres And the sort of people he hates. (CP 686)

This portrait of Yeats as blithely ahistorical, foolishly mystical, and thoroughly spiteful has many prose parallels. When he was asked by Stephen Spender in 1964 to contribute to a collection of essays about Yeats, Auden

62

Influential Ghosts

remarked that he couldn’t, since the poet had always represented a side of himself that he didn’t like: “I am incapable of saying a word about Yeats,” he wrote, “because, through no fault of his, he has become for me a symbol of my own devil of unauthenticity, of everything which I must try to eliminate from my own poetry, false emotions, inflated rhetoric, empty sonorites.”12 In his collection The Table Talk of W.H. Auden, Alan Ansen quotes Auden as saying in 1947 that “I’m surprised there haven’t been more attacks on Yeats as a fascist. He’s really dangerous without being direct.” And later that year Auden admitted that “the more I read him, the less I like him . . . He was a horrible old man.”13 Humphrey Carpenter notes that Auden once included Yeats in a list of “horrid” men (a list which also included Brecht and Frost, and which therefore, since all three were great influences on Auden, says just as much about his desire to separate art from life as the Yeats elegy).14 Carpenter also suggests that Auden’s 1961 libretto Elegy for Young Lovers features a leading character—the poet Gregor Mittenhofer—whose use of his wife’s spiritualism as raw material, as well as his tendency to ruin the happiness of others in order to create great art, give him strong similarities to Yeats.15 And Auden himself, without declaring outright that Mittenhofer had been inspired by Yeats, wrote that “The Theme of Elegy for Young Lovers is summed up in two lines by Yeats: ‘The intellect of man is forced to choose/ Perfection of the life, or of the work.’”16 Finally, and most important for a consideration of Auden’s elegies as a group, Auden remarked in a 1970 interview that “These elegies of mine are not poems of grief . . . Yeats I only met casually and didn’t particularly like him. Sometimes a man stands for certain things, which is quite different from what one feels in personal grief.”17 “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” which was Auden’s first important elegy, was also the first poem he wrote after arriving in the United States in 1939. In fact, when Yeats died, Auden had only been in the country for two days, and this coincidence of events cannot have failed to make a strong impression on him. In fact, just as Auden’s numerous remarks about Yeats reveal as much as they do about him as they do about Yeats, his decision to write his first American poem about Yeats’s death seems like a deliberate attempt not only to bid farewell to Yeats, but also to say hello to his new, American self. None of these quotations or anecdotes would belong in a discussion of “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”—a poem, after all, about the separation of a poet’s life and art—if the poem itself were not so full of similar, contradictory moments. But it is. A close reading of the poem shows just how deeply ambivalent Auden feels about Yeats, and how different the poem therefore is from earlier English elegies.

Burying and Praising

63

In the first of the poem’s three sections, Auden describes Yeats’s death in the impassive, clinical tone that readers would have known to expect from him in 1939, but that still must have come as a considerable surprise: He disappeared in the dead of winter: The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted, And snow disfigured the public statues; The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day. What instruments we have agree The day of his death was a dark cold day. (CP 247)

Yeats is described here—in what Christopher Yu has aptly termed a “metropolitan purgatory”18—not as dying, but as “disappearing”; in fact, it is the wintry scene around him for which Auden reserves his descriptions of “the dead of winter” and “the dying day.” And rather than include a chorus of mourners who lament the poet’s death, as Shelley (for example) does in “Adonais,” Auden states only that “the instruments”—presumably devices for measuring the weather such as thermometers and barometers—“agree/ The day of his death was a dark cold day.” For Auden, then, Yeats’s death is an objective fact, not the occasion for subjective, bitter grief that it is in such elegies as “Lycidas” and “Adonais.” But despite the poem’s apparently antielegiac opening, it also makes much use of the language of Yeats’s poetry and the imagery of the elegiac tradition. “Disappearing,” for example, is Yeats’s own word for death in several of his poems,18 so perhaps Auden has assigned this line the dual functions of demystification and homage. The same duality can also be seen in the chilly line, “The Mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day”; “mercury” is of course Auden’s invention, but “sank” may be a quiet allusion to the passage in “Lycidas” in which the “woeful Shepherds” are told to “weep no more,” since “Lycidas your sorrow is not dead,/Sunk though he be beneath the wat’ry floor.”20 Furthermore, the natural imagery of these lines both evokes and alters similar images in earlier elegies. With his reference to “instruments,” Auden creates a contrast between his blunt modern elegy and earlier, more emotional ones—but by personifying the “instruments” in the first place he is employing the time-honored technique of anthropomorphism. Because it takes place in winter and includes a river, Auden’s poem, however innovative in its frankness, also recalls many winters and waters of previous elegies—the “winter-eve” with which Matthew Arnold’s “Thyrsis” opens, for example,21 or the many rivers in “Lycidas.” And by setting the poem in an anonymous modern city, Auden may be commenting ironically on Yeats’s bucolic final resting place of Drumcliff

64

Influential Ghosts

churchyard, but he is also indulging in the sincerest form of flattery, since in many of his elegies Yeats makes use of similar settings—the “grey/ Eighteenthcentury houses” of “Easter, 1916,” to cite just one instance.22 But probably the most anti-elegiac aspect of Auden’s wintry scene is that it never gives way to spring—a transition which, with all its hints of resurrection and rebirth, had characterized elegies for centuries beforehand.23 As the first section continues, Auden’s anti-elegiac tone becomes even more pronounced, but his use of conventional elegiac themes and images continues. In poems as different as Spenser’s “November Eclogue” and Tennyson’s In Memoriam, nature participates in a speaker’s lament in various violent ways, providing a public counterpart to their private grief.24 Since Auden so notoriously disliked Shelley,25 it may be unfair to refer to “Adonais” at all, but this poem also contains a classic example of sorrow writ large. For several stanzas in the poem’s middle section, all of nature grieves along with Shelley: the “Pale Ocean in unquiet slumber lay,” the “wild winds flew round, sobbing in their dismay,”26 and so on. But in Auden’s elegy the world of nature, neither delighted nor dismayed, simply goes about its usual business: Far from his illness The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests, The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays; By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems. (CP 247)

In this section, unchanging forests and a vigorous but unmoved river have taken the place of the responsive, mournful nature of earlier elegies. But why does Auden include a wolf as his representative animal, when it hardly seems archetypally Irish? Here an awareness of the elegiac tradition becomes crucial for a full understanding of the poem. Edward Mendelson has written of the many ways in which “Lycidas” informs “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,”27 and Milton’s presence in Auden’s poem seems especially pronounced in these lines. Toward the end of “Lycidas,” Milton uses an elaborate sheep-and-wolf allegory to attack religious corruption, reserving for the climactic end of one section a description of “the grim Wolf with privy paw/ (Who) Daily devours apace.”28 But the wolves in Auden’s poem, though more numerous, have nothing to do with the rest of the poem’s action; they simply keep on doing what they were doing before Yeats died. And as with the anti-Shelley moments in Auden’s elegy, its anti-Milton sentiments have their prose counterparts: Auden once wrote of “Lycidas” that “it must be condemned, as Dr. Johnson condemned it,

Burying and Praising

65

for being unfeeling and frivolous, since one expects wisdom and revelation and it provides neither.”29 Interestingly enough, there are also wolves in “Adonais,” who are thought to represent Keats’s harshest critics, and who, along with ravens and vultures, prey on Adonais in the poem’s twentyeighth stanza. But nothing of the sort happens in Auden’s poem. And while there are obvious disadvantages to the stasis and indifference that the poem describes, there is also one big benefit: “The death of the poet was kept from his poems.” Just as a poet’s death does not affect nature, so natural events such as death, Auden seems to imply, will not affect the way Yeats’s poems get read. While the rest of the poem’s first section grows more sincerely sorrowful—describing the process by which Yeats “is scattered among a hundred cities” and “wholly given over to unfamiliar affections”—it also contains many moments that can only be described as anti-elegiac. By telling us, for example, that Yeats is “scattered,” Auden is once again violently altering an old poetic image, for, as Jahan Ramazani has observed, “Updating the immortality topos of the traditional elegy, Auden depicts the dead man’s transcendence not as an ascent to the stars but as an urban dispersal.”30 Auden comes close to admitting that Yeats’s death was indeed a special event when he reports that in the importance and noise of to-morrow When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse And the poor have the suffering to which they are fairly accustomed, And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom, A few thousand will think of this day As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual. (CP 247)

But this admission is undercut, no doubt deliberately, by Auden’s relentless qualifications fairly, almost and slightly.31 The section ends with Auden’s repetition of two earlier lines: “What instruments we have agree/ The day of his death was a dark cold day” (CP 248). In addition to closing this section as it began and therefore implying that nothing much has been learned or divulged in the intervening lines, Auden here makes use of the traditional elegiac device of repetition—seen in Milton’s recurring phrases “Yet once more” and “Lycidas is dead,” and Shelley’s frequent cry “O, weep for Adonais”—only to undermine it, since (unlike Milton and Shelley) Auden is paradoxically drawing attention to the fact that the day of Yeats’s death is hardly worth drawing attention to.32

66

Influential Ghosts

Auden added the poem’s second section a month after the poem was first published,33 and this insertion is a very significant one, not only because the section includes Auden’s now-infamous statement that “poetry makes nothing happen,” but also because of the pains Auden takes in the section not to praise Yeats. It is here that, addressing Yeats directly, he remarks, “You were silly like us: your gift survived it all” (248), thereby making the poem an even clearer statement that poetry and life should be kept separate.34 This attitude is obviously very different from that of Auden’s earlier poems, such as “Spain,” in which Auden very definitely wants something to happen. But for the same reason that Auden removed “Spain” from later collections of his poetry, he seems to have added this section of “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” for the sake of advancing his view that—as he put it in “New Year Letter”—“Art is not life and cannot be/ A midwife to society” (CP 201). The section also sounds much more American than the other two: in the space of a few lines, Auden refers to valleys, executives, and flowing south from ranches. He seems to want to suggest that his new ideas about the connection between art and life, as well as his move to America, are just as important to the poem as Yeats’s death. Moreover, what “survives” not just once but three times in the section is poetry itself, not Yeats. Auden cannot have used this word in triplicate without giving some thought to the possibility that he was the greatest English-speaking poet since Yeats. Perhaps, then, his use of “survives” in the section—a word that rhymes with several other end-words and therefore moves Part Two toward the confidently rhyming Part Three—is significant also. By emphasizing his own survival of Yeats, Auden can finish the poem on a self-assured note. Auden’s repetition of this word also represents yet another use of a classic elegiac device, although for the very anti-elegiac purpose of reminding readers that poetry survives even though Yeats has died. Auden’s habit of revising affected the entire poem, and its third section in particular. But in order to understand why Auden removed three stanzas from the third section, one must first understand his revisions of the first and second sections. In revising the poem, Auden seems to have taken out all the words or phrases at which the term “Yeatsian” could possibly be hurled. In the first section, he changed “O all the instruments agree” (EA 241) to the more straightforward “What instruments we have agree” (CP 247). Many have objected to the change; David Bromwich, for example, wrote that “the poem has stopped singing.”35 But what the line loses in prophetic power, it gains in intellectual honesty, since the original line simply does not sound like the sort of thing that a poet capable of writing such a painstakingly aloof, stubbornly rational poem would think or say. The original may also have displeased Auden because it sounded too much like Yeats at his most

Burying and Praising

67

overheated, for frequently throughout his poetry—five times alone in the last two stanzas of “Among School Children”—he emits similar cries. It may also be significant that both “Lycidas” and “Adonais” contain many lines that begin with an apostrophic “O,” so that in revising these lines, Auden took pains to distance himself from both Yeats and the entire elegiac tradition.36 In Part Two of the poem, for what would seem to be similar reasons, Auden changed the statement that poetry “survives/ In the valley of its saying”(EA 242) to “survives/ In the valley of its making” (CP 248), thus revising his notion of poetry as an all-powerful, prophetic utterance to one that emphasized its essential utility: “making” sounds more like Frost than Yeats. Auden’s reasons for omitting three stanzas from Part Three—stanzas in which he claims that time “Worships language and forgives/ Everyone by whom it lives” (EA 242), including the politically suspect Kipling and Claudel—may be partly due to the fact that the lines contain a faint echo of Shelley,37 but make most sense when compared to his other revisions of the poem. Just as he took out lines that might sound too Yeatsian, so here he seems to omit the potentially Yeatsian notion that bad political views are acceptable so long as the person who holds them produces great art. (Indeed, Auden declared in a lecture on Shakespeare in the 1940s that “The writer who surrenders to language—including even W.B. Yeats—is a minor poet.”38) By removing these lines, then, Auden distances himself from several things: Yeats, the elegiac convention of overlooking the faults of the dead, and his own earlier poetry. The poem “Spain,” for example—which Auden later disowned—ends with the statement that “History to the defeated/ May say Alas but cannot help or pardon” (EA 212). As in the case of the three omitted stanzas, what Auden found objectionable here is the idea that great artists and grand historical forces are intrinsically more important than the people whose lives they may ruinously affect. But by rejecting “Spain,” dismissing other, Yeatsian poems like “September 1, 1939,” and omitting the three stanzas of the Yeats elegy, Auden revised various lofty notions of both poetry and history. If his alteration makes “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” a more modest poem, it also makes it a more chilling and timely one when one remembers that it was written on the eve of World War Two. With the other three stanzas gone, Auden’s stanza in which “All the dogs of Europe bark” becomes more affecting, precisely because it does not ennoble or excuse historical atrocities. The poem’s last section as it now stands begins this way: Earth, receive an honored guest: William Yeats is laid to rest.

68

Influential Ghosts Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry. In the nightmare of the dark All the dogs of Europe bark, And the living nations wait, Each sequestered in its hate; Intellectual disgrace Stares from every human face, And the seas of pity lie Locked and frozen in each eye. Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice (CP 248–9)

The poem’s blend of homage and critique, elegiac and anti-elegiac elements, is nowhere more significant or intricate than in these stanzas. The tetrameter couplets, which may recall Blake’s “The Tyger,”39 may also be meant to remind readers of Yeats’s “Under Ben Bulben,” in which the poet wrote about his own upcoming death. The latter possibility becomes more likely in light of the fact that Auden once wickedly remarked that the command “Horseman, pass by!” with which “Under Ben Bulben” ends40 was unrealistic, since the passerby was more likely to be a motorist.41 If Auden is indeed using Yeats’s meter deliberately, then his imitation has two very different, though not mutually exclusive effects. On the one hand, it indicates that he can write more intelligently and honestly about Yeats’s death than Yeats himself could, but on the other hand, it shows that the tradition of what Peter Sacks has called “elegiac emulation”— practiced by such different poets as Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Yeats himself 42—is one in which Auden wants to be included. The first stanza of the poem’s last section contains similar ambiguities. While the image of a tomb is a conventional elegiac one,43 and the reference to “the Irish vessel”— along with the later “seas of pity”—evoke the liquid imagery so common to the elegiac tradition,44 Auden’s statement that “William Yeats is laid to rest” is as anti-elegiac, and as anti-Yeatsian, as the poem ever gets: Auden not only shortens Yeats’s regal three-part name to a more down-to-earth bipartite one, but he also overturns Yeats’s convention in his elegies of not naming the dead.45 The construction “is laid,” moreover, recalls Yeats’s statement in “Under Ben

Burying and Praising

69

Bulben” that “Under bare Ben Bulben’s head/ In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid,”46 except that Auden immediately follows this echo of Yeats’s passive assertion with his own, active one: “Let the Irish vessel lie/ Emptied of its poetry.” Finally, the voice/rejoice rhyme calls to mind Yeats’ question in “Man and the Echo”: “O rocky voice/ Shall we in that great night rejoice?”47 with the vital distinction that while Yeats morbidly contemplated rejoicing in darkness and death, Auden heartily rejoices in poetry and survival. (The rhyme also recalls lines in Yeats’s “The Gyres”—“Out of Cavern comes a voice/And all it knows is that one word ‘Rejoice’”48—but again with the difference that Auden’s rejoicing implies a future that humans can shape, while Yeats’s conjures one that, since it is cyclical, they cannot.49) The last stanzas of the elegy, which Auden did not revise, are as complex a blend of praise and criticism as anything earlier in the poem. “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” concludes as follows: With a farming of the verse Make a vineyard of the curse, Sing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress; In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountain start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise. (CP 249)

Auden’s “farming of a verse,” like his revision of “saying” to “making,” is yet another departure from Yeats’s lofty notion of bardic inspiration; and his insistence that even though poetry “makes nothing happen,” it survives “in the valley of its saying,” returns in his command to “Make a vineyard of the curse.” The process by which a “curse” blooms into “verse” is probably also meant to evoke the traditional elegiac process of death and resurrection,50 revealing that while Auden may stubbornly refuse to bring a particular poet back to life, he eagerly insists on a continued life for poetry in general. And if this kind of poetry cannot come from Yeats’s idea of poetic inspiration (“Bring the soul of man to God,” he implores young poets in “Under Ben Bulben”51), neither does it result from his late, all-out rejection of all of poetry except the kind that comes from lying down “where all the ladders start/ In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart,” as he puts it at the end of “The Circus Animals’ Desertion.”52 Perhaps Auden even reuses Yeats’ heart/start rhyme as a subtle, final way of killing two birds with one stone—namely,

70

Influential Ghosts

mourning Yeats and spurring himself on to great poetic achievements. This broadening of the poem to refer to poets other than Yeats is also reflected in Auden’s command, “Follow, poet, follow right/ To the bottom of the night.” To whom are the lines addressed? To the dead Yeats, possibly; to living poets other than Auden, probably; to Auden himself—who called himself “poet” in several early, unpublished poems53—almost certainly. But however one interprets the last section of the poem, one cannot help admitting that, like the rest of “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” it strays as far from other elegies as a poem can possibly stray and still be called an elegy. Like the rest of the poem, the final section refers to other living poets— in this case Auden—in ways that would have been unthinkable in earlier elegies. “Lycidas” ends with the “uncouth swain” (the poem’s speaker) deciding Lycidas is not dead, giving his coat a tug, and walking off to “fresh Woods and Pastures new.”54 Shelley finishes his poem by declaiming that “The soul of Adonais, like a star,/ Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.”55 Both endings are perfectly consistent with the poems they conclude: if Milton declared that Lycidas really was dead, or Shelley expressed doubts about Adonais’s ability to soar heavenward, it would be the poetic death of both poems. But even though—or perhaps because—Lycidas and Adonais are immortalized, they cannot teach their survivors anything except the fact that life is not worth living. In Auden’s elegy there is never any doubt that Yeats is dead and will remain so. Simultaneously, though, Auden urges the “poet” to “persuade us to rejoice,” to “sing of human unsuccess,” and to “Teach the free man how to praise.” Whatever one thinks of Auden’s revisions of the poem, his stubborn distance from his subject matter, or his crafty insertion of himself into a poem ostensibly about someone else, one cannot deny that the poem’s hortatory ending makes it at once an extremely innovative elegy and an extraordinarily moving one. Auden’s other elegies share the combination of praise and wariness that makes “In Memory of W.B.Yeats” such a strange and original poem. “In Memory of Sigmund Freud,” written just a few months after the Yeats elegy, is not as biographically revealing as the earlier poem, but it is similar to it in many other significant ways. The fact that both poems are followed by their subjects’ dates of death—in Yeats’s case, “Jan. 1939,” and in Freud’s, “Sept. 1939”—suggests that Auden wanted people to read them with an urgent awareness of the coming war. Fittingly, the imagery of war is everywhere in the two poems. The barking “dogs of Europe” who “wait/ Each sequestered in its hate” in the Yeats elegy find their parallels in the Freud elegy, both in the poem’s mournful opening, which creates a broad, panicky context for Freud’s death—“When there are so many we shall have to mourn,/ when

Burying and Praising

71

grief has been made so public . . . ” (CP 273)—and in its more specific moments: the fact that Freud was “an important Jew who died in exile,” the “dishonest mood of denial” of 1939 (CP 274), and so on. In both elegies, furthermore, Auden uses his subjects’ own words and ideas as devices with which to commemorate them, analyzing Freud’s life and career in psychoanalytic fashion just as he employed Yeats’s characteristic rhymes and meters in order to write about him. Both poems also reflect Auden’s eagerness to write an elegy that—however conventional in some respects—does not focus exclusively on its subject. Just as “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” begins as a description of one man’s death and ends as a much more general account of the current condition of Europe and all poets’ ability to “sing of human unsuccess,” “In Memory of Sigmund Freud” progresses from the one to the many, from Auden’s description of Freud as an “important Jew who died in exile” to his declaration that he “is no more a person/ now but a whole climate of opinion/ under whom we conduct our different lives” (CP 275). But the most significant shared feature of “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” and “In Memory of Sigmund Freud” is Auden’s unwillingness in either poem to praise his subject wholeheartedly. The Freud elegy may begin in a more poetically conventional way; Freud, after all, does not unceremoniously “disappear,” but unequivocally dies, and the crowd of mourners in which Auden is included (at least as indicated by the “we” of the poem’s first line) seems as large as the funeral cortege in “Adonais.” And some of the poem’s imagery—from its concluding vision of rival goddesses stationed at Freud’s grave, to its description of Freud descending, like Odysseus and Dante, to an underworld, a “stinking fosse where the injured/ lead the ugly life of the rejected” (CP 274)—may appear more traditional as well.56 Nonetheless, the poem goes further in the other direction, too, since Auden is even more matter-of-fact about Freud’s faults than he was about Yeats’s. Freud, in Auden’s account, “wasn’t clever at all; he merely told/ the unhappy Present to recite the Past/ like a poetry lesson”; harsher still, he “often . . . was wrong and at times absurd” (CP 275). These moments in the elegy are a far cry from Nabokov’s later invectives against the “Viennese quack,” but even so, they can hardly have been expected by members of a Freud-soaked culture—or by readers of an elegy. As with Auden’s reservations about Yeats, his mixed feelings for Freud have many prose precedents; and reading them, one gets the feeling that Auden’s ambivalence towards Freud was so deeply ingrained that a full-scale poem about him, elegiac or otherwise, was inevitable. Much of Auden’s early writing bears the indelible stamp of Freud’s writing, often to the point where the two cannot be disentwined: Edward Callan has noted that a 1935

72

Influential Ghosts

journal entry of Auden’s about “the essence of Freud’s teaching” is actually “a summary of Auden’s own teachings.”57 And the young Auden, pairing Freud with Marx, gave them a sweeping endorsement by remarking that “Both are right.”58 But from an early age, Auden also found much to criticize in Freud’s thought. In a 1929 journal entry he wrote that “The error of Freud and most psychologists is making pleasure a negative thing, progress towards a state of rest,” since “Creative pleasure is, like pain, an increase in tension” (EA 299). And in another entry Auden defiantly redefined transference as “The re-creation of the original attitude of dependence towards the parents,” went on to assert that “it does not involve, as Freud says, the acquired attitudes of resentment,” and tartly concluded that “All that means is that Freud is behaving as foolishly as the parents did” (EA 299). In another entry from the same year, he wrote that “Freud’s error is the limitation of neurosis to the individual. The neurosis involves all society.”59 While these critical comments may not have found their way directly into the elegy, they still show, taken as a whole, how hard it would have been for Auden to write an elegy for Freud that was both wholly celebratory and wholly honest. Auden’s attacks on Freud sometimes even crept into his earlier poetry, as in a passage in “Letter to Lord Byron” where he breezily revises Freud’s account of artistic creation as a full-time, semi-conscious endeavor by proclaiming that(EA 299) Freud’s not quite O.K. No artist works a twenty-four-hour day. In bed, asleep or dead, it’s hard to tell The highbrow from l’homme moyen sensuel. (EA 198)

Along the same lines, it has even been suggested that the alcaic stanzas of “In Memory of Sigmund Freud” constitute a rebuke of Freud’s “overlooking of conscious shaping,”60 and help demonstrate Auden’s conviction that artistic creation is a much more rational process than Freud thought. But although this interpretation is bolstered by Auden’s remark in “Letter to Lord Byron,” it is weakened by a close scrutiny of Auden’s poetic career, for he wrote many other poems in alcaics around the same time that he wrote the Freud elegy: the poem “They” was even written in the same year, and “The Dark Years” just a year later. And besides, Auden was interested in “conscious shaping” in every poem he ever wrote.61 Auden may not have many fully complimentary things to say about either Yeats or Freud. But just as Yeats’s “gift survived it all,” Freud’s effect on European culture is far more lasting and valuable than his occasional absurdity or lack of cleverness. And as the poem winds toward its close, he

Burying and Praising

73

becomes, despite his deficiencies, a sort of beleaguered role model for his survivors, a person who quietly surrounds all our habits of growth and extends, till the tired in even the remotest miserable duchy have felt the change in their bones and are cheered, till the child, unlucky in his little State, some hearth where freedom is excluded, a hive whose honey is fear and worry, feels calmer now and somehow assured of escape . . . (CP 275)

Just as Yeats, for all his faults, can “Teach the free man how to praise” in ways that will help him escape “the prison of his days,” Freud has revealed the inner riches of those who find their outer lives brutally circumscribed by the march of contemporary events. And perhaps most importantly, Freud is like Yeats—and unlike other subjects of earlier elegies—in being described as generous, and having something very particular to offer his survivors: just as Yeats can teach us to “sing of human unsuccess,” Freud would unite the unequal moieties fractured by our own well-meaning sense of justice, would restore to the larger the wit and will the smaller possess but can only use for arid disputes, would give back to the son the mother’s richness of feeling (CP 276)

In the same way that Auden qualifies his description of Yeats as “silly,” he implicitly takes back—by adding a coda to—his attack on Freud as “not clever” by describing him here in such adulatory terms. The vocabulary of these lines—“unite,” “restore,” “give back”—helps end “In Memory of Sigmund Freud” on a relatively affirmative note, despite its shattering last stanza: One rational voice is dumb. Over his grave the household of impulse mourns one dearly loved:

74

Influential Ghosts sad is Eros, builder of cities, and weeping anarchic Aphrodite. (CP 276)

These lines have more in common with the last lines of “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” than they seem to at first glance. Although they describe an outer world that contains nothing like the indifferent instruments or carefree careening wolves of the Yeats elegy, and that even seems to respond to Freud’s death, the response is such a self-consciously symbolic and literary one that Auden cannot have meant us to interpret this description as we would, say, Shelley’s sobbing winds; personalized natural forces have been replaced by impersonal people, and the result is not so much an intensely emotional scene of mourning as a frieze-like tableau of grief. While the beginning of “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” and the end of “In Memory of Sigmund Freud” appear very different, then, they are actually quite alike, since in both cases Auden seems eager to distance us from his subjects’ deaths as much as he can. This kind of anti-elegy may not be to everyone’s liking. But what makes both poems so striking is the fact that Auden’s aloof removal from his subjects actually—and paradoxically—brings them closer to their contemporaries and their readers. “At the Grave of Henry James,” written in 1941 and published four years later, is different from Auden’s Yeats and Freud elegies in several important respects. First and foremost, it is not really an elegy, since James had been dead for twenty-five years at the time of the poem’s composition. But in Auden’s defense, he was only nine when James died, and cannot be expected to have had a real sense of James’s life and work until much later. Besides, Auden’s elegies for Yeats and Freud are not exactly standard elegies either, so the fact that James had been dead for some time when Auden wrote the poem should hardly keep it from being considered alongside the other two poems. In fact, “At the Grave of Henry James” has many remarkable similarities to both the Yeats and Freud elegies. Like “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” the poem aggressively eschews such hallmarks of the traditional elegy as the pathetic fallacy. Auden, standing at James’s snow-covered grave, remarks that “The snow . . . Has left the defence of whiteness to these tombs” (CP 310); unlike the dead James, nature is simply running its course and melting the snow in order to prepare for a new season. The hint of spring in the poem’s opening is hardly a sign that James, like Lycidas or Adonais, has been resurrected somewhere, for just as Auden insists on nature’s indifference to Yeats’s death and Freud’s really being dead, here he contrasts a natural flourishing to an unchanging, wintry tomb. But of course, as has already been shown, Auden uses traditional elegiac themes and images at the same

Burying and Praising

75

time that he carefully dismantles them: the “pools at my feet” that represent the end of the snow may be an allusion to the conventional elegiac image of water flowing—just as the many rivers and fountains in the Yeats elegy both recall and revise the entire elegiac tradition. Much of the imagery of “In Memory of Sigmund Freud” also finds its way into this poem. Throughout both elegies, Auden depicts his subjects as magisterial, larger-than-life figure who exerted their power, or tried to, over less rational creatures: thus we read that Freud was surrounded by “shades that still waited to enter/ the bright circle of his recognition,” and that James “opened such passionate arms to your Bon when It ran/ Towards you with Its overwhelming reasons pleading/ All beautifully in Its breast” (CP 311). These lines from the James elegy also offer further proof of how conventional many aspects of Auden’s elegies are: Peter Sacks has written that “a child’s submission to a certain authority or law,” represented here by James’s parental relation to his “Bon,” is a traditional elegiac image.62 The image even appears elsewhere in the poem, when Auden remarks that James’s “hand submitted/ To those formal rules that help a child to play,” and that (in an odd reversal of the image) his is “the disciplinary image that holds/ Me back from agreeable wrong” (CP 312). It even appears in the Freud elegy, when Auden compares “the unhappy Present” to a child told to “recite the Past/ like a poetry lesson till sooner/ or later it faltered” (CP 274). The most innovative feature of Auden’s elegies is their deeply ambivalent attitudes towards their subjects, and “At the Grave of Henry James” is no different. Just as he values Yeats’ gift that “survived it all” and Freud’s ability to teach us lessons we had forgotten long ago, Auden praises James for being “a great and talkative man” and a “Master of nuance and scruple,” and for possessing a “lucid gift” (CP 311–12). And just as he omitted the stanzas of “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” which linked Yeats to writers involved in dubious political activities, he praises James for his removal from the world of politics. As the poem ends, Auden also broadens its scope as he does in both the Yeats and Freud elegies. Since “All will be judged,” Auden asks James to “Pray for me and for all writers, living or dead” (CP 312). But just as Auden makes it clear that Yeats was silly and that Freud wasn’t clever, his remarks about James in the poem are not entirely flattering. The heart of this “great and talkative man,” we are reminded, was “fastidious as/ A delicate nun” (CP 311)—a description which, even if it helps James pursue his “lucid gift,” seems a little insulting as well; could Auden be implying that one of the reasons James kept art and life so separate was that he was simply too finicky and frail to do otherwise? Auden’s ambivalence toward James, so like his mixed feelings about Yeats and Freud, makes the elegy

76

Influential Ghosts

more intriguing and original, but also makes it more enigmatic. As with his views on Yeats and Freud, Auden’s poetic portrait of James becomes clearer when one considers it in the context of his other recorded comments about the “great and talkative man.” On the one hand, Auden knew long passages of James by heart and repeated them to the delight—and occasional irritation—of his friends.63 Auden also praised James in his introduction to The American Scene for “his self-knowledge, his awareness of just what he could and could not do, and his critical literary sense, his respect for the inalienable right of every subject to its own form and treatment”64—a description that could easily be a prose paraphrase of “Master of nuance and scruple.” His remarks on the novelist’s superiority in such poems as “The Novelist” and “Letter to Lord Byron” may have been derived from James’ Preface to The Ambassadors.65 Auden also seems to have appreciated James’s satiric gift, since he included a hilariously cruel passage about three young women in A Certain World under the howlingly ad hoc caption “Prose, annihilating.”66 And in a 1946 lecture he lavishly praised “our dear H.J.” as “an example of personal integrity” (CPr 303, 300). But on the other hand, Auden admitted in a 1948 conversation—using imagery very close to the poem’s—that “I must say that James’ Notebooks annoy me. One reads a passage like ‘causons, causons, mon bon’—his self-justification as a writer—and one thinks it wonderful . . . But the Notebooks show he was writing like that all the time. And I find that a very suspect attitude for an artist.”67 Indeed, Auden’s praise of James’s literary virtues in the American Scene introduction quickly devolves into an attack on his “lack of journalistic talent” which “is probably due to the fact that he had no “vulgar curiosity”: “One can easily imagine Stendhal or Tolstoi or Dostoievski becoming involved in a barroom fight,” Auden goes on, “but James, never. I have read somewhere a story that once, when James was visiting a French friend, the latter’s mistress, unobserved, filled his top hat with champagne, but I do not believe that because, try as I will, I simply cannot conceive what James did and said when he put his hat on.”68 Is James, then, really such a “Master of nuance and scruple” after all? Or is Auden subtly but surely judging him in the poem, just as he insists all writers will one day be judged? When Auden asserts, toward the end of the poem, that “there is no end/ To the vanity of our calling,” is he including or exempting James? As he does in the Yeats and Freud elegies, Auden pays tribute to his subject by writing like him: the poem’s contorted syntax, endless sentences, and scattered French phrases all help make it what Monroe Spears has called “A virtuoso exercise in sympathetic parody,”69 and the lines, quoted earlier, in which James’s Bon runs toward him have even been lifted from James’s journals.70 But is the par-

Burying and Praising

77

ody always sympathetic? Are the paraphrases always well-intentioned? Judging from similar moments in Auden’s other elegies, they are not. And judging from Auden’s later imitations of James—Ferdinand’s sonnet, and the entire section III of “The Sea and the Mirror”—they are even more emphatically not. If the poem had been written by a lesser poet, it might crumble under the weight of all these ambiguities. But in the end, Auden’s shifting attitudes toward James—like all his complex connections to Yeats and Freud—only help produce a better, stranger, and more honest elegy. Auden substantially revised “At the Grave of Henry James” shortly after he wrote it, and a comparison of the two versions reveals a great deal about Auden’s evolving views of the nature and purpose of elegies. First and most obviously, Auden toned the poem down by taking out its many uses of the vocative “O.” In some cases he simply omitted the word from the beginning of a line or sentence; in another, more extreme case, he took out a whole stanza altogether. The poem’s original fifth stanza, for example, read as follows: Startling the awkward footsteps of my apprehension, The flushed assault of your recognition is The donnée of this doubtful hour: O stern proconsul of intractable provinces, O poet of the difficult, dear addicted artist, Assent to my soil and flower. 71

Perhaps Auden decided that the combination of French phrase, alliterative overload, and double apostrophe out-Jamesed even James. In any case, he cut this stanza along with thirteen others, reducing the poem’s original twentyfour stanzas to a mere ten. These cuts, though far more drastic than Auden’s revisions of “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” show him involved in a very similar attempt to purge his elegies of dishonest rhetoric and bombastic claims, and thereby make them more viable vehicles for writing about the modern world. Another effect of Auden’s cuts is to make the James elegy less religious and more literary—as if, by writing at length about himself as a soul to be saved, Auden would upset the precarious balance in all his elegies between commemoration of the dead and insistence on the talents, hopes and aspirations of the living. The two versions differ most noticeably in their two endings. At the end of the 1941 version, Auden asks James to pray for him and other writers Because the darkness is never so distant,

78

Influential Ghosts And there is never much time for the arrogant Spirit to flutter its wings, Or the broken bone to rejoice, or the cruel to cry For Him whose property is always to have mercy, the author And giver of all good things.

But in the poem’s 1945 version, Auden cut this stanza so that the original penultimate stanza became the last: All will be judged. Master of nuance and scruple, Pray for me and for all writers living or dead: Because there are many whose works Are in better taste then their lives, because there is no end To the vanity of our calling, make intercession For the treason of all clerks. (CP 312)

The reasons for Auden’s revision are perfectly consistent with his other elegies, and with his ideas about elegies in general: in the original poem, and in a maneuver perilously close to an “Adonais”-like stellification, Auden modifies his prayer to James into a prayer to God, so that the former gets subsumed by the merciful spirit of the latter. But Auden’s revision keeps the poem about James, with all his flaws and eccentricities, and it also keeps it—despite the reference to prayer—firmly planted on earth. None of Auden’s other elegies is as complex or as interesting as these three. But even a brief look at them reveals how consistently he returned to the same images and ideas. They also show, in somewhat cruder form, what he did on a larger, grander scale in his great elegies. In “In Memory of Ernst Toller,” for example—written to honor the exiled German playwright who hanged himself in New York City in May, 1939—Auden returns to many of the preoccupations and ambiguities that marked the Yeats elegy. A “shining neutral summer” that “has no voice/ To . . . ask how a man dies” (CP 249) has replaced the “dead of winter” at the start of the earlier poem; Toller, like Yeats a composite of good and bad qualities, was “egotistical and brave” (CP 249); like Yeats’s death, Toller’s is set against the backdrop of a “Europe which . . . (had) Already been too injured to get well” (CP 249); and as in the Yeats poem, Auden places the date of Toller’s death right below the title in order to emphasize this connection between personal and worldwide turmoil. The poem’s language and imagery also contain many striking parallels to Auden’s other elegies. Just as Auden brought “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” to a close by commanding

Burying and Praising

79

Yeats to “persuade us to rejoice,” he begins the Toller elegy by describing the various people gathered at his grave as “the friends who are sad and the enemies who rejoice” (CP 249). The contexts in which Auden uses this word could not be more different: in the case of the Yeats poem, rejoicing is what Auden wants people to do, while in the Toller elegy it is a reprehensible action that only Toller’s “enemies” are callous enough to commit. But the very different uses to which Auden put this one word in two poems—written just three months apart—reveals the frequency which he drew on his particular elegiac vocabulary, sometimes using the same word for opposite purposes. This frequency can also be seen in the poem’s metaphorical language, since the “bright little longings” who fly in Toller’s window to tell him “About the big and friendly death outside” (CP 249) anticipate the “delectable creatures” who, with their “large sad eyes,” represent all our deepest needs and longings in the Freud elegy. As with Auden’s two uses of “rejoice,” the fact that the little creatures are very different in the two poems—maleficent in the Toller elegy and basically good-natured in the Freud elegy—only helps show how consistent his language of mourning was. As the poem continues, so do its similarities to Auden’s other elegies. In another stern refusal to stellify, glorify or otherwise exalt his poem’s subject, Auden gently commands his friend to “lie shadowless at last among/ The other war-horses who existed till they’d done/ Something that was an example to the young”(CP 249); then, broadening the poem’s scope, he writes that “We are lived by powers we pretend to understand” (CP 250)—a statement that has been interpreted as a summary of George Groddeck’s thought72 but, whatever its source, represents the same widening of focus that occurs in phrases like “human unsuccess” and “deserts of the heart.” But despite all these similarities between the Yeats and Toller elegies— similarities which show that these poems must be considered together— the more personal tone of the latter helps remind us that each must also be considered as a separate poem. Going his reference to “William Yeats” one better, Auden becomes even more intimate in this poem, referring to Toller as “Dear Ernst” (CP 249) in one of the tenderest moments in all his elegies—especially since the German word connotes not only sobriety but also trustworthiness.73 Auden also discusses the circumstances of Toller’s death with far greater specificity than he did in the elegies for Yeats, Freud, and James; a far cry from Yeats’s “disappearance,” Toller’s suicide is the occasion for some of the poem’s most touching, uncertain moments, as Auden asks Toller, “What was it that your shadow unwillingly said?” and

80

Influential Ghosts

wonders, “Did the small child see something horrid in the woodshed long ago?” (CP 249) There are three probable reasons for this poem’s surprising intimacy. Whereas Auden never knew Freud or James and only briefly met (and actively disliked) Yeats, he both met and liked Toller, and also translated the lyrics for his play No More Peace! Additionally, as a recent exile himself, Auden would probably have empathized with Toller’s chaotic emigré status without having met him. And finally, Auden must have felt that his obligation, as a recent Christian convert, to discover the reasons for Toller’s suicide, overrode his obligation, as an anti-elegiac elegist, to write a completely impersonal poem. “In Memory of Ernst Toller,” then, is something of an anomaly among Auden’s elegies, but it also something of a relief, showing that even though Auden took great pains to alter and update an age-old poetic genre, he never lost sight of its basic function of commemorating the dead. Four late elegies by Auden—three for friends, one for a slain president—reveal that, in the process of writing such innovative tributes, Auden had found an elegiac mode that he liked enough to return to again and again. These poems, written decades after the homages to Yeats, Freud and James, reflect all the changes of style and belief that Auden and his poetry had undergone in the intervening years. But the trace of the three great elegies is everywhere. In “The Cave of Making,” a 1964 elegy for Louis MacNeice later collected in “Thanksgiving for a Habitat,” Auden waxes nostalgic about his late friend, a “lover of women and Donegal” (CP 691), but in the understated manner of the earlier elegies: “I wish you hadn’t caught that cold,” he casually confesses, “but the dead we miss are easier/ to talk to: with those no longer/ tensed by problems one cannot feel shy” (CP 692). And just as he told Yeats to “teach the free man how to praise,” declared that Freud had become “a whole climate of opinion,” and asked James to “pray for all writers living or dead,” Auden broadens the focus of this elegy as it reaches its conclusion, declaring that MacNeice has become one of “the voices of conscience” and even using his death as an occasion for reflecting on the craft of poetry in general, since After all, it’s rather a privilege amid the affluent traffic to serve this unpopular art which cannot be turned into background-noise for study or hung as a status-trophy by rising executives, cannot be “done” like Venice or abridged like Tolstoy, but stubbornly still insists upon

Burying and Praising

81

being read or ignored. (CP 693)

In “The Art of Healing,” Auden’s 1969 memorial poem for his friend Dr. David Protetch, he admires the very qualities in Protetch that other elegists might try to ignore or disguise. After quoting Protetch’s cantankerous remark that “It is only bad temper/ that keeps me going,” Auden claims that we shouldn’t “want our friends to be/ superhuman” (CP 837) anyway. No stellified Adonais beaming down from the heavens, Protetch remains crankily and vibrantly on earth. And much like the end of “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” “The Art of Healing” closes with Auden’s “objective praise” for the human, flawed Dr. Protetch. “Elegy For J.F.K.,” written five years earlier, is by almost any standard a bad poem. But it contains so many features of Auden’s other tributes—a reminder of nature’s indifference, an emphasis on survival, and a final reminder that the dead can teach us to “praise”—that it reads as sort of crystallized Auden elegy, and is therefore worth quoting in full: Why then, why there, Why thus, we cry, did he die? The heavens are silent. What he was, he was: What he is fated to become Depends on us. Remembering his death, How we choose to live Will decide its meaning. When a just man dies, Lamentation and praise, Sorrow and joy, are one. (CP 754–5)

Another poem, simply titled “Elegy” and written in 1968 in honor of Auden’s German housekeeper, Emma Eiermann, includes a typically Audenesque blend of understated grief (“oh, how could you go and die”?), guarded praise (“a housekeeper is harder/ to replace than a lover”) and faint reproach (“out you would storm,/ arms whirling, screaming abuse/ in peasant German/ at startled Americans/ who had meant no harm,/ and, after they’d gone, for days/ you would treat us to the sulks”) (CP 766–7). In a moment that

82

Influential Ghosts

gives this late, minor elegy some of the same features as the earlier, greater ones, Auden also uses Emma’s own language to write about her; in fact, it is Emma’s German, not Auden’s English, that frames the poem, which opens with the question, “Liebe Frau Emma,/ na, was hast Du denn gemacht?” and closes with the blessing, “Du gute, schlaf in Ruhe” (CP 768). A year before he died, Auden wrote a poem called “Lullaby” in which he described his own impending death with the same measured tone and mixed feelings that he had displayed in his elegies for other people. The poem, which might be called a “self-elegy,”74 is only one of several such poems that Auden wrote, and along with the others offers further proof of the way he both revived and rebelled against the elegiac tradition throughout his career. Like Auden’s other elegies, the poem’s various low-key remarks about weather (“another day has westered/ and mantling darkness arrived”), old age (“Your daily round is done with”), and mortality (“Now for oblivion”) (CP 875–6) may help situate the poem in a particular genre, but they also help destroy our expectations that the poem will be a standard example of this genre. And the poem’s refrain alone—“Sing, Big Baby, sing lullay,” which becomes “Sleep, Big Baby, sleep your fill ”(CP 876) at the poem’s close—shows how it both fulfills and overturns the generic conventions of elegy. From Moschus’s Lament for Bion—which includes the refrain, “Begin, ye Sicilian Muses, begin the dirge”—to Milton’s repeated complaint that “Lycidas is dead,” the refrain has been a staple of the elegiac tradition.75 But in “Lullaby,” the refrain is hardly what we would expect: no resurrected Adonais or godlike Lycidas, Auden is simply an overgrown infant about to go to sleep for the last time. All these features of the poem may make Auden seem unrealistically, even disappointingly calm in the face of death. But given the stark precedents of his earlier elegies, “Lullaby” is the only kind of elegy that he could realistically have written for himself. Composing his own epitaph, Keats declared that he was “one whose name was writ in water.”76 But such an epitaph would have been too ethereal for the fleshy, earthbound Auden of “Lullaby.” Rupert Brooke, faced with the prospect of dying in the Great War, cheered himself up with the thought that a foreign field would be “forever England.”77 But this glorification of death by way of patriotism was not to Auden’s liking either. So even though “Lullaby” may come as something of a shock, it may also be the best possible elegy for him. A huge outpouring of elegies have been written for Auden since his death, some by friends and fellow poets, others by people who never met him.78 But splendid though many of them are, none matches “Lullaby”’s harsh realism or no-holds-barred description of second childhood. Auden wrote candidly and unsparingly of some of the greatest minds of the last two centuries, but saved his grittiest, most anti-elegiac remarks for himself.

Chapter Four

In Health and in Sickness: Auden and Kierkegaard’s Stormy Marriage

In the late 1930s and 1940s, confessing that you admired the work of the great Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard was a little like admitting that you drank several cups of coffee in the morning, or enjoyed going to the movies now and then. Who didn’t? For during this period, Kierkegaard— who was born in 1813, lived a short life of relative obscurity, and died in 1855—was enjoying a vogue of immense popularity. The rise of existentialism, the threat of the coming war, and the writings and teachings of progressive theologians like Barth, Niebuhr and Tillich during the 1920s and 1930s all contributed to a powerful and widespread interest in Kierkegaard among intellectuals throughout America and Europe.1 Auden was no exception, and once he had discovered Kierkegaard, with characteristic rapacity he was soon making use of several of his most important ideas in his own work. But although Kierkegaard exerted a fascinating and profound influence on many of Auden’s short and long poems, their ardent romance—as had been the case with all of Auden’s other major influences—eventually cooled, and the two passionate and opinionated thinkers amicably agreed to part ways. Auden most likely started reading Kierkegaard in late 1937 or early 1938, for a complex combination of personal and intellectual reasons, and is himself the best source of information on this turn of events. In an essay written for a volume called Modern Canterbury Pilgrims, published in 1956, Auden described his loss of faith in the secular systems that had always served him so well—and his consequent need for a firmer, more spiritual foundation. Until recently, Auden writes, he and his society had “assumed that there was only one outlook on life conceivable among civilized people, the liberal humanism in which all of us had been brought up.”2 Given this attitude, all talk of God or faith “seemed irrelevant since such values as freedom of the person, equal justice for all, respect for the rights of others, etc., were self-evident truths.” However, recent cataclysmic events had called this comfortable 83

84

Influential Ghosts

secularism into question, since it had so clearly “failed to produce the universal peace and prosperity it promised, failed even to prevent a World War,” and was now powerless to explain the rise to power of the Nazis in Germany. “Confronted by such a phenomenon,” Auden continues, “it was impossible any longer to believe that the values of liberal humanism were self-evident. Unless one was prepared to take a relativist view that all values are a matter of personal taste, one could hardly avoid asking the question: ‘If, as I am convinced, the Nazis are wrong and we are right, what is it that validates our values and invalidates theirs?’” With all these questions in mind, Auden went to Spain during the Civil War, and to his considerable surprise was “profoundly shocked and disturbed” to find the churches closed and the priests nowhere in sight. He “could not escape acknowledging that, however I had consciously ignored and rejected the Church for sixteen years, the existence of churches and what went on in them had all the time been very important to me”; and he wondered, “If that was the case, what then?” Shortly after his return from Spain, Auden met a man who, more than anyone else, was responsible for his fascination with Kierkegaard. Visiting the offices of Oxford University Press to discuss a book of light verse he was editing, Auden met the Anglican layman Charles Williams for the first time. Williams was one of the earliest popularizers of Kierkegaard, arguing in his 1939 book The Descent of the Dove that “He coordinated experiences in a new manner . . . He lived under a sense of judgment, of contrition, of asceticism; but also (and equally) of revolt, of refusal, of unbelief . . . He forbade us resignation; he denied tragedy; he was a realist and unbeliever—both in this world and in the other; and his life of skepticism was rooted in God.”3 Williams had also played an important role in getting Oxford University Press to undertake the task of translating and publishing Kierkegaard’s works; and he instantly became a spiritual mentor for Auden, who remarks in the essay that, upon meeting Williams, he “for the first time in my life felt myself in the presence of personal sanctity. I had met many good people before who made me feel ashamed of my own shortcomings, but in the presence of this man . . . I did not feel ashamed. I felt transformed into a person who was incapable of doing or thinking anything base or unloving.” The two men no doubt discussed Kierkegaard during this meeting, after which Auden “started to read some theological works, Kierkegaard in particular, and began going, in a tentative and experimental sort of way, to church.” Certain personal affinities between Auden and Kierkegaard may also have helped cement their relationship. Auden’s first biographer Humphrey Carpenter suggests that Auden

In Health and in Sickness

85

must have recognized himself in Kierkegaard’s writings, for Kierkegaard’s early intellectual development bore a marked resemblance to his own. Kierkegaard had, like Auden, been brought up in the Church by one parent especially, in his case his father; and like Auden he had a very ambiguous relation towards that parent. He felt that his childhood had been responsible for his neurosis, and compared himself to a ship that had sustained damage at its launching. He also believed that there could be no such thing as ‘inherited’ Christianity; each individual must rediscover his religious beliefs for himself.4

Whatever its cause, Auden’s enthusiasm took hold and lasted for a long time. In a letter to his old Oxford tutor E.R. Dodds dated March 11, 1940, Auden wrote, “Am reading Kierkegaard’s Journal at the moment which is fascinating.”5 And on December 11, 1946, when his friend Alan Ansen showed him a copy of the one-volume edition of Kierkegaard’s For Self-Examination and Judge for Yourselves! and asked whether he owned it, Auden replied, “Yes, I think I have them all now. I may not have some of the edifying discourses published by obscure houses, but I don’t think I want them very badly.”6 Kierkegaard’s presence in Auden’s poetry can begin to be strongly felt around the middle of 1939, and although Auden’s most sustained engagement with his thought appears in the long poems he wrote shortly afterward—New Year Letter, For the Time Being and The Sea and the Mirror especially—his shorter poems of this period contain both healthy doses of Kierkegaard’s vocabulary and hearty explorations of his ideas. “Like a Vocation,” for example, a poem written in May 1939, is rich with Kierkegaardian language which, while hardly the most important thing about the poem, shows how great an impression Kierkegaard had already made on Auden. The poem is a meditation on the various ways, good and bad, that poets receive inspiration and remain true to their calling. Auden spends most of the poem telling us what would-be poets should not do: they must not behave (as Romantic poets would?) like “that dream Napoleon, rumour’s dread and centre” (CP 256), and they should never believe (as liberal humanists would?) that “politeness and freedom are . . . enough,” for “They lead/ Up to a bed that only looks like marriage.” But as the poem winds to its spirited close, Auden reveals that what these fledgling poets should do is keep in their minds a picture of The one who needs you, that terrified Imaginative child who only knows you As what the uncles call a lie,

86

Influential Ghosts But knows he has to be the future and that only The meek inherit the earth, and is neither Charming, successful, nor a crowd (CP 257)

These passages share a common reliance on Kierkegaard’s vocabulary. “Dread” is a term he uses with near-obsessive frequency throughout his work in order to describe—as Walter Lowrie puts it in a useful Glossary of Kierkegaard’s major concepts—“an agonizing premonition prompted by nothing concrete, but by horror at . . . nothingness—like the dizziness one may experience on the brink of an abyss” and which “when it is realized as entanglement in the toils of Necessity becomes Despair.”7 Kierkegaard’s major work on the subject, The Concept of Dread, was not translated until 1944,8 but Auden would have been familiar with the term from countless other passages in Kierkegaard’s writings, for example a page in his Journal in which he defines dread as “a desire for what one fears, a sympathetic antipathy . . . an alien power which takes hold of the individual, and yet one cannot extricate oneself from it, does not wish to, because one is afraid, but what one fears attracts one.”9 Equally significant about Auden’s use of this word is the fact that he had used it in his poetry many times before—as in the 1930 “Consider,” in which people are suddenly “seized with immeasurable neurotic dread” (CP 62). It was as if Auden, encountering the term in Kierkegaard, was discovering new uses for his own earlier vocabulary. The same could be said of his mention of marriage, which was both a crucial concept for Kierkegaard and a leitmotif of Auden’s earlier poetry—though a fuller exploration of this term belongs in a discussion of the poem “In Sickness and in Health.” The idea of the “crowd” is an extremely important one for Kierkegaard as well, serving as a target of great scorn in his short, polemical work, The Present Age—which Auden, in his 1944 “Preface to Kierkegaard,” urged readers of Kierkegaard to begin with. The term would also be used by Auden in many later lectures, essays and poems. “Leap Before You Look,” a poem written in December 1940, also reflects Auden’s recent immersion in Kierkegaard. Like so many of Auden’s poems, it begins as an abstract meditation and ends as an intimate love poem, but it is Kierkegaardian from start to finish. The title alone, beyond its wry inversion of a cliché, reveals much about Auden’s interest in Kierkegaard’s “leap of faith,” a phrase he uses in Fear and Trembling (which had been translated in 1939 in the Oxford University Press series) to describe a terrifying but essential transition from reason to religion—specifically, the “leap” Abraham makes from the ethical law that tells him not to sacrifice Isaac, to the divine command that insists he do so. This “leap,” and the need to perform it

In Health and in Sickness

87

in one’s daily life, informs the entire poem, whose obsessive use of only two rhymes drives its message home. Auden declares at the poem’s outset that “The sense of danger must not disappear,” warning us: “Look if you like, but you will have to leap” (CP 313). And when we “leap” into danger, what are we getting away from? Auden answers this question in a subsequent stanza: The worried efforts of the busy heap, The dirt, the imprecision, and the beer Produce a few smart wisecracks every year; Laugh if you can, but you will have to leap. (CP 313)

The “busy heap” ridiculed here could be a different translation of Kierkegaard’s “crowd,” which is antithetical to the solemnity, danger and faith that will never be part of our lives “So long as we consent to live like sheep.” At the poem’s close, Auden—turning to his loved one as Arnold did at the end of “Dover Beach,” but with a much sterner message—remarks that A solitude ten thousand fathoms deep Sustains the bed on which we lie, my dear: Although I love you, you will have to leap; Our dream of safety has to disappear. (CP 314)

Lovers, according to this sobering poem, don’t and mustn’t exist in a world removed from the cares and dangers of everyday life. Auden, throughout the poem employing Kierkegaard’s vocabulary to help him articulate his own strident anti-Romanticism, here makes use of a favorite phrase of Kierkegaard’s, one that would appear many times in his poetry: “seventy thousand fathoms.” (In a forgivable exercise of poetic license, seventy gets shrunk to ten for the sake of the meter.) Auden probably first encountered the phrase in a passage from Kierkegaard’s Journals, where he writes that his adversary, Bishop Mynster, “has never been out on 70,000 fathoms in order to learn out there, he has always clung to the established order of things and has now quite grown into it.”10 The phrase also occurs in The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard, a selection edited by Auden and published in 1952: Kierkegaard writes that “Without risk there is no faith . . . If I wish to preserve myself in faith I must constantly . . . remain out upon the deep, over seventy thousand fathoms of water, still preserving my faith.”11 Amazingly enough, all these allusions and nods to Kierkegaard never drown the poem, but instead contribute to both its sly wit and its utter seriousness.

88

Influential Ghosts

Several of Auden’s poems of this time feature another favorite concept of Kierkegaard’s: the “absurd.” This term denotes a certain kind of belief that, according to Kierkegaard, makes Abraham willing to slay Isaac even though the law tells him not to; it is what prompts us to have faith in a person or concept even when the voices of reason tell us we’ve gone mad. Lowrie defines it as that which is “contrary to appearance, plausibility, or probability,” since “Faith as such can find an appropriate object only in paradox; for if faith is reached, or subsequently justified, by demonstration, or by plausible argument, it is no longer faith but knowledge.” It is what “emerges in the ethical sphere so soon as interest is centred in the individual.”12 And it appears with great frequency in many of Auden’s poems. In the 1939 “Law Like Love,” an exploration of all the different ways people define law, Auden again heaps scorn on a Kierkegaardian “loud angry crowd” who shout, “Very angry and very loud,/ Law is We” (CP 263). But he goes on to offer an alternative to this ruinous group-think as, once again, the poem becomes a love poem: If therefore thinking it absurd To identify law with some other word, Unlike so many men I cannot say Law is again, No more than they can we suppress The universal wish to guess Or slip out of our own condition Into an unconcerned condition. (CP 263)

Since it is “absurd” (though tempting) to try to define law objectively and once and for all, Auden makes an “absurd” leap of his own—into the subjective, into the personal—and calls it “like love” (CP 264).13 In “The Maze,” written the next year, Auden traces the various thoughts of one “Anthropos apteros” (CP 303)—wingless man—after he realizes he is lost in a maze, and in doing so presents us with a condensed version of Western intellectual history: metaphysics tells this latter-day Everyman to “Assume this maze has got a plan”; skepticism leads him to question whether “data from the world of Sense” are “valid evidence”; aestheticism urges him to “go which way I please,” and so on. But finally Anthropos concludes that he should “Content myself with this conclusion:/ In theory there is no solution” (CP 304); then, “perplexed/ To know which turning to take next,” he “Looked up and wished he were a bird/ To whom such doubts must seem absurd.” Although the poem, to its credit, does not valorize the bird’s blissful otherworldliness at the expense of man’s “absurd” mental convolutions,

In Health and in Sickness

89

it does present us, by way of Kierkegaard, with an alternative to them. In “Atlantis,” written in 1941, Auden uses Kierkegaard’s term in a similar way, exploring the many circuitous routes we must take to arrive at the truth— symbolized by the vanished city of the poem’s title—and urging the necessity of being “ready to/ Behave absurdly enough” (CP 315) on our journey there. For seekers of Atlantis—as for poor Anthropos apteros in his maze, wouldbe definers of the law, or people who resist “the busy heap”—conventional routes will not suffice, though “absurd” ones may offer better results. But more than any other short poem of this period, “In Sickness and in Health,” written in the autumn of 1940 to commemorate the marriage of his friends Maurice and Gwen Mandelbaum, reflects the degree to which Auden had read, absorbed, and brooded on Kierkegaard’s thought. Like “Leap Before You Look,” the poem begins with a warning: love is a waste land “where dwell/ Our howling appetites,” a “land of condors, sick cattle and dead flies” (CP 317). Unaware how difficult and problematic love is—and again characterized by a term of scorn dear to Kierkegaard’s heart—we are no better than “a crowd/ Of poaching hands and mouths who out of fear/ Have learned a safer life than we can bear” (CP 318). Sensing, if not acknowledging, the dangers of love, we either turn into Tristan and Isolde, “the great friends” who “Make passion out of passion’s obstacles” and, “Deliciously postponing their delight,/ Prolong frustration till it lasts all night,/ Then perish,” or we become like Don Juan, “so terrified of death he hears/ Each moment recommending it” (CP 318). Both Tristan and Isolde’s chaste affair and Don Juan’s compulsive philandering come about because of a denial of time and the body: their passion will end if it’s ever consummated; and if he ever settles down, he’ll realize that he’s mortal. All three of them are doomed, and the poem reaches deadlock. But suddenly Kierkegaard enters the picture and offers Auden a solution. Becoming a love poem yet again, the poem asserts with astonishing abruptness: “Beloved, we are always in the wrong,/ Handling so clumsily our stupid lives,/ Suffering too little or too long,/ Too careful even in our selfish loves” (CP 319). Auden could have read a variant of this statement, “Before God man is always in the wrong”—which also appears in Volume Two of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or—in Williams’ Descent of the Dove, where it is approvingly cited.14 He also quoted the phrase in a letter written to Spender in the same year as the poem,15 and uses it here as a kind of allusion ex machina; for once we become aware of our humility in the face of love or God, through all life’s chaos there “comes a voice/ Which utters an absurd command—Rejoice.” Once we make the “absurd” leap of faith, once we take our marriage vows under God’s aegis, we have grounds for rejoicing.

90

Influential Ghosts

Kierkegaard is responsible for the turning-point of “In Sickness and in Health,” but he also deserves credit for Auden’s reference to Don Juan, and for the thoughts on marriage that pervade the entire poem. In his Journal Kierkegaard writes that Don Juan, along with Faust and the Wandering Jew, represents “life outside religion.”16 And frequently throughout his work he contrasts the despair of romantic love—which is doomed by its immediacy and hostility to time—with the glory of married love, which can only take place in time, and must be reaffirmed every single day. Kierkegaard’s most famous remarks on the subject of marriage occur in the second volume of his massive work Either/Or, which was not translated until 1944, four years after Auden wrote “In Sickness and in Health.” But so much of the poem sounds like Either/Or that it is tempting to suppose that Auden had heard about it— perhaps in conversation with Charles Williams?—even if he hadn’t actually read it yet. Auden’s reference, in the 1940 New Year Letter, to “the either/ors, the mongrel halves” (defined in his Notes as “impatient romantics”) helps support this theory. And in Kierkegaard’s Stages on Life’s Way, translated in 1940, Auden could have found many similar remarks on the superiority of marriage to romantic love. What did Kierkegaard—who had himself broken off an engagement— find so wonderful about marriage? If romantic love is doomed by its inability to come to terms with time, the body, and other things of this world (“What does erotic love love? Infinity. What does erotic love fear? Boundaries”) marriage is the splendid opposite, the “unity of freedom and necessity” which must be “renew(ed) constantly”; far from dreading time, marriage depends on its passing for its continued existence. “Romantic love,” Kierkegaard summarizes the contrast, “remains constantly abstract in itself, and, if it is able to acquire no external history, death already is lying in wait for it, because its eternity is illusory.” Married love, on the other hand, “begins with possession and acquires inward history.”17 In a 1944 “Preface to Kierkegaard” that appeared in The New Republic, Auden quotes a similar statement: “Romantic love can very well be represented in the moment, but conjugal love cannot, because an ideal husband is not one who is such once in his life but one who every day is such.”18 All these scattered remarks and opinions about the institution of marriage can be found lurking beneath the surface of Auden’s difficult, moving poem. But in turning to Kierkegaard for help in celebrating marriage, Auden was also radically revising much of his own previous poetry. Lucy McDiarmid has written of the proliferation of marriages throughout Auden’s early poetry, the way in which, “From 1928 through 1939, this was Auden’s paradigmatic ritual: a wedding that reconciles a divided, unhappy community,

In Health and in Sickness

91

regenerating its natural life and redeeming its spirit.” But all these weddings and brides and bridegrooms never quite live up to their potential. In fact, far from redeeming the world, they tend to “appear only in ceremonial bits and pieces—some brideless bridegrooms, fragments of nuptial vows, a few bars of Mendelssohn or Lohengrin—and lovers fail to save.”19 Not until “In Sickness and in Health” do we find a new focus on “life after the great public ritual moment.” Marriage is regarded, just as it was before, as a way to end chaos and bring order—“Describe round our chaotic malice now,/ The arbitrary circle of a vow” (CP 319), Auden commands in the poem. What is new is the poem’s emphasis on the interdependence of marriage and time—the fact that, after we take our vows, we must reaffirm them every day, amid countless threats and temptations. For this reason, Auden focuses for the first time in his poetry on life after the ceremony—when, with the passing of time, the lovers will have to make good on their vows—rather than the ceremony itself. What is also new is an emphasis on marriage’s dailiness: the poem, after all, ends with prayer to “hold us to the ordinary way” (CP 320). Under the tutelage of Kierkegaard, Auden has learned to tone down and transfigure his lofty expectations of marriage, and the result is a poem that is both more grittily realistic and more ultimately hopeful than any of his previous works about marriage. The poem’s subject matter is nothing new, but its outlook, borrowed largely from Kierkegaard, represents a sweeping change in Auden’s thought. The first long poem that Auden wrote after his move to America was New Year Letter. Composed, in tetrameter couplets, from January to April of 1940, and accompanied by more than eighty pages of notes, the poem is Auden’s dense and ambitious attempt to find a reason for the horrible war just getting started, and, more broadly, to provide satisfying answers to eternal questions of good, evil, and the nature of the self. The influences on the poem are an almost laughably eclectic group—in a list of “Modern Sources” that he attaches to his Notes, Auden cites, among others, Henry James, Margaret Meade (sic), Thucydides, and Carl Jung. But he also mentions Kierkegaard’s Journals, and more than any other influence on the poem, Kierkegaard never seems far from Auden’s thoughts. The poem, so intent on calling centuries of shoddy thinking into question, turns to Kierkegaard again and again for help with its act of demolition; and Auden, wearing his debt on his sleeve, even quotes Kierkegaard at great length in the poem’s Notes. New Year Letter begins in confusion and chaos, as Auden describes the gathering storm on the horizon of our future, the terrifying knowledge that war will soon break out: “on the verge of happening/ There crouched the presence of The Thing” (CP 199). Although we respond to this knowledge

92

Influential Ghosts

by trying to make sense of the situation—“All formulas were tried to still/ The scratching on the window-sill,/ All bolts of custom made secure/ Against the pressure on the door”—we are helpless in the face of the fact that “up the staircase of events/ Carrying his special instruments,/ To every bedside all the same/ The dreadful figure swiftly came” (CP 199). As Auden will also tell us in his next long poem, For the Time Being, the atrocities now occurring are so dreadful that all our received systems of thought—our calm rationalism, our benign liberalism—are powerless to explain them: “more and more we are aware,/ However miserable may be/ Our parish of immediacy,/ How small it is, how, far beyond,/ Ubiquitous within the bond/ Of one impoverishing sky,/ Vast spiritual disorders lie” (CP 205). So what do we do now? How and where do we look for a cure for these vast disorders? It may be the case that we can’t begin to look for the truth until some catastrophic situation forces us to do so, for, as Auden tells us in an extremely Kierkegaardian moment, what except despair Can shape the hero who will dare The desperate catabasis Into the snarl of the abyss That always lies just underneath Our jolly picnic on the heath Of the agreeable, where we bask, Agreed on what we will not ask, Bland, sunny and adjusted, by The light of the accepted lie? (CP 217)

Since recent events have been so dreadful and hard to explain, since “This lust in action to destroy/ Is not the pure instinctive joy/ Of animals, but the refined/ Creation of machines and mind” (CP 225), we must listen to what Kierkegaard has to say about the weakness of reason and logic in the face of calamity: As out of Europe comes a Voice Compelling all to make their choice, A theologian who denies What more than twenty centuries Of Europe have assumed to be The basis of civility, Our evil Daimon to express

In Health and in Sickness

93

In all its ugly nakedness What none before dare say aloud, The metaphysics of the Crowd, The Immanent Imperative By which the lost and injured live In mechanised societies Where natural intuition dies . . . (CP 225)

A “new Anthropos” (CP 230) may have come along and, in the enlightened wake of Luther and Montaigne, “Subjected earth to the control/ And moral choices of the soul,” but in doing so “He founded a new discipline/ To fight an intellectual sin,/ Reason’s depravity that takes/ The useful concepts that she makes/ As universals” (CP 231). But reason, as recent events have so painfully shown, can’t be universalized after all—and it took a host of modern prophets to show us how and why, including Blake, Rousseau, Baudelaire, and of course “ironic KIERKEGAARD,” who, according to the poem, “stared long/ And muttered, ‘All are in the wrong’” (CP 231). Kierkegaard can help us come to terms with the war by commanding us to make the “absurd” leap from reason to faith, and forcing us to realize that even though “aloneness is man’s real condition” (CP 238) and times are terrible, we can all become knights of faith, quietly but passionately going about our lives. It is a scary realization, but with it comes a kind of glory: Each salesman now is the polite Adventurer, the landless knight GAWAINE-QUIXOTE, and his goal The Frauendienst of his weak soul; Each biggie in the Canning ring An unrobust lone FISHER-KING; Each subway face the PEQUOD of Some ISHMAEL hunting his lost love, To harpoon his unhappiness And turn the whale to a princess (CP 239)

While the wit and concision of these lines are typically Auden-esque, the idea underlying them—that the real heroes of the day are anonymous—comes directly from Kierkegaard. In a passage Auden quotes in The Living Thoughts, Kierkegaard writes that while “The knights of infinite resignation can be easily distinguished by the hovering and daring of their gait . . . those who bear the jewel of faith are not so easily recognizable, because in their outward

94

Influential Ghosts

appearance they bear a striking resemblance to a class of people which is bitterly despised by faith and infinite resignation alike—they bear a close resemblance to the narrow bourgeoisie.” Although Kierkegaard admits that “I have never, in the course of my experience, seen a reliable example of the knight of faith,” he notes that “I do not for a moment deny that every other man may be such a knight.” Naturally there is something disillusioning about these unheroic heroes—Kierkegaard supposes that, upon meeting one, he will exclaim, “Good God! Is this really he? Why, he looks like an inspector of Taxes!”20—but there is also something exhilarating about the way, in a time of war, in a world of “crowds,” these individuals lead their lives. Having shown with the help of Kierkegaard that faith, not reason, will sustain us through these difficult times, the poem ends with a prayer. New Year Letter contains many explicit and implicit references to Kierkegaard, but to call it an homage to him, or claim, as some critics have done,21 that its tripartite structure is modeled after his three “spheres of existence”—the Aesthetic, the Ethical, the Religious—is probably going too far. (Auden did, however, describe the volume The Double Man, in which the poem was included, as being “in the form of Pascal’s Pensées or Kierkegaard’s journal, i.e. a series of Reflections on art, politics, life and death etc.”22 ) But For the Time Being, a “Christmas Oratorio” written in 1941–2 and dedicated to the memory of Auden’s mother, is far more deeply steeped in Kierkegaard’s thought. The poem, which frames the drama of Christ’s birth with the nightmarish advent of World War Two, is a meditation on the nature of belief and the competing claims of reason and faith; and Auden relies heavily, throughout its fifty-odd pages, on Kierkegaard’s vocabulary and theology to wrestle with and resolve the poem’s central questions. As the poem begins, we are plunged into wartime’s terrible frenzy: “Darkness and snow descend” over the world (CP 349), “The evil and armed draw near” (CP 350), and, as the poem’s Narrator tells us, we are in the presence of evil unlike anything we’ve ever witnessed: “We can only say that now It is there and that nothing/ We learnt before It was there is now of the slightest use,/ For nothing like it has happened before . . . This is the Abomination. This is the wrath of God” (CP 352). Amid all this horror and confusion—improbably, miraculously— Christ is born, and the various characters in the poem respond to this event in wildly different ways. It is here that Kierkegaard becomes crucial to the poem, for whenever Auden strives to remind us that only an absurd “leap of faith” will allow us to believe in the Incarnation—and help us out of our modern-day despair—he is drawing on the very ideas of Kierkegaard’s that he had already explored in many shorter poems. Faith, we are reminded

In Health and in Sickness

95

again and again, is only possible when reason has failed. In one “Recitative,” for example, we learn that The miracle is the only thing that happens, but to you it will not be apparent, Until all events have been studied and nothing happens that you cannot explain. . . . Therefore, see without looking, hear without listening, breathe without asking: The inevitable is what will seem to happen to you purely by chance; The Real is what will strike you as really absurd (CP 353–4)

Shortly afterward, Joseph expresses his doubts to the angel Gabriel about whether Mary is actually pregnant with Christ, and the dialogue ends as follows: JOSEPH All I ask is one Important and elegant proof That what my Love had done Was really at your will And that your will is Love. GABRIEL No, you must believe; Be silent, and sit still. (CP 364)

Joseph, like a good slave to reason, demands proof; but if, like Abraham, he is to be a good believer, he must make the leap of faith—which, as Auden writes in his Introduction to The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard, reminds people “that they cannot live without faith in something, and that when the faith which they have breaks down, when the ground crumbles under their feet, they have to leap even into uncertainty if they are to avoid certain destruction.”23 All this is easier said than done, of course, but as the Narrator tells him, “To choose what it is difficult all one’s days/ As if it were easy, that is faith. Joseph, praise” (CP 365). The process by which we acquire faith, as Kierkegaard describes it, is an arduous, painful and solitary one: “Dread is the dizziness of freedom,” he writes in The Concept of Dread .24 Auden, in a section of the poem in which

96

Influential Ghosts

the Three Wise Men are given “The Summons” to visit Christ by the “Star of the Nativity,” describes it in a very similar way: Beware. All those who follow me are led Onto that glassy mountain where are no Footholds for logic, to that Bridge of Dread Where knowledge but increases vertigo: Those who pursue me take a twisting lane To find themselves immediately alone With savage water or unfeeling stone, In labyrinths where they must entertain Confusion, cripples, tigers, thunder, pain. (CP 368)

Both the imagery of these lines—the vertigo, the dread—and their underlying message that, in matters of belief, logic has “no/ Footholds” and seekers of God “find themselves immediately alone,” come straight from Kierkegaard (and obviously, too, from earlier Auden poems with all their solitary, struggling spies and questers). In a section of the poem entitled “The Meditation of Simeon,” Auden presents us with the most prolonged, and also the most personal, engagement with Kierkegaard’s thought to be found anywhere in his poetry. If, as Auden shows throughout the poem, neither logic nor reason can explain Christ’s birth or turn us into believers, then how and why can we believe? Auden explores these questions by speaking in the voice of Simeon, who in the Gospel of St. Luke is a “righteous and devout” man who is told by the Holy Spirit that he “would not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Messiah.” Guided by the Spirit to the courts of the Temple, he sees Jesus and takes him in his arms, reassuring God, “Master, now you are dismissing/ your servant in peace . . . / for my eyes have seen your salvation.”25 T.S. Eliot, in his poem “A Song for Simeon,” had shown us the old man, tired of life and the things of this world, begging his savior God to “Let thy servant depart.”26 But Auden’s Simeon is a far cry from Eliot’s weary protagonist, and in his rather long-winded but deeply impassioned “Meditation” attempts to come to terms with the inadequacy of reason, logic, and indeed all secular systems of thought in guiding one to belief. He describes the frightening, lonely, absurd conditions—the “bridge of dread”—in which the decision to believe takes place: a would-be believer like him, “in order to proceed at all . . . must decide which is Real and which is only Appearance, yet at the same time cannot escape the knowledge that his choice is arbitrary and subjective” (CP 386). He must, in

In Health and in Sickness

97

short, make the leap of faith—but only after he has reached “the ultimate frontier of consciousness, the secular limit of memory beyond which there remained but one thing for him to know, his Original Sin” (CP 387). Belief in Christ “could only be fulfilled when it was no longer possible to receive, because it was clearly understood as absurd”; the Word could not be made Flesh “until men had reached a state of absolute contradiction between clarity and despair in which they would have no choice but to accept absolutely or to reject absolutely, yet in their choice there should be no element of luck, for they would be fully conscious of what they were accepting or rejecting” (CP 387). The debt that these remarks owe to Kierkegaard can be seen in their striking resemblance to just two passages from his Journal. In one, he tells us that “to see God, or see miracles happen by virtue of the absurd . . . reason must stand aside”27; and in the other he writes that it is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are. Human understanding has vulgarly occupied itself with nothing but understanding, but if it would only take the trouble to understand itself at the same time it would simply have to posit the paradox. The paradox is not a concession but a category, an ontological definition which expresses the relation between an existing cognitive spirit and eternal truth.28

Simeon, having outlined for us the nature of his belief, ends his Meditation on a note of calm exultation, praying on our behalf that, “following Him, we may depart from our anxiety into His peace” (CP 390). In this section, as so often throughout the poem, Auden uses his cast of Biblical characters to dramatize Kierkegaard’s notion that we can only have faith once we have reached certain secular limits and then leapt beyond them. Despite the doubts of Joseph and the protestations of Herod—who, in the section immediately after Simeon’s, cries out in good liberal humanist fashion that if people could just “be sensible,” they would see that “the notion of a finite God is absurd” (CP 394)—Auden continually urges us to accept the solitary, subjective, life-altering “absurdity” of faith. But the poem’s theological ruminations never stray too far from the terrible and pressing historical circumstances in which it was written. Reading of Herod and Simeon, we also think continually of Hitler and Stalin; the poem’s analysis of the Incarnation is inseparable from its exploration of the contemporary failure of liberal humanism. This double focus is the triumph of For the Time Being—but it is a victory that would not have occurred if Kierkegaard had not provided

98

Influential Ghosts

Auden with a lens through which he could view very recent and very distant events at exactly the same time. Auden’s next long poem, The Sea and the Mirror (1942–44), does not—unlike New Year Letter and For the Time Being—constantly remind readers that a war is taking place past its pristine pages. Subtitled “A Commentary on Shakespeare’s The Tempest,” the poem is instead an exploration of the power and the limitations of artistic creation. Despite its surface differences from the other two poems, however, The Sea and the Mirror has much in common with them—in particular its message, hinted at all along but only fully stated at its conclusion, that art and its creators it are really only immature and incomplete versions of the one true creator, God. Just as New Year Letter advises us that reason can neither help us explain the war nor suggest convincing alternatives to it, just as For the Time Being contrasts Herod’s smug rationalism with Simeon’s “absurd” faith, The Sea and the Mirror offers us representatives of the aesthetic and ethical realms only to show how flawed their views and values ultimately are. The themes of Auden’s poem may be different, but his interest in—and reliance on— Kierkegaard has not abated. After a brief “Preface,” we are introduced to Prospero in the act of saying farewell to Ariel, who symbolizes the artistic powers that he is renouncing. Prospero wonders whether, when he returns home to Milan and becomes an ordinary person just like everyone else, it will still seem “quite so dreadful/ Not to be interesting any more, but an old man/ Just like other old men” (CP 409). When his servants tend to his needs, will he “ever be able/ To stop myself from telling them what I am doing,—/ Sailing alone, out over seventy thousand fathoms—?” By having Prospero declare that he will no longer be “interesting,” Auden is using a word that Kierkegaard often used to characterize the aesthetic realm—and thereby showing how far Prospero still has to go. People stuck in the aesthetic realm, according to Kierkegaard, are governed by the crude distinction of interesting/ not interesting. In Either/Or, for example, Kierkegaard uses the word constantly to describe the situations in which his Don Juan-esque “seducer” finds himself—but also to denote a stage past which he and we must travel in order to enter the ethical, and finally the religious sphere. Prospero, by ceasing to become interesting, is also moving past this stage. Or is he? Auden’s use of his beloved “seventy thousand fathoms” would seem to indicate that the post-renunciation Prospero will indeed be a different person, an anonymous “knight of faith” who only looks like an ordinary old man. But Prospero never once refers to another, more powerful Creator—and for this reason his renunciation is false. (In fact, Auden had

In Health and in Sickness

99

very harsh words for Prospero in his essay “Balaam and his Ass,” bemoaning the fact that “it never occurs to him that he, too, might have erred and be in need of pardon.”29) Prospero’s flawed farewell—his inability to imagine any system larger than his own—also leaves room for the devilish Antonio, who in the second part of the poem keeps interrupting the happy meditations of the “courtly crew” (CP 411) that Prospero has assembled. Antonio, “The Only One, Creation’s O” (CP 422), plays a role in The Sea and the Mirror similar to the role played by the war in Auden’s two earlier long poems, representing the capacity for evil and the brute force of will that simply cannot be explained by non-religious systems of thought. In the poem’s third section, “Caliban to the Audience,” Auden tries to right Prospero’s (and Antonio’s) wrongs by having Caliban point out, amid a labyrinthine discussion of the relation between art and life, the “abruptly dreadful end” to which “the human effort to make its own fortune” (CP 442) ultimately leads. What we need to do to get beyond this sorry state of affairs is to make the leap of faith, to realize once and for all that even the greatest works of art—Prospero’s, Shakespeare’s, Auden’s—are “feebly figurative signs” of “that Wholly Other Life from which we are separated by an essential emphatic gulf ” (CP 444). Then and only then, seventy thousand fathoms away from the misguided Prospero, can we “rejoice in the perfected Work which is not ours” (CP 444). Auden once told his friend Ursula Niebuhr that The Sea and the Mirror was “really about the Christian conception of art”30—and the poem travels toward its final, Christian moments along a distinctly Kierkegaardian path. Whether Auden happened to be borrowing words or world views, Kierkegaard’s influence extended to his criticism as well. In his essay “The Virgin and the Dynamo,” Auden elaborately explains the differences between three different pluralities: crowds, societies and communities. Taking his cue from Kierkegaard—who in The Present Age had called the public “a monstrous abstraction, an all-embracing something which is nothing, a mirage”31—Auden places them lowest on the list, since they are “comprised of n > 1 members whose only relation is arithmetical, they can only be counted. A crowd loves neither itself nor anything other than itself; its existence is chimerical.”32 Off the record Auden was equally diligent about applying Kierkegaard’s analysis of the “crowd” to works of literature: in his Conversations with Auden, Howard Griffin records a long conversation the two men had about Shakespeare’s plays in which Auden discussed the role of the crowd in Coriolanus and Julius Caesar, stating that “The crowd is what one is added to, as distinguished from Kierkegaard’s category of the Single One; that is, they have nothing in common except togetherness.”33 In various

100

Influential Ghosts

other essays, such as “Balaam and His Ass,” Auden reveals a fascination for Mozart’s Don Giovanni that must certainly have been inspired—or at least nourished—by Kierkegaard’s analysis of the same character in Part One of Either/Or. “Genius and Apostle,” an essay exploring the nature of drama, takes its title, its epigraph (“No genius has an in order that: the Apostle has absolutely and paradoxically an in order that”) 34 and its interest in the nature of vocation from Kierkegaard’s work of the same name. In his Introduction to the Living Thoughts anthology, and again in his 1948 introduction to The Portable Greek Reader, Auden also wrought dazzling changes on a crucial concept of Kierkegaard’s, applying the three “spheres of existence” to three different historical periods. Since, according to Auden, Kierkegaard is concerned, for the most part, with describing the way in which these categories apply in Christian or post-Christian society, one can perhaps make his meaning clearer by approaching these categories historically, i.e., by considering the Aesthetic and the Ethical at stages when each was a religion, and then comparing them with the Christian faith in order to see the difference, first, between two rival and incompatible Natural Religions and, secondly, between them and a Revealed Religion in which neither is destroyed or ignored, but the Aesthetic is dethroned and the Ethical fulfilled.35

Making good on his word, Auden then introduces us to “The Aesthetic Religion”—that is, the time of the Greek Gods—in which men are governed by passions which they conceive as “not as belonging to the self, but as divine visitations, powers which it must find the means to attract or repel if the self is to survive.” This religion, however, soon breaks down for two reasons: “man’s knowledge of good and evil, and his certainty that death comes to all men, i.e. that there is no either/or of strength or weakness, but even for the exceptional the doom of absolute weakness.” The “Ethical Religion”—or the God of Greek philosophy—then substitutes “the either/or of Knowledge of the Good or Ignorance of the Good,” but founders—like the centuries of reasonable people in New Year Letter—upon discovering “that knowledge of the good does not automatically cause the knower to will it.” Like wicked Antonio, the Ethical man “may even disobey deliberately out of spite, just to show that he is free.” All that is left to do is to leap to the third stage, the period of “Revealed Religion”—i.e. Judaism and Christianity—in which it is revealed “that the Life is not an object for aesthetic admiration nor the Truth an object for ethical appropriation, but a Way to be followed, an inclination of the heart, a spirit in which all actions are done.”36

In Health and in Sickness

101

Under the pseudonym Didymus, Auden wrote a series of “Lecture Notes” in 1942 for the small Catholic magazine Commonweal. The name itself was a testament to Kierkegaard’s influence, for he had written almost all his early works under a bizarre assortment of assumed names. Kierkegaard’s influence is everywhere apparent in Auden’s “Notes,” from his ruminations on “The three Religions—Natural, Revealed and Christian,” to his eager borrowing of Kierkegaard’s Esthetic and Ethical spheres (“Just as the Esthetic cannot conceive of Fate in its own terms, the Ethical cannot conceive of Will”). Most powerfully of all, Auden again displays a fascination with marriage that can only have come from Kierkegaard. In the following passage, he views a certain marital crisis in light of the three spheres of existence and reaches a highly Kierkegaardian conclusion: A married man and a married woman are tempted to commit adultery. They consult the Esthetic who asks smiling, “Are you in love? Really? You’re quite sure? Then, children, I give you my blessing.” Just to be on the safe side they consult the Ethical also who exclaims: “How dare you suggest such a thing. Quite inexcusable under any circumstances. But there, there, don’t cry. I’ll help you. I have here some excellent sedative pills. Take two every three hours.” As a last resort they consult the Religious who, before they can even have begun to tell their story, says: “I know what you are going to ask. If you are not in love, the question is academic and you should be ashamed of wasting my time and yours. If you are in love, I am very glad, but the answer is no.”

And elsewhere in the “Notes,” Auden treats marriage as an ideal state against which other stages on life’s way are measured and found wanting: The difference between a genuine Judaism and a genuine Christianity is like the difference between a young girl who has been promised a husband in a dream, and a married woman who believes that she loves and is loved. The young girl knows that the decisively important thing has not yet happened to her . . . To the married woman, on the other hand, the decisively important thing has already happened, and because of this everything in the present is significant; she is perfectly content to discuss the coming election with her partner, to listen to the children’s account of the football game, to dance and laugh with the fat but still gallant old novelist, to spend an afternoon playing bridge at the Ladies Club, not because she thinks they are

102

Influential Ghosts serious matters, but because what is serious is no longer something she has to be on the lookout to discover.37

But the happy marriage could not last forever. “In Sickness and in Health” was all well and good, but Auden’s poetic vows to love, honor and obey Kierkegaard soon fell into conflict with his own evolving beliefs, and before long he was writing poems and essays in which he expressed his decidedly mixed feelings about many of Kierkegaard’s most important ideas. Just as Auden’s impassioned borrowing of Hardy’s “hawk’s vision” gradually gave way to an emphasis on human perspective, and the importance of human choice that accompanied it; just as his structural allusions to earlier poems contained elements of both homage and critique; and just as his elegies both celebrated and blamed the people who inspired them, his love affair with Kierkegaard was a rocky one in which early infatuation led to later disillusionment, first love to the trials and tribulations of a struggling marriage. Auden’s critiques of Kierkegaard often found their way into his writings on much broader topics. In his contribution to a 1950 Partisan Review forum on “Religion and the Intellectual,” for example, Auden wrote that “Kierkegaard’s statement that a passionate commitment to an untruth is religiously superior to a lukewarm interest in the truth is excellent polemics in a situation where both parties are agreed as to what the truth is. When they are not, it is highly dangerous. To kick a beggar or to give him a dime may both be existentially ‘authentic’ choices of oneself, but we need to know in what respects they differ.”38 These sharp remarks, which appear under the subheading “Objective and Subjective,” may not constitute a thorough critique of Kierkegaard, but they certainly contain a trenchant attack on the existentialist cult of “authenticity” whose members, rightly or wrongly, viewed Kierkegaard as a founding father. In a 1968 essay, “A Knight of Doleful Countenance: Second Thoughts on Kierkegaard,” Auden’s critique of Kierkegaard—though always fairminded—is far more sweeping and systematic. Auden begins the essay by warily circling his target, remarking that Like Pascal, Nietzsche, and Simone Weil, Kierkegaard is one of those writers whom it is very difficult to estimate justly. When one reads them for the first time, one is bowled over by their originality (they speak in a voice one has never heard before) and by the sharpness of their insights (they say things which no one before them has ever said,

In Health and in Sickness

103

and which, henceforward, no reader will ever forget). But with successive readings one’s doubts grow, one begins to react against their overemphasis on one aspect of the truth at the expense of all others, and one’s first enthusiasm may all too easily turn into an equally exaggerated aversion.

Auden goes on to enumerate these “doubts,” among which are the curious fact that one cannot imagine Kierkegaard as a child, and that he “suffers from one great literary defect, which is often found in literary geniuses: he never knows when to stop . . . for fear of the blank silence which might follow if he did.” But throughout the essay, Auden also expresses profound reservations about a particular aspect of Kierkegaard’s life and work—reservations that appear, in various guises, throughout his later poems as well, and focus on Kierkegaard’s gloomy, life-denying tendencies, his refusal to appreciate human beings or Christianity for all their complex and colorful multiplicity. “Given his extraordinary upbringing,” Auden writes, “it is hardly surprising that Kierkegaard should have become—not intellectually but in his sensibility—a Manichee. That is to say, though he would never have denied the orthodox doctrine that God created the world, and asserted that matter was created by an Evil Spirit, one does not feel in his writings that, whatever sorrows and sufferings a man may have to endure, it is nonetheless a miraculous blessing to be alive.” The critique continues: “Like all heretics, conscious or unconscious, he is a monodist, who can hear with particular acuteness one theme in the New Testament—in his case, the theme of suffering and self-sacrifice—but is deaf to its rich polyphony . . . The Passion of Christ, for example, was to Kierkegaard’s taste, the Nativity and Epiphany were not.” 39 It is significant, here and elsewhere, that Auden was not criticizing Kierkegaard by simply returning to his old liberal humanist values, but rather, having so thoroughly assimilated Kierkegaard’s views, now felt beyond him. (As Auden once remarked in an interview about existentialism in general, it had “done all it can, and is now a danger.”40) In Auden’s view, Kierkegaard’s narrow focus not only made for cumbersome reading—it was also a deformation of his own religion. “It is quite true,” the poet wrote of the philosopher, “that, as he complained, an overemphasis on the joy of Christmas at the expense of sorrow on Good Friday can produce an all too cozy version of Christianity, but to reject Christmas altogether is to say that the importance given it in the Gospel narratives was un-Christian.” Auden found all his suspicions

104

Influential Ghosts

about Kierkegaard’s distaste for Christmas confirmed in his description of human birth: . . . the entrance to this room (life on earth) is a nasty, muddy, humble stairway and it is impossible to pass without getting disgustingly soiled oneself.41

This disgusted account, had any number of other modern writers stumbled upon it, would have found fit audience indeed. But Auden wanted nothing to do with it, and proposed the writings of the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer—whose death at the hands of the Nazis Auden had earlier commemorated in his elegy “Friday’s Child”—as a healthy alternative to its, and Kierkegaard’s, morbidity. Reminding us that the theologian “speaks with the authority of someone who, unlike Kierkegaard, was actually martyred,” Auden writes that Bonhoeffer has “the proper corrective”: We should love God eternally with our whole hearts, yet not so as to compromise or diminish our earthly affections, but as a kind of cantus fermus to which the other melodies of life provide the counterpoint. Earthly affection is one of those contrapuntal themes, a theme which enjoys autonomy of its own.

Kierkegaard, in short, may have had astonishing and wise things to say about almost everything under the sun, but fell short when it came to such subjects as brotherly love. Auden, addressing these flaws, noted that while “It is certainly at least partially true that, as Kierkegaard says, ‘Erotic love is selflove, friendship is self-love’ . . . according to the Gospels Christ never condemns erotic love and friendship as sinful; He merely says that since they come ‘naturally’ to human beings, men and women must not take moral credit for them.” Again Auden cites Bonhoeffer’s earthier teachings as a corrective: To long for the transcendent when you are in your beloved’s arms is, to put it mildly, a lack of taste and it is certainly not what God expects of us . . . If he pleases to grant us some overwhelming earthly bliss, we ought not to try and be more religious than God himself. 42

Auden’s Modern Canterbury Pilgrims essay, despite its narrative of the time when he first started reading Kierkegaard, contains some harsh jabs at him as well—foremost among them the accusation that “A planetary visitor might

In Health and in Sickness

105

read through the whole of his voluminous works without discovering that human beings are not ghosts but have bodies of flesh and blood.” Kierkegaard may have understood our minds through and through, but he didn’t seem to find our bodies worth mentioning—didn’t even seem to acknowledge that we have them. Auden continues: although “As a spirit, a conscious person endowed with free will, every man has, through faith and grace, a unique ‘existential’ relation to God,” one that “few since St. Augustine have described . . . more profoundly than Kierkegaard,” every man also “has a secondary relation to God which is neither unique nor existential: as a creature composed of matter, as a biological organism, every man, in common with everything else in the universe, is related by necessity to the God who created the universe and saw that it was good, for the laws of nature to which, whether he likes it or not, he must conform are of divine origin.”43 Not content to let Bonhoeffer’s words speak for him, Auden wrote several poems in which he quietly but powerfully corrected Kierkegaard’s blindness to the body. Some of these poems are deadly serious, and some are imbued with what Auden had called, in New Year Letter, a “reverent frivolity” (CP 224), but they all remind us—and the hovering ghost of Kierkegaard— to take our bodies seriously. Bodies may be frail and flawed, the poems assert, but we need them in order to live and love, and should therefore be eternally grateful to have them. In his Academic Graffiti—a series of clerihews written from 1952 to 1970—Auden offers the following rebuke: Søren Kierkegaard Tried awfully hard To take The Leap But fell in a heap. (CP 681)

Although the poem doesn’t specify precisely why Kierkegaard has fallen “in a heap,” the very image of this most ethereal of thinkers splayed on the ground gives us a clue. Kierkegaard’s downfall as a philosopher, Auden seems to be implying, was that he couldn’t acknowledge his body, but couldn’t avoid it either; at the very moment that he attempted his grandiose, boldly capitalized Leap, his body tripped him up with its loud reminder of really being there. A startling coincidence helps confirm this rift between Auden and Kierkegaard. The final poem of Auden’s “Memorial for the City,” a dense and difficult meditation on the life, death and history of cities, is narrated by none other than the human body itself—a body who triumphantly reveals that all the city’s “delusions are not mine,” and that “I shall rise again to hear her

106

Influential Ghosts

judged” (CP 596). Auden even introduces this section with the command, “Let Our Weakness Speak” (CP 595): the body may be weak, but it gets capitalized and it gets the last words in the poem. Two anecdotes of Kierkegaard’s life, neither of which Auden could possibly have known, display his own, very different attitude toward this “weakness.” Kierkegaard wrote in an 1845 notebook entry that “As a sick man longs to cast off his bandages, so does my sound mind long to cast off my body’s weakness, that sweaty, sodden poultice which is the body and its weakness.”44 And in the recent Encounters with Kierkegaard, Hans Brochner, a contemporary of Kierkegaard, tells a story that demonstrates his aversion to all things corporeal: I will mention a particular expression of Kierkegaard . . . as typical. Kierkegaard had a servant who was very reliable and to whom he entrusted the discharge of all sorts of practical matters. Thus when he was going to move, he drove out in the morning, and in the evening proceeded to his new home, where everything had been put in order by the servant—even the library was in order. Kierkegaard once said of this servant, with respect to his practical thoughts: ‘He is, in reality, my body.’ 45

Kierkegaard may have lamented the body’s weakness, but Auden found cause for celebration in this same frailty. In a 1950 “Short,” he makes the following request: Give me a doctor, partridge-plump, Short in the leg and broad in the rump, An endomorph with gentle hands, Who’ll never make absurd demands That I abandon all my vices, Nor pull a long face in a crisis, But with a twinkle in his eye Will tell me that I have to die. (CP 571)

The poem is light-hearted as can be, but the request, especially when seen in the context of Auden’s changing relationship with Kierkegaard, is extremely revealing. In earlier poems like “In Sickness and in Health,” Auden had used Kierkegaard’s favorite terms enthusiastically and uncritically, proclaiming, for example, that “All chance, all love, all logic, you and I,/ Exist by grace of the Absurd” (CP 319). But in this poem, it is precisely “the absurd” from which Auden shrinks, preferring instead the fleshier and more substantial doctor,

In Health and in Sickness

107

with his humble but archetypally human contours. To be told to “abandon all my vices” is now much less important than to be told “that I have to die”; and the “gentle” doctor’s message is accompanied by “a twinkle in his eye” because it is an oddly consoling one. Life is short and all men are mortal, the poem seems to be saying; so why not come to terms with the fact that you have a body, and start enjoying yourself? The assault continued. In the 1973 poem “No, Plato, No,” written just months before his death, Auden declared in a thoroughly un-Kierkegaardian manner that I can’t imagine anything that I would like less to be than a disincarnate Spirit, unable to chew or sip or make contact with surfaces or breathe the scents of summer or comprehend speech and music or gaze at what lies beyond. (CP 888)

Bodies may grow old, and everyone must die, but for the time being Auden finds great joy in the fact that “the sublunar world is such fun,/ where Man is male or female/ and gives Proper Names to all things.” Perhaps most tersely and tellingly of all, Auden appended the following haiku-variant as a “Postscript” to “The Cave of Nakedness,” the final poem of his sequence “Thanksgiving for a Habitat”: Our bodies cannot love: But, without one, What works of Love could we do? (CP 713)

Works of Love is one of Kierkegaard’s later religious works in which, with his characteristic combination of rigor and fervor, he enumerates love’s various traits and demands: “You Shall Love Your Neighbour,” “Love is the Fulfilling of the Law,” and “Love Builds Up” are the titles of three chapters. But in Auden’s poem, love requires a body before it can be or do anything else. In this little poem, the body is neither fiercely glorified (as it might be in, say, anything by D.H. Lawrence) nor glumly forgotten (as it is, at least according to Auden, throughout the works of Kierkegaard). Rather, it is simply accepted as a necessary, vital part of life. And the larger context of the poem—a sequence, after all, about that most mundane of subjects, a

108

Influential Ghosts

human dwelling—only increases the force of its highly un-Kierkegaardian message. Auden’s critique of Kierkegaard, though reflected in many poems and essays, never took the form of all-out warfare. Kierkegaard’s writings might have suffered from his inability, as Auden put it in his poem “Precious Five,” to “Bless what there is for being”(CP 591); he might have gotten Christianity wrong in ways both large and small; he might have gone on too long and never understood what it means to be fully human. But just as his various disputes with Hardy had not kept him from remarking, in the poem “A Thanksgiving,” that it was largely thanks to Hardy’s influence that he had started writing in the first place, Auden took pains to point out in the same poem that when “hair-raising things/ that Hitler and Stalin were doing/ forced me to think about God,” it had been Kierkegaard who, along with Charles Williams and C.S. Lewis, “guided me back to belief ” (CP 891–2). And even his “Second Thoughts” essay, with all its incisive comments on Kierkegaard’s failings, concluded on a positive note: “One may doubt his theological orthodoxy,” Auden wrote, “one may question his right to demand of others a martyr’s death which he did not suffer himself, but one can have no doubt whatsoever that he was a genius.”46 Throughout this essay and many other writings, Auden proved himself a clear-eyed and astute critic of Kierkegaard. But it was a tribute to the largeness and generosity of both of their minds that Auden chose to end the essay with such a consummate work of love.

Notes

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION 1. T. S. Eliot, Selected Poems (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), 1964. 2. Aidan Wasley, “Postmodern American Poetry and the Legacy of Auden,” Yale University dissertation, 2000, 6.

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE 1. Thomas Hardy, The Complete Poems, ed. James Gibson (New York: Macmillan), 1982, 305. (Hereafter TH in the notes.) 2. For an account of this experience, see W.H. Auden, Introduction to The Protestant Mystics, reprinted in Forewords and Afterwords, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage), 1974, 69–70. 3. TH 305. 4. John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Poems, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Macmillan), 1957, 120. 5. TH 101. 6. Ibid. 150. 7. Randall Jarrell remarks that Auden’s immersion in Hardy’s poetry helps explain “his endless procession of birds and beasts” (Randall Jarrell on W.H. Auden, ed. Stephen Burt (New York: Columbia University Press), 2005, 36). 8. TH 468. 9. TH 9. 10. The passage is quoted in Monroe Spears, The Poetry of W.H. Auden: The Disenchanted Island (New York: Oxford University Press), 1963, 292–3. Spears notes (342n) that “the reference to and quotation from Hardy are omitted in the book version” of The Dyer’s Hand. 11. TH 553. 12. TH 543

109

110

Notes to Chapter One

13. S. Friedman, in “Auden and Hardy” (Notes and Queries, no. 13, 1966, 419), even suggests that “The Newcomer’s Wife” may have inspired the later Auden poem “Victor.” 14. John Bayley, The Romantic Survival (London: Constable), 1957, 39–40. 15. TH 511. 16. Ibid. 340. 17. For a detailed analysis of this poem—and its debt to Hardy—see Robert B. Shaw, “How It’s Done,” a review of Auden’s Juvenilia, Poetry, July 1995. 18. TH 7. 19. Christopher Isherwood, “Some Notes on the Early Poetry,” included inW. H. Auden: a Tribute, ed. Stephen Spender (New York: Macmillan), 1974, 74. 20. Anthony Hecht, The Hidden Law: The Poetry of W.H. Auden (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 1993, 39. 21. TH 137. 22. Ibid. 148 23. This poem, like many collected in The English Auden, originally had no title; I have therefore referred to the poem by its title in the Collected Poems. 24. This “Commentary” is omitted in the Collected Poems. 25. Edward Mendelson, Early Auden (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 1981, 200n. 26. Edward Mendelson, Introduction, W.H. Auden: Selected Poems (New York: Vintage), 1979, xiv. 27. TH 390. 28. Ibid. 437. 29. John Fuller, W.H. Auden: A Commentary (London: Faber and Faber), 1998, 454. 30. TH 75. 31. This is a full list of the Hardy poems that Auden includes, in the order in which they appear: “The Souls of the Slain,” “The Lacking Sense,” “Wessex Heights,” “Channel Firing,” “The Walk,” “I found her out there,” “The Voice,” “After a Journey,” “The Phantom Horsewoman,” “First Sight of Her and After,” “The Five Students,” “Who’s in the next room,” “Afterwards.” (Poets of the English Language, Vol. V: Tennyson to Yeats, ed. with Norman Holmes Pearson (New York: Viking), 1950). 32. TH 346. John Fuller, in A Commentary 69, has suggested the possible echoes of this poem in Auden’s work. 33. TH 434. 34. Donald Davie, Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press), 1972, 116. David Bromwich agrees, claiming in his essay “An Oracle Turned Jester” that Auden’s “typical poem like Hardy’s starts

Notes to Chapter Two

111

from a meditation which must be idiosyncratic on a landscape which must be difficult” (Harold Bloom, ed., Modern Critical Views: W.H. Auden (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), 99).

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO 1. The Poems of Wilfred Owen, ed. Jon Stallworthy (New York: Norton), 1986, 125. 2. Francesco Binni, Saggio Su Auden (Milano: U. Mursia), 1967, 19n. My translation. 3. Cleanth Brooks, Modern Poetry and the Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 1939, 133. 4. W.H. Auden, A Certain World (London: Faber and Faber), 1970, 420. 5. For a more extended discussion of how Auden’s use of allusion differs from that of other modern poets—Eliot in particular—see George W. Bahlke, The Later Auden (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press), 1970, 13, and John G. Blair, The Poetic Art of W.H. Auden (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 1965, 10. 6. Poets of the English Language, ed. W.H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson, Vol. II (New York: Vintage), 1950, 95. 7. For a comparison of these two poems, see Anthony Hecht, The Hidden Law: The Poetry of W.H. Auden (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 1993, 33– 4. 8. Richard Bozorth, in Auden’s Games of Knowledge: Poetry and the Meanings of Homosexuality (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 31–8, provides a splendid discussion of the different levels on which this poem can be read. 9. John Fuller, A Reader’s Guide to W.H. Auden (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux), 1970, 43. It should be noted than in his later study of Auden, Fuller suggests instead that the bridegroom represents “Narcissus . . . immersed in his own image” in the lake (John Fuller, Auden: A Commentary (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), 64). 10. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Poems, Ballads and Sonnets, ed. Paul Franklin Baum (New York: Doubleday), 1937, 161. 11. Ibid. 162. 12. Edward Mendelson, Early Auden (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 1981, 42. 13. Rossetti 319. 14. John Fuller notes, in fact, that “when sending an early thirty-four stanza draft to Isherwood, Auden referred to it as ‘the Locksley Hall poem.’” He also remarks that Auden wrote the poem on Easter Day, 1930 as “a poem of resolve . . . a challenge to try to start living” (Commentary 69). 15. Tennyson: A Selected Edition, ed. Christopher Ricks (Berkeley: University of California Press), 1989, 184.

112 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

Notes to Chapter Two Ibid. 185. Ibid. 188. Ibid. 191. Hecht 20. John Bayley, The Romantic Survival (London: Constable), 1957, 130. Monroe Spears, The Disenchanted Island: The Poetry of W.H. Auden (New York: Oxford University Press), 1968, 73n. Hecht 459. W.H. Auden, ed., The Oxford Book of Light Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1938, 393–4. W.H. Auden, “Rilke in English,” The New Republic (Sept. 6, 1939), 135. Fuller, Reader’s Guide, 100. David Kalstone, Sidney’s Poetry: Contexts and Interpretations (New York: Norton), 1970, 77. Sir Philip Sidney, Selected Poems, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1973, 74. Ibid. 75. Fuller, Reader’s Guide, 107. Ibid. 196. Matthew Arnold, Selected Poems and Prose, ed. Miriam Allott (London: J.M. Dent),1991, 29. Ibid. 88. Edward Callan, Auden: A Carnival of Intellect (New York: Oxford University Press), 1983, 123. John D. Rosenberg, unpublished remark, November 20, 1991. Oxford Book of Light Verse, xviii. Winthrop Mackworth Praed, Selected Poems, ed. Kenneth Allott (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 1953, 118. Ibid. 119. Ibid. 120–1. Fuller, Reader’s Guide, 112. Fuller (Ibid. 248) suggests that Auden’s late poem “A Toast” may also have been written under the influence of Praed. Sir John Suckling, Minor Poets of the Seventeenth Century, ed. R.G. Howarth (London: J.M. Dent), 1953, 185. William Shakespeare, Complete Works, ed. W.J. Craig (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1974, 22. In “Balaam and His Ass,” for example, Auden writes that “Prospero’s forgiving is more the contemptuous pardon of a man who knows that he has his enemies completely at his mercy than a heartfelt reconciliation . . . One must admire Prospero because of talents and his strength; one cannot possibly like him” (The Dyer’s Hand, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Random House), 1962, 129).

Notes to Chapter Three

113

44. Shakespeare 907. 45. Ibid. 938. 46. Stephen Spender, Preface to Herbert Greenberg, Quest for the Necessary: W.H. Auden and the Dilemma of Divided Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 1968. 47. Stephen Spender, Collected Poems 1928–1985 (New York: Oxford University Press), 1986, 32. 48. Richard Hoggart, Auden: An Introductory Essay (New Haven: Yale University Press), 1951, 30. 49. Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound, ed. Michael John King (New York: New Directions), 1976, 108. 50. John Ashbery, Selected Poems (New York: Penguin), 1985, 105–6.

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE 1. Shakespeare, Complete Works, ed. W.J. Craig (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1974, 834. 2. See Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1994, 176, for a list of the poets whose elegies Auden anthologized. 3. John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Macmillan), 1957, 124. 4. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Riesman, Neil Fraistat and Sharon B. Powers (Norton, 1977), 422. 5. W.H.Auden, The Dyer’s Hand, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage), 1989, 27. 6. Humphrey Carpenter, W.H. Auden: A Biography (London: George Allen and Unwin), 1981, 390. 7. The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Macmillan), 1989, 132. 8. Edward Callan, Auden: A Carnival of Intellect (New York: Oxford University Press), 1983, 145. 9. Quoted in John Blair, The Poetic Art of W.H. Auden (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 1965, 91. 10. Quoted in Callan 145. 11. Jahan Ramazani, Yeats and the Poetry of Death (New Haven: Yale University Press), 1990, 9. 12. Quoted in Edward Mendelson, Early Auden (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 1981, 206. 13. Alan Ansen, The Table Talk of W.H.Auden, ed. Nicholas Jenkins (London: Faber and Faber), 1990, 72. 14. Carpenter 425. 15. Ibid. 399.

114

Notes to Chapter Three

16. Yeats 246, quoted in Monroe Spears, The Disenchanted Island: The Poetry of W.H. Auden (New York: Oxford University Press), 1968, 282. 17. “Craft Interview: W.H.Auden,” New York Quarterly (Winter, 1970), 13. 18. Christopher Yu, Nothing to Admire: The Politics of Poetic Satire from Dryden to Merrill (New York: Oxford University Press), 2003, 149. 19. Callan 148. 20. Milton 124. 21. Matthew Arnold, Selected Poems and Prose, ed. Miriam Allott (London: J.M Dent), 1991, 120. 22. Ramazani, in Poetry of Mourning 185, and Yeats and the Poetry of Death 60, discusses the influence of Yeats’s urban settings on Auden’s. 23. Peter Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press), 1985, 24 and passim. 24. For many examples of this elegiac convention, see Stan Smith, By Mourning Tongues: Studies in English Elegy (Ipswich: Boydell Press), 1977, 5 ff. 25. For example, in A Certain World Auden prefaces his section on elegies with the remark that although “Poets seem to be more generally successful at writing elegies than at any other literary genre . . . the only elegy I know of which seems to me a failure is ‘Adonais.’” (A Certain World (London: Faber and Faber), 1970, 147.) In addition, the two elegies that Auden includes—Hardy’s “The Last Signal” and John Betjeman’s “I.M. Walter Ramsden”—are subdued in tone and matter-of-fact in subject matter, and therefore seem intended as a further reproof of Shelley. And behind Auden’s distaste for Shelley may lie a further criticism of Yeats, since his early poetry was hugely influenced by Shelley and he wrote— in Essays and Introductions and elsewhere—of his fondness for Shelley’s poetry. 26. Shelley 415. 27. Edward Mendelson, Later Auden (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 7–8. 28. Milton 124. 29. Dyer’s Hand 341. Just as Auden’s attack on “Adonais” may be a veiled attack on Yeats, his dislike of “Lycidas” may be partly intended as one as well, since Yeats’s poetry—as Ramazani notes in Yeats and the Poetry of Death, 14—contains numerous echoes of “Lycidas.” 30. Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning 186. 31. For a comprehensive list of all these qualifications, see Robert Roth, “The Sophistication of W.H.Auden: A Sketch in Longinian Method,” Modern Philology, February 1961. 32. Sacks 23 and passim. 33. For a fuller account of the composition of this section, see Samuel Hynes, The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 1982, 350–53.

Notes to Chapter Three

115

34. Anthony Hecht, in The Hidden Law: The Poetry of W.H. Auden (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 1993, 144, suggests that Auden’s description of Yeats as “silly” may be a deliberate paraphrase of one of the Prosecutor’s remarks in the Partisan Review debate. 35. David Bromwich, quoted in Callan 176. 36. Sacks, for example, writes of Milton’s exploitation of “the rhetorical power of the vocative mood” (95). 37. Callan (154) quotes Shelley’s claim in The Defense of Poetry that the faults of such poets as Homer, Virgil and Spenser “have been weighed and found to have been dust in the balance; if their sins were scarlet they are now white as snow; they have been washed in the blood of the mediator and redeemer Time.” 38. W.H. Auden, Lectures on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Kirsch (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 2000, 68. 39. Callan 152. 40. Yeats 328. 41. Carpenter 455. 42. See Sacks 270 for a long list of examples. 43. Smith 10. 44. Sacks 303. 45. Ramazani, Yeats and the Poetry of Death, 65. 46. Yeats 327. 47. Ibid. 346. 48. Ibid. 293. 49. For a more thorough discussion of these lines, see Stan Smith’s essay “Persuasions to Rejoice: Oedipal Dialogues with W.B. Yeats,” in Katherine Bucknell and Nicholas Jenkins, eds., “The Language of Learning and the Language of Love,” Auden Studies 2 (New York: Oxford University Press), 1994, 155–163. 50. Sacks 2 and passim. 51. Yeats 326. 52. Ibid. 348. 53. Edward Mendelson, unpublished remark, November 15, 1993. 54. Milton 125. 55. Shelley 427. 56. Hecht discusses the way in which, in these stanzas, “Freud is turned . . . into a classical hero, an Odysseus or Aeneas, who visits the Underworld in order to find out some arcane but necessary secret” (133). 57. Callan 38. 58. Carpenter 152. 59. The journal entry is not in The English Auden, but Edward Mendelson— in Early Auden, 52—quotes it. 60. Callan 19.

116

Notes to Chapter Four

61. For the most acute study of Freud’s influence on Auden’s work that I am aware of, see Katherine Bucknell’s introduction, “Freud’s Not Quite O.K.,” to Auden’s 1971 lecture “Phantasy and Reality in Poetry,” as well as the essay itself; both are in ‘In Solitude, for Company’: W. H. Auden After 1940, Auden Studies 3, ed. Katherine Bucknell and Nicholas Jenkins (New York: Oxford University Press), 1995. 62. Sacks 327. 63 Carpenter 425. 64. Dyer’s Hand 309. 65. Mendelson, Early Auden 38n. 66. Certain World 309. 67. Quoted in Ansen 95. 68. Dyer’s Hand 310. 69. Spears 199. 70. Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning 201. For a longer list of Jamesian quotations in the elegy, see John Fuller, Auden: a Commentary (London: Faber and Faber), 1998, p. 399. 71. The original version of the poem can be found in Auden’s Selected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage), 1979, 119–123. For an extremely thorough account of Auden’s revisions, see Joseph Warren Beach, The Making of the Auden Canon (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 1957, 59ff. 72. Spears 63. 73. I am grateful to David Mikics for this observation. 74. For a fuller description of the genre, as well as several examples, see Ramazani, Yeats and the Poetry of Death 136. 75. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press), 1973, 150. 76. Andrew Motion, Keats (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1997, 564. 77. Rubert Brooke, “The Soldier,”The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, ed. Jon Silkin (New York: Penguin), 1981. 78. For (necessarily incomplete) lists of these elegies, see Ian Sansom, “Auden and Influence,” in The Cambridge Companion to W.H.Auden, ed. Stan Smith (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press), 2004, 236–7, and Wasley 58-9.

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR 1. For a detailed study of this interest, see Peter Schilling, “Søren Kierkegaard and Anglo-American Literary Culture of the Thirties and Forties” (Columbia University dissertation, 1994).

Notes to Chapter Four

117

2. Monroe Spears, The Poetry of W. H. Auden (New York: Oxford University Press), 1968, 175ff. Auden’s essay, long out of print, is quoted at length in this book. 3. Charles Williams, The Descent of the Dove (London: Faber and Faber), 1939, 212–13. 4. Humphrey Carpenter, W.H. Auden: A Biography (London: George Allen and Unwin), 1981, 285. 5. Ibid. 6. Alan Ansen, The Table Talk of W. H. Auden (London: Faber and Faber), 1990, ed. Nicholas Jenkins, 7. 7. Walter Lowrie, Kierkegaard, Vol.II, (Gloucester: Peter Smith), 1962, 631. 8. For a helpful chronology of “Kierkegaard in English,” see Schilling 239ff. 9. The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, ed. Alexander Dru (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1939, 79–80. 10. Ibid. 115. 11. The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard, ed. W.H. Auden (New York: McKay), 1952, 130. 12. Lowrie 633. 13. John Fuller notes that the poem recalls Auden’s distinction in his essay on Kierkegaard in Forewords and Afterwords: “God’s love is not a law at all: that is to say, Laws of are aesthetic, Laws for ethical” (W.H. Auden: A Comentary (London: Faber and Faber), 1998, 250). 14. Williams 219. 15. Fuller 392. 16. Journals 50. 17. Either/Or, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 1944, 442, 46 and 140. 18. “A Preface to Kierkegaard,”The New Republic, May 15 1944, 686. 19. Lucy McDiarmid, Auden’s Apologies for Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 1990, 47–8. 20. Living Thoughts 109–11. 21. See, for example, Edward Callan, “Auden’s New Year Letter; A New Style of Architecture” in Monroe Spears, ed., Auden: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall), 1964. 22. Fuller 319. 23. Living Thoughts 18. 24. Quoted in Justin Repogle, Auden’s Poetry (Seattle: University of Washington Press), 1969, 56. 25. The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Edition (New York: Oxford University Press), 1989, 60.

118

Notes to Chapter Four

26. T. S. Eliot, Selected Poems (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), 1964, 100. 27. Journals 91. 28. Ibid. 118. 29. Dyer’s Hand 129. 30. Edward Callan, Auden: A Carnival of Intellect (New York: Oxford University Press), 1983, 192. 31. Kierkegaard, The Present Age, trans. Alexander Dru (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1940, 59. 32. Dyer’s Hand 63. 33. Howard Griffin, Conversations with Auden, ed. Donald Allen (San Francisco: Grey Fox Press), 1981, 60. Auden also draws heavily on Kierkegaard’s ideas about crowds in his lecture on Julius Caesar in Lectures on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Kirsch (Princeton: Princeton Uniersity Press), 2000, 126–9. 34. Dyer’s Hand 433. 35. Forewords and Afterwords, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage), 1974, 172. 36. Living Thoughts 8–17. 37. John Deedy, Auden as Didymus: The Poet as Columnist Anonymous (Mount Vernon: Paul P. Appel), 1993; the quotations are from 26, 31, 37, and 41–2 respectively. 38. Partisan Review, Feb. 1950, 124. 39. Forewords and Afterwords 182–92. 40. Edward Mendelson, Later Auden (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 1999, 277. 41. Forewords and Afterwords 191–2. 42. Ibid. 192. 43. Quoted in Spears 177. Auden also remarked in a 1972 interview with Daniel Halpern that existentialism “doesn’t pay proper attention to the body” (cited in Mendelson, Later Auden 277). 44. Josiah Thompson, Kierkegaard (New York: Knopf ), 1973, 7. 45. Encounters with Kierkegaard: A Life as Seen by His Contemporaries, collected, edited and annotated by Bruce H. Kirmmse, translated by B.H. Kirmmse and Virginia K. Larsen (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 1996. 46. Forewords and Afterwords 197.

Works Cited

Ansen, Alan, The Table Talk of W.H. Auden, ed. Nicholas Jenkins (London: Faber and Faber), 1990. Arnold, Matthew, Selected Poems and Prose, ed. Miriam Allott (London: J.M. Dent), 1991. Ashbery, John, Selected Poems (New York: Penguin), 1985. Auden, W.H., A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (London: Faber and Faber), 1971. ———.Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage), 1991. ———.Collected Prose, Vol. I: 1939–1948, ed. Edward Mendelson (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 2002. ———.“Craft Interview,” New York Quarterly, Winter 1970. ———.The Dyer’s Hand (New York: Random House), 1962. ———.The English Auden, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber), 1978. ———.Forewords and Afterwords, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Random House), 1973. ———.Juvenilia, ed. Katherine Bucknell (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 1994. ———.Lectures on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Kirsch (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 2000. ———.(ed.) The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard (New York: David McKay), 1952. ———.(ed.)The Oxford Book of Light Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1938. ———.(ed. with Norman Holmes Pearson) Poets of the English Language (New York: Viking), 1950., Vols. I—V. ———.“A Preface to Kierkegaard,” The New Republic, May 15 1944. ———.“Rilke in English,” The New Republic, Sept. 6. 1939. ———.Selected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage), 1979. Bahlke, George W., The Later Auden (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press), 1970. Bayley, John, The Romantic Survival (London: Constable), 1957.

119

120

Works Cited

Beach, Joseph Warren, The Making of the Auden Canon (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 1957. Binni, Francesco, Saggio Su Auden (Milan: U. Mursia), 1967. Blair, John, The Poetic Art of W.H. Auden (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 1965. Bloom, Harold, Modern Critical Views: W. H. Auden (New York: Chelsea House, 1986). ———.The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press), 1973. Bozorth, Richard R., Auden’s Games of Knowledge: Poetry and the Meanings of Homosexuality (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). Brooks, Cleanth, Modern Poetry and the Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 1939. Bucknell, Katherine and Jenkins, Nicholas, eds., ‘The Language of Learning and the Language of Love,’ Auden Studies 2 (New York: Oxford University Press), 1994. ———.‘In Solitude, for Company’: W.H. Auden After 1940, Auden Studies 3 (New York: Oxford University Press), 1995. Burt, Stephen, ed., Randall Jarrell on W.H. Auden (New York: Columbia University Press), 2005. Callan, Edward, Auden: A Carnival of Intellect (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1983. Carpenter, Humphrey, W.H. Auden: A Biography (London: George Allen amd Unwin), 1983. Davie, Donald, Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press), 1972. Deedy, John, Auden as Didymus: The Poet as Columnist Anonymous (Mount Vernon: Paul P. Appel), 1993. Dru, Alexander, ed., The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1939. Eliot, T.S., Selected Poems (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), 1964. Friedman, S., “Auden and Hardy,” Notes and Queries, no. 13, 1966. Fuller, John, A Reader’s Guide to W.H. Auden (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 1970. ———.W.H. Auden: A Commentary (London: Faber and Faber), 1998. Greenberg, Herbert, Quest for the Necessary: W.H. Auden and the Dilemma of Divided Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 1968. Griffin, Howard, Conversations with Auden, ed. Donald Allen (San Francisco: Grey Fox Press), 1981. Guerard, Albert J., ed., Hardy: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall), 1963. Hardy, Thomas, The Complete Poems, ed. James Gibson (New York: Macmillan), 1982. Hecht, Anthony, The Hidden Law: The Poetry of W.H. Auden (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 1993.

Works Cited

121

Hoggart, Richard, Auden: An Introductory Essay (New Haven: Yale University Press), 1951. The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Edition (New York: Oxford University Press), 1989. Howarth, R.G., ed., Minor Poets of the Seventeenth Century (London: J.M. Dent), 1953. Hynes, Samuel, The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in Engliand in the 1930s (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 1982. Kalstone, David, Sidney’s Poetry: Contexts and Interpretations (New York: Norton), 1970. Kierkegaard, Søren, Either/ Or, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton Univesity Press), 1944. ———.Fear and Trembling, trans. Robert Payne (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1939. ———.Journals, ed. Alexander Dru (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1939. ———.The Present Age, trans. Alexander Dru (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1940. ———.Stages on Life’s Way, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 1940. Kirmmse, Bruce H., ed., Encounters with Kierkegaard: A Life as Seen by His Contemporaries, trans. Bruce H. Kirmmse and Virginia K. Larsen (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 1996. Lowrie, Walter, Kierkegaard (Gloucester: Peter Smith), 1962. McDiarmid, Lucy, Auden’s Apologies for Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 1990. Mendelson, Edward, Early Auden (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 1981. ———.Later Auden (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 1999. Milton, John, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Macmillan), 1957. Motion, Andrew, Keats (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1997. Owen, Wilfred, The Poems of Wilfred Owen, ed. Jon Stallworthy (New York: Norton), 1986. Partisan Review, “Religion and the Intellectual,” Feb. 1950, #2. Pound, Ezra, Collected Early Poems, ed. Michael John King (New York: New Directions), 1976. Praed, Winthrop Mackworth, Selected Poems, ed. Kenneth Allott (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1953. Ramazani, Jahan, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press), 1994. ———.Yeats and the Poetry of Death (New Haven: Yale University Press), 1990. Repogle, Justin, Auden’s Poetry (Seattle: University of Washington Press), 1969. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, Poems, Ballads and Sonnets, ed. Paul Franklin Baum (New York: Doubleday), 1937.

122

Works Cited

Roth, Robert, “The Sophistication of W. H. Auden: A Sketch in Longinian Method,” Modern Philology, February 1961. Sacks, Peter M., The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press), 1985. Schilling, Peter, “Søren Kierkegaard and Anglo-American Literary Culture of the Thirties and Forties,” Columbia University dissertation, 1994. Shakespeare, William, Complete Works, ed. W. J. Craig (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1974. Shaw, Robert B., “How It’s Done,” Poetry, July 1995. Shelley, Percy Bysshe, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H.Reiman, Neil Fraistat, and Sharon B. Powers (New York: Norton), 1977. Sidney, Sir Philip, Selected Poems, ed. Katherine Duncan Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1973. Silkin, Jon., ed., The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (New York: Penguin), 1981. Smith, Stan, By Mourning Tongues: Studies in English Elegy (Ipswich: Boydell Press), 1977. _____, ed., The Cambridge Companion to W.H. Auden (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press), 2004. Spears, Monroe, ed., Auden: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall), 1964. ———.The Poetry of W.H. Auden: The Disenchanted Island (New York: Oxford University Press), 1968. Spender, Stephen, Collected Poems 1928–1985 (New York: Oxford University Press), 1986. ———.(ed.)W.H. Auden: A Tribute (New York: Macmillan), 1974. Tennyson, Alfred Lord, Tennyson: A Selected Edition, ed. Christopher Ricks (Berkeley: University of California Press), 1989. Thompson, Josiah, Kierkegaard (New York: Knopf ), 1973. Wasley, Aidan R., “Postmodern American Poetry and the Legacy of Auden,” Yale University dissertation, 2000. Williams, Charles, The Descent of the Dove (London: Faber and Faber), 1939. Yeats, William Butler, The Collected Poems, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Macmillan), 1983. Yu, Christopher, Nothing to Admire: The Politics of Poetic Satire from Dryden to Merrill (New York: Oxford University Press), 2003.

Index

A Academic Graffiti, 61, 105 “Adonais” (Shelley), 58, 61, 63–65, 67, 70–71, 74, 78, 81, 114n Aeneas (char.), 115n “After Reading Keats’ Ode”, 7–8 “After the Burial”, 13 Age of Anxiety, The, 47, 52 alcaic stanza, 72 “Allendale”, 13–14 Ambassadors, The (James), 76 American Scene, The (James), 76 “Among School Children” (Yeats), 67 Ansen, Allen, 62, 85 Antonio (char.) 53, 99 Ariel (char.) , 53, 98 Arnold, Matthew, 46–48, 50, 63, 87 “Art of Healing, The”, 81 Ashbery, John, 55–56 “Atlantis”, 89 “At the Grave of Henry James”, 74–80 Auden, W.H. and allusion , xi-xii, 31–56, 102, 111n isolation in early poetry, 34–37 move to America, 22, 32, 62 revisions of poems, 23–24, 66–67, 77–78, 116n and Romanticism , 5, 7, 85, 87 and theories of poetic influence, xii, 3 titles of poems, 110n visit to Spain, 84 (see also specific works and entries on elegy, Hardy and Kierkegaard)

Auerbach, Erich, 35 Augustine, St. , 105 Austen, Jane, 32

B Bahlke, George, 111n “Balaam and His Ass”, 99, 100, 112–13n Barth, Karl, 83 Baudelaire, Charles, 93 Bayley, John, 12, 41 Beach, Joseph Warren, 116n “Belief ”, 8–9, 15 Beowulf, 38 Betjeman, John, 114n Binni, Francesco, 33 Blair, John, 111n Blake, William , 40, 51, 68, 93 Bloom, Harold, xii Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 104–05 Bozorth, Richard, 111n Brecht, Bertolt, xi, 62 Brochner, Hans, 106 Bromwich, David, 66, 110–11n Brooke, Rupert, 82 Brooks, Cleanth, 33 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 68 Browning, Robert, 5 Bucknell, Katherine, 1, 5, 9, 11, 18, 115n “Bucolics”, 52 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 50

C Caliban (char.), 53–54, 99

123

124 “California”, 6–7 Callan, Edward, xi, 47, 60, 71–72, 115n Campion, Thomas, 33 Carew, Thomas, 51 Carpenter, Humphrey, 60, 62, 84–85 “Cave of Making, The” , 80 “Cave of Nakedness, The”, 107 Certain World, A, 33, 48, 76, 114n “Circus Animals’ Desertion, The” (Yeats), 69 Claudel, Paul, 67 Come Hither, (de la Mare) 41 “Commentary”, 22–24, 26 Commonweal, 101 “Consider”, 2, 18–19, 21, 27, 37–39, 50, 52, 86 Conversations with Auden, 99 Coriolanus (Shakespeare) 99 Coward, Noel, 50 “Cutty Wren, The”, 41–43, 49–50

D Dante , 56,71 “Dark Years, The”, 72 Davie, Donald, 29 de la Mare, Walter, 41 Descent of the Dove, The (Williams) 84, 89 “Dichtung and Wahrheit”, 52 Didymus, 101–02 Dodds, E.R., 85 Dog beneath the Skin, 21 Don Giovanni, (char.), 100 Don Juan (char.), 89–90, 98 Donne, John, 5 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 76 Double Man, The, 94 “Dover”, 2, 21, 24 “Dover Beach”, (Arnold) 46–48, 87

E “Easter, 1916” (Yeats), 64 Edgar (char.), 54 Eiermann, Emma, 81–82 elegies, 57–82 anthologized by A. 113n A’s ambivalent attitude toward subjects of, 58, 71, 74–75, 102 common traits of A’s, 78–81

Index conventions of, 63–65, 68–69, 74–75, 82, 114n “self-elegies ” , 82 written for A., 82, 116n “Elegy”, 81–82 “Elegy for J.F.K.”, 81 Elegy for Young Lovers, 62 Eliot, T.S., 1, 2, 5, 31, 96, 111n Empson, William, 43 Encounters with Kierkegaard, 106 existentialism, 103, 118n

F “Fairground”, 14 “Family Ghosts”, 19, 29, 36 “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape” (Ashbery) 55–56 Faust (char.) 90 Ferdinand (char.), 77 Flaubert, Gustave, 40 For the Time Being, 23, 52, 85, 92, 94–98 Freud, Sigmund, 29, 40, 57–58, 70–77, 79–80, 115–16n “Friday’s Child”, 104 Friedman, S., 110n “Frost”, 10 Frost, Robert, 1, 9, 60, 62, 67 Fuller, John, xi, 26, 37, 43, 46–47, 110– 12n, 117n

G “Genius and Apostle”, 100 “Get There if You Can”, 37, 39–41, 52 Gloucester (char.), 54 Goethe, J.W. von, 1, 33, 52 “Good-night to the Season” (Praed) 48–50 Graves, Robert, 60 Griffin, Howard, 99 Groddeck, George, 79 “Gyres, The” (Yeats), 69

H Halpern, Daniel, 118n Hamlet, (char.) , 54 Hardy, Thomas, xi, 1–29, 32, 50–51, 58, 60, 108, 109–11n, 114n A’s first reading of, 3–5

Index A. rejects pessimism of 14–18 “hawk’s vision”, 2, 4, 5, 18–28, 32, 102 technical influence on A., 5, 13–16, 28–29 “Afterwards”, 10 “Birds at Winter Nightfall”, 16 “Channel Firing”, 4 “Darkling Thrush, A”, 8 “During Wind and Rain”, 14 Dynasts, The, 4, 22 “Hap”, 10 “Heiress and Architect”, 28 “He Prefers Her Earthly”, 16 “Heredity”, 29 “He Revisits His First School”, 12 “How Great My Grief ”, 15 “In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’”, 11 “Last Signal, The”, 114n “Moon Looks in”, 24–25 “Newcomer’s Wife, The”, 12, 110n “Oxen, The”, 9 “Poems of 1912–13”, 12 Poems of the Past and the Present, 15 “Puzzled Game-Birds, The”, 16 Return of the Native, The, 4 “Shelley’s Skylark”, 8 “Temporary the All, The”, 13–14 “To the Moon”, 25 “Voice, The”, 28 “Walk, The”, 12 “Have a Good Time”, 43 Hecht, Anthony, 14, 39, 41, 111n, 115n Hegel, G.W.F., 35 “Heine’s Grave” (Arnold), 47 “He Revisits the Spot”, 12 Hitler, Adolf, 108 Hoggart, Richard, 55 “Homage to Clio”, 27–28 Homer, 115n Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 46 Horace, xi, 1, 14 “Horae Canonicae”, 52–54 Hynes, Samuel, 115n

I “I am Not a Camera”, 2, 26–27

125 “In a Train”, 12 In Memoriam (Tennyson), 64 “In Memory of Ernst Toller”, 78–80 “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory” (Yeats), 60–61 “In Memory of Sigmund Freud”, 70–76, 79–80 “In Memory of W.B.Yeats”, 33, 59–81 “In Praise of Limestone”, 24, 26 “In Sickness and in Health”, 86, 89–91, 102, 106 “In Time of War”, 23 “Ischia”, 24, 26 Isherwood, Christopher, 14

J James, Henry, 53, 57–58, 74–78, 91, 116n Jarrell, Randall, 109n John, Augustus, 60 Johnson, Samuel, 64–65 Jonson, Ben, 51 Julius Caesar, (Shakespeare) 58, 99, 118n Jung, Carl, 91 Juvenilia , 1–18

K Kallman, Chester, 22 Kalstone, David, 44 Keats, John, 4, 7, 61, 65, 82 Kennedy, John , 81 Kenyon Review, The, 61 Kierkegaard, Søren, xi, 1, 83–108 on the absurd, 88–89, 93–94, 106–07 A. begins reading, 83–85 A’s growing disillusionment with , 102–08 on being “interesting”, 98 A’s biographical similarities to, 85 on the body, 105–08, 118n on crowds, 86–89, 99, 118n first appearance in A’s poetry , 85 influence on A’s criticism, 99–102 influence on A’s long poems, 91–99 influence on A’s short poems , 85–91 “leap of faith”, 86–87, 89, 93–95, 97, 105 on marriage, 86, 89–91

126 popularity in 1930s and 1940s, 83 spheres of existence, 94, 100–01 Concept of Dread, The, 86, 95 Either/Or, 89–90, 98, 100 Fear and Trembling, 86–87 For Self-Examination, 85 Journals, 85–87, 91, 94, 97 Judge for Yourselves!, 85 Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard, The 87, 93–95, 100 Present Age, The, 86, 99 Stages on Life’s Way, 90 Works of Love, 107 Kipling, Rudyard, 67 “Knight of Doleful Countenance, A”, 102, 108

L “Lakes”, 47 “Lament for Bion” (Moschus), 82 “Landscape”, 11 Lane, Homer, 40 “Last Time, The”, 12 “Law Like Love” , 88 Lawrence, D.H., 40, 107 “Leap Before You Look”, 86–87, 89 Letter to Lord Byron, 23, 47, 50–51, 72, 76 Lewis, C.S., 108 “Like a Vocation”, 85–86 “Locksley Hall” (Tennyson) 39–41 Lohengrin, 91 Lowrie, Walter, 86, 88 Luke, Gospel of St., 96 “Lullaby”, 82 Luther, Martin, 93 “Lycidas” (Milton), 58, 63–65, 67, 70, 74, 82, 114n

M Macbeth (Shakespeare), 20 MacNeice, Louis, 58, 80 “Mail-Train, Crewe, The”, 16–18 “Making, Knowing, and Judging”, 10 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 32 “Man and the Echo” (Yeats), 69 Mandelbaum, Gwen, 89 Mandelbaum, Maurice, 89

Index Marx, Karl, 72 “Maze, The”, 88 McDiarmid, Lucy, 90–91 Mead, Margaret, 91 “Memorial for the City”, 2, 26–27, 105–06 Mendelson, Edward, 23, 64 Mendelssohn, Felix, 91 Mikics, David, 116n Milton, John, 58, 63–65, 67, 70, 74, 82, 114–15n “Miner’s Wife, The”, 11 Modern Canterbury Pilgrims, 83–84, 104–05 Montaigne, Michel de, 93 “Moon Landing”, 26–27 Moschus , 82 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 100 “Musée des Beaux Arts”, 55 Mynster, Bishop, 87

N Nabokov, Vladimir, 71 Newman, John Henry, 40 New Republic, The, 90 New Year Letter, xi, 23, 50–52, 66, 85, 90, 91–94,98, 100, 105 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 83 Niebuhr, Ursula, 99 Nietzsche, Friedrich , 102 Nineteenth Century British Minor Poets, 37 “1929”, 36–37, 39 “Nocturne”, 25–26 No More Peace! (Toller), 80 “No, Plato, No”, 107 Notebooks (James), 76 “Novelist, The”, 76 “November Eclogue” (Spenser), 64

O “Ode to Gaea”, 27 “Ode to Terminus”, 28 Odysseus (char.) 71, 115n “Old Colliery, The”, 16–17 “On This Island”, 46–48, 50 Orators, The, 41, 43 “O Tell Me the Truth About Love”, 48–50 ottava rima, 50 Owen, Wilfred, 32

Index “O Where Are You Going”, 41–43 “Oxford”, 2, 22, 24 Oxford Book of Light Verse, 41, 48–49

P Paid on Both Sides, 19, 23, 29, 35–38, 43 Partisan Review, 59, 102 Pascal, Blaise, 94, 102 “Paysage Moralisé”, 43–46, 48, 52, 55–56 Picasso, Pablo, 31 Plato, 40 “Ploughing”, 10–11 Poems (1928), 61 Poets of the English Language, 28, 43, 48, 110n Poet’s Tongue, The, 10, 43, 60 Popeye, 56 Portable Greek Reader, The, 100 Pound, Ezra, 31, 55–56 Praed, Winthrop Mackworth, 48–50, 112n “Precious Five”, 17, 108 “Preface to Kierkegaard, A” , 86 Prospero (char.), 53–54, 98–99, 112–13n Protech, David, 81 Protestant Mystics, The, 109n “Public v. The Late Mr. William Butler Yeats”, 59–60 “Pumping-Engine, Cashwell, The”, 16–17

R Ramazani, Jahan, 65, 113–14n “Religion and the Intellectual”, 102 rhyme royal, 50 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 43, 51 “River Profile”, 14 “Rose-cheekt Laura” (Campion), 33 Rosenberg, John, 48 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 37–40, 45, 50 Roth, Robert, 114n Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 93 “Rugby Chapel” (Arnold) 47

S Sacks, Peter, 68, 75, 115n “Sad Standards, The” (Spender), 55 Sandburg, Carl, 4 Sansom, Ian, 116n

127 sapphic stanza, 13–14 Schilling, Peter, 116n “The Sea and the Mirror”, 52–54, 77, 85, 98–100 “Secret Agent, The”, 34–36, 37–38, 52 “September 1, 1939”, 67 sestina, 43–46, 55–56 “Sestina: Altaforte” (Pound), 55–56 Seven Types of Ambiguity (Empson) 43 Shakespeare, William, 53–54, 58, 67, 98–99 Shaw, Robert B., 110n Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 58, 61, 63–65, 67, 70–71, 74, 114–15n “Shield of Achilles, The”, 28–29 “Shorts” , 106 Sidney, Sir Philip, 43–46, 50, 55 Smart, Christopher, 31 Smith, Stan, 114–15n “Song for Simeon, A” (Eliot), 96 “Song to David” (Smart), 31 “Sonnets from China”, 22–23 “Spain”, 66–67 Spears, Monroe, 76, 109n Spender, Stephen, 54–55, 61, 89 Spenser, Edmund, 64 Stalin, Joseph, 108 Stendhal, 76 “Stone Walls”, 9 “Strange Meeting” (Owen), 32 Strauss, Richard, 60 Stravinsky, Igor, 60 Suckling, John, 51 “Summer Night, A”, 2, 20–21, 24, 31–32

T Table Talk of W.H. Auden, The, 62 “Taller To-day”, 36, 38 Tempest, The, (Shakespeare), 53–54, 98–99 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 4, 16, 39–41, 50, 64 “Thanksgiving, A”, xi, 60, 108 “Thanksgiving for a Habitat”, 52, 80, 107 “The chimneys are smoking”, 19 “They”, 72 “This Loved One”, 29, 36 “This Lunar Beauty”, 24, 26 Thomas, Edward, 1, 2, 9, 10, 60

128 “Thomas Hardy: a Literary Transference”, 3 Thucydides, 91 “Thyrsis” (Arnold), 63 Tillich, Paul, 83 “Toast, A”, 112n “To a Toadstool”, 6–7 Toller, Ernst, 58, 78–80 Tolstoy, Leo, 76 “To Marguerite—Continued” (Arnold) 47 “Tonight when a full storm surrounds the house”, 61 “Traction-Engine, The”, 14, 16 triolet, 15–16 Tristan and Isolde (chars.), 89 “Two Triolets”, 15 “Tyger, The” (Blake), 68

U “Uncle Henry”, 33–34 “Under Ben Bulben” (Yeats), 68–69

Index “Us” (Spender), 55

V “Victor”, 110n Virgil, 34, 115n “Virgin and the Dynamo, The”, 99

W Waller, Edmund , 51 Wandering Jew, The (char.) 90 Wasley, Aidan, xii, 116n Weil, Simone, 102 “Whitman and Arnold”, 47 Williams, Charles, 84, 90, 108

Y “Yeats as Example”, 33, 61 Yeats, William Butler, 33, 52, 57–71, 80, 114–15n “Yee Gote-heard Gods” (Sidney), 43–46 Yu, Christopher, 63