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Introduction Cambridge University Press 0521829623 - The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden Edited by Stan Smith Excerpt More information 1 STAN SMITH Introduction ‘Of the many definitions of poetry, the simplest is still the best: “memorable speech”’, W. H. Auden wrote in the Introduction to his 1935 anthology, The Poet’s Tongue (Poet’s Tongue, p. v). Auden is one of the few modern poets whose words inhabit the popular memory. Long before the recitation of ‘Funeral Blues’ in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral, many of his phrases had passed into common use. His characterisation in ‘September 1, 1939’of the 1930s as a ‘low dishonest decade’ has become definitive and ubiquitous, invoked even in quarters not normally associated with high literacy. Dan Quayle, for example, announcing his 1999 Presidential candidacy, applied it to the Clinton years. This poem alone has supplied titles for countless books, including studies of the economic origins of World War II (A Low Dishonest Decade), Soviet espionage (The Haunted Wood), the history of saloons (Faces Along the Bar) and a play about AIDS (The Normal Heart). Such diverse co-options indicate the range of reference Auden can pack into a single poem. Ironically, a poem Auden rapidly disowned has become one of the most widely cited modern texts. Written in a ‘dive’ on New York’s Fifty-Second Street on the day Germany invaded Poland, it took on a whole new sig- nificance after 11 September 2001. The Times Literary Supplement’s ‘Letter from New York’ after those events reported that Auden’s words were now everywhere, reprinted in many major newspapers, read on national Public Radio and featured in hundreds of web chat-rooms. Students at Stuyvesant High, four blocks from Ground Zero, included the poem in a special issue of their newspaper distributed free by the New York Times, stressing its closing admonition: ‘We must love one another or die.’ Only rarely, however, did a country reeling from this assault on its security acknowledge the moral at the poem’s heart: ‘those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return’. Indeed, a nation in denial as well as in shock slapped down as un-American the few voices that dared draw the lesson which, the poem insists, all schoolchildren learn. 1 © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521829623 - The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden Edited by Stan Smith Excerpt More information stan smith The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (1993) contains forty cita- tions from Auden’s work, shrewdly succinct observations such as that on Yeats (‘silly like us’), and semi-aphoristic opening lines like those of ‘Musee´ des Beaux Arts’ or concluding ones, as in Spain’s reflections on an unfor- giving history. Auden shares with Yeats (fifty citations) and T. S. Eliot (fifty- seven citations) a talent for turning the memorable phrase. But what distin- guishes him is the range of his emotional and verbal reference. No one else strikes roots in such diverse areas of the collective linguistic unconscious as Auden. Even Yeats cannot match the range revealed by the Dictionary of Quotations, which extends from the lyric melancholy of ‘Lay your sleep- ing head’, through the gnomic utterances of the dense early poetry and the political intensities of the 1930s, to the brash demotic formula a former Tory Minister for Education, Kenneth Baker, adopted in 1980 as the title for an anthology of ‘satirical and abusive verse’: I Have No Gun, But I Can Spit. Such responses testify to an ambivalent aspect of Auden’s verse: its abil- ity, as he put it in ‘We Too Had Known Golden Hours’, to sing from the ‘resonant heart’, with words that over the decades accrue new significances and establish new connections between some original complex of particulars and later ones. That poem also registered the dangers of such a talent: one’s words may be hijacked, ‘soiled, profaned, debased’, ‘pawed-at and gossiped- over’ by the public, or concocted by meretricious editors into ‘spells that befuddle the crowd’. In 1939, newly arrived in New York, Auden spoke at a dinner to raise money for Spanish refugees. The speech’s success pro- voked a bout of self-contempt. As he wrote to a friend a few months later, ‘I suddenly found I could really do it, that I could make a fighting dem- agogic speech and have the audience roaring. I felt just covered with dirt afterwards’ (Carpenter, p. 256). Auden knew his poetry could have a similar effect. The self-loathing of the reformed sinner lies behind his expulsion of ‘September 1, 1939’, ‘A Communist to Others’ and even the revised ‘Spain 1937’ from his Collected Shorter Poems in 1966. A Foreword explained that such poems had been excised because they were ‘dishonest’, expressing feel- ings or beliefs he had never held, ‘simply because it sounded to me rhetorically effective’. This somewhat rhetorical attempt to wring rhetoric’s neck echoes Yeats echoing Verlaine. There is some irony in this, since it was Yeats Auden blamed for what a letter to Stephen Spender called in 1964 ‘my own devil of unau- thenticity . false emotions, inflated rhetoric, empty sonorities’. Yeats may indeed have made him ‘whore after lies’ (Early Auden,p.206). But in 1941 he had explicated a punning line in New Year Letter, ‘There lies the gift of double focus’, with a note to the effect that the Devil is ‘indeed, the father of 2 © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521829623 - The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden Edited by Stan Smith Excerpt More information Introduction Poetry, for poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings’. An equally emphatic pronouncement in 1968 in Secondary Worlds declared that ‘It is with good reason that the devil is called the Father of lies’, in the context of distinguishing ‘the White magic of poetry’ from the verbal ‘Black Magic’ of propaganda, which practises ‘enchantment as a way of securing domination over others’. For millions of people today words like commu- nism, capitalism and imperialism, peace, freedom and democracy, he wrote, have ‘ceased to be words, the meaning of which can be enquired into and discussed’, and have become instead ‘right or wrong noises to which the response is as involuntary as a knee-reflex’ (SW, pp. 126–9). The situation is actually a little more complicated. ‘Art poetique’,´ Verlaine’s poem denouncing rhetoric, commends the ‘chanson grise’ (grey song, neither black nor white) where ambiguity is joined to precision, open- ing itself to ‘other skies’ and ‘other loves’. But this is only a different kind of rhetoric, posturing flamboyantly in the very refusal to take sides. Auden’s gift of double focus performs a similar function. Indeed, his art is often at its richest when it testifies, rhetorically, to just such mixed feelings and neb- ulous horizons. With unabashed chutzpah, his 1939 sonnet about Verlaine’s lover Rimbaud speaks of ‘the rhetorician’s lie’ bursting like a frozen pipe to make a poet. As he wrote in his elegy for Yeats, ‘the words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living’. But it is in part rhetorical contrivance which ensures their resurrection as apparently direct responses to events they could not possibly have foreseen. From his first public collection, Poems (1930), Auden was everywhere in the 1930s, both text and talisman. Naomi Mitchison in The Week-end Review, 25 October 1930, welcomed the volume as the harbinger of ‘the New Generation’, proof that ‘the country is not going to the dogs after all’. Dylan Thomas carried around a copy of the volume until it fell to pieces. In 1932 John Hayward, the keeper of T. S. Eliot’s critical conscience, wrote of The Orators as ‘the most valuable contribution to English poetry since The Waste Land’ (Haffenden, p. 114). The ‘Auden effect’ lay in that ability to catch the changing moods of the time in luminous images, magical phrases and breath- taking aperc¸us, expressing sentiments that people were unaware they shared until they read him. Such sentiments were often decidedly political, indicting a disintegrating social and economic system ripe for fascism, and propagat- ing an alternative future in the form of a woolly, undefined ‘communism’ which bore little relation to the brutalities of Stalin’s Soviet Union. Auden’s poems, however, also had a distinctive personal timbre, the sense of a vulnerable, embattled self which made them iconic to a generation whose psychic integrity seemed to be threatened by the impersonal forces 3 © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521829623 - The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden Edited by Stan Smith Excerpt More information stan smith of a history out of control. ‘Consider this and in our time’ defined the stance of a generation, looking down on its culture with disdainful detachment from the Olympian heights of hawk or airman. Another poem set that gen- eration’s agenda as the quest for ‘New styles of architecture, a change of heart’. The question at the start of The Orators in 1932, ‘What do you think about England, this country of ours where nobody is well?’ was asked with varying degrees of anxiety throughout the decade. The title poem of his major collection of 1936, Look, Stranger!, invited its readers to look without illusions on contemporary Britain, ‘this island now’. If Auden was the unremitting critic of ‘our time’, a large part of his appeal lay in the verbal and imagistic ferocity, the rhetorical splendour, of his denun- ciations and dissections. His readers went to his poetry to make their flesh crawl.
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