W. H. Auden 1907-1973

http://www.englishworld2011.info/ 2421 W. H. AUDEN 1907-1973 Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, England, the son of a doctor and of a former nurse. He was educated at private schools and Christ Church, Oxford. After gradu- ation from Oxford he traveled abroad, taught school in England from 1930 to 1935, and later worked for a government film unit. His sympathies in the 1930s were with the left, like those of most intellectuals of his age, and he went to Spain during its Civil War, intending to serve as an ambulance driver on the left-wing Republican side. To his surprise he felt so disturbed by the sight of the many Roman Catholic churches gutted and looted by the Republicans that he returned to England without fulfilling his ambition. He traveled in Iceland and China before moving to the United States in 1939; in 1946 he became an American citizen. He taught at a number of American colleges and was professor of poetry at Oxford from 1956 to 1960. Most of his later life was shared between residences in New York City and in Europe—first in southern Italy, then in Austria. Auden was the most prominent of the young English poets who, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, saw themselves bringing new techniques and attitudes to English poetry. Stephen Spender, C. Day Lewis, and Louis MacNeice were other liberal and leftist poets in this loosely affiliated group. Auden learned metrical and verbal techniques from Gerard Manley Hopkins and Wilfred Owen, and from T. S. Eliot he took a conversational and ironic tone, an acute inspection of cultural decay. Thomas Hardy's metrical variety, formal irregularity, and fusion of panoramic and intimate perspectives also proved a useful example, and Auden admired W. B. Yeats's "serious reflective" poems of "personal and public interest," though he later came to disavow Yeats's grand aspirations and rhetoric. Auden's English studies at Oxford familiarized him with the rhythms and long alliterative line of Anglo-Saxon poetry. He learned, too, from popular and folk culture, particularly the songs of the English music hall and, later, American blues singers. The Depression that hit America in 1929 hit England soon afterward, and Auden and his contemporaries looked out at an England of industrial stagnation and mass unemployment, seeing not Eliot's metaphorical Waste Land but a more literal Waste Land of poverty and "depressed areas." Auden's early poetry diagnoses the ills of his country. This diagnosis, conducted in a verse that combines irreverence with craftsmanship, draws on both Freud and Marx to show England now as a nation of neurotic invalids, now as the victim of an antiquated economic system. The intellectual live- liness and nervous force of this work made a great impression, even though the com- pressed, elliptical, impersonal style created difficulties of interpretation. Gradually Auden sought to clarify his imagery and syntax, and in the late 1930s he produced "Lullaby," "Musee des Beaux Arts," "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," and other poems of finely disciplined movement, pellucid clarity, and deep yet unsentimental feeling. Some of the poems he wrote at this time, such as "Spain" and "September 1, 1939," aspire to a visionary perspective on political and social change; but as Auden became increasingly skeptical of poetry in the grand manner, of poetry as revelation or as a tool for political change, he removed these poems from his canon. (He came to see as false his claim in "September 1, 1939" that "We must love one another or die.") "Poetry is not magic," he said in the essay "Writing," but a form of truth telling that should "disenchant and disintoxicate." As he continued to remake his style during World War II, he created a voice that, in contrast not only to Romanticism but also to the authoritarianism devastating Europe, was increasingly flat, ironic, and conversational. He never lost his ear for popular speech or his ability to combine elements from popular art with technical formality. He daringly mixed the grave and the flip- pant, vivid detail and allegorical abstraction. He always experimented, particularly in ways of bringing together high artifice and a colloquial tone. http://www.englishworld2011.info/ 2422 / W. H. AUDEN The poems of Auden's last phase are increasingly personal in tone and combine an air of offhand informality with remarkable technical skill in versification. He turned out, as if effortlessly, poems in numerous verse forms, including sestinas, sonnets, ballads, canzones, syllabics, haiku, the blues, even limericks. As he became ever more mistrustful of a prophetic role for the poet, he embraced the ordinary—the hours of the day, the rooms of a house, a changeable landscape. He took refuge in love and friendship, particularly the love and friendship he shared with the American writer Chester Kallmann. Like Eliot, Auden became a member of the Church of England, and the emotions of his late poetry—sometimes comic, sometimes solemn—were grounded in an ever deepening but rarely obtrusive religious feeling. In the last year of his life he returned to England to live in Oxford, feeling the need to be part of a university community as a protection against loneliness. Auden is now generally rec- ognized as one of the masters of twentieth-century English poetry, a thoughtful, seri- ously playful poet, combining extraordinary intelligence and immense craftsmanship. A note on the texts: Auden heavily revised his poems, sometimes omitting stanzas (as in "Spain" and "In Memory of W. B. Yeats") or even entire poems ("Spain" and "September 1, 1939"). The texts below are reprinted as they first appeared in book form and again in his Selected Poems: A New Edition, ed. Edward Mendelson (1989). Petition1 Sir, no man's enemy, forgiving all But will his negative inversion, be prodigal: Send to us power and light, a sovereign touch2 Curing the intolerable neural itch, 5 The exhaustion of weaning, the liar's quinsy,0 tonsillitis And the distortions of ingrown virginity. Prohibit sharply the rehearsed response And gradually correct the coward's stance; Cover in time with beams those in retreat 10 That, spotted, they turn though the reverse were great; Publish each healer that in city lives Or country houses at the end of drives; Harrow the house of the dead; look shining at New styles of architecture, a change of heart. Oct. 1929 1930 On This Island1 Look, stranger, at this island now The leaping light for your delight discovers, Stand stable here And silent be, 1. This title, by which the poem is widely known, ulous cure for disease (cf. "sovereign" as an adjec- is from Auden's later collections. Many of his early tive, meaning "supreme, all-dominating"). poems first appeared without titles. 1. The title is from Auden's later collections. 2. The king's touch was often regarded as mirac- http://www.englishworld2011.info/ LULLABY / 2423 5 That through the channels of the ear May wander like a river The swaying sound of the sea. Here at the small field's ending pause Where the chalk wall falls to the foam, and its tall ledges 10 Oppose the pluck And knock of the tide, And the shingle scrambles after the suck- ing surf, and the gull lodges A moment on its sheer side. 15 Far off like floating seeds the ships Diverge on urgent voluntary errands; And the full view Indeed may enter And move in memory as now these clouds do, 20 That pass the harbour mirror And all the summer through the water saunter. Nov. 1935 1936 Lullaby1 Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm; Time and fevers burn away Individual beauty from 5 Thoughtful children, and the grave Proves the child ephemeral: But in my arms till break of day Let the living creature lie, Mortal, guilty, but to me 10 The entirely beautiful. Soul and body have no bounds: To lovers as they lie upon Her tolerant enchanted slope In their ordinary swoon, is Grave the vision Venus° sends Roman goddess of love Of supernatural sympathy, Universal love and hope; While an abstract insight wakes Among the glaciers and the rocks 20 The hermit's sensual ecstasy. Certainty, fidelity On the stroke of midnight pass 1. Title from Auden's later collections. http://www.englishworld2011.info/ 2424 / W. H. AUDEN Like vibrations of a bell, And fashionable madmen raise 25 Their pedantic boring cry: Every farthing2 of the cost, All the dreaded cards foretell, Shall be paid, but from this night Not a whisper, not a thought, 30 Not a kiss nor look be lost. Beauty, midnight, vision dies: Let the winds of dawn that blow Softly round your dreaming head Such a day of sweetness show 35 Eye and knocking heart may bless, Find the mortal world enough; Noons of dryness see you fed By the involuntary powers, Nights of insult let you pass 40 Watched by every human love. Jan.1937 1937,1940 Spain1 Yesterday all the past. The language of size Spreading to China along the trade-routes; the diffusion Of the counting-frame and the cromlech;2 Yesterday the shadow-reckoning in the sunny climates. Yesterday the assessment of insurance by cards, The divination of water; yesterday the invention Of cartwheels and clocks, the taming of Horses. Yesterday the bustling world of the navigators. Yesterday the abolition of fairies and giants, The fortress like a motionless eagle eyeing the valley, The chapel built in the forest; Yesterday the carving of angels and alarming gargoyles; The trial of heretics among the columns of stone; Yesterday the theological feuds in the taverns And the miraculous cure at the fountain; Yesterday the Sabbath of witches; but to-day the struggle.

Load more