Wasley_final.indb 1 9/8/10 6:32:43 AM PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS Princeton and Oxford Wasley_final.indb 2 9/8/10 6:32:44 AM Wasley_final.indb 3 9/8/10 6:32:45 AM Copyright © 2011 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW press.princeton.edu All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wasley, Aidan, 1968– The age of Auden : postwar poetry and the American scene / Aidan Wasley. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-691-13679-0 (alk. paper) 1. American poetry—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Auden, W. H. (Wystan Hugh), 1907–1973—Influence. 3. Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.)— History—20th century. I.˜Title. PS323.5.W37 2011 813’.5409—dc22 2010025252 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Garamond Premier Pro Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Wasley_final.indb 4 9/8/10 6:32:45 AM To Jan and Vernagh Wasley Wasley_final.indb 5 9/8/10 6:32:45 AM Wasley_final.indb 6 9/8/10 6:32:45 AM List of Abbreviations ix Preface xiii Prologue: Auden in “Atlantis” 1 Part I 1 A Way of Happening: Auden’s American Presence 33 Part II 2 Father of Forms: Merrill, Auden, and a Fable of Influence 77 3 The Gay Apprentice: Ashbery, Auden, and a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Critic 109 4 The Old Sources: Rich, Auden, and Making Something Happen 145 Epilogue: He Became His Admirers: Saying Goodbye to Auden 175 Notes 209 Index 243 Wasley_final.indb 7 9/8/10 6:32:45 AM Wasley_final.indb 8 9/8/10 6:32:45 AM ACW Adrienne Rich, A Change of World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 1951). ADW Adrienne Rich, An Atlas of a Difficult World: Poems 1988–1991 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991). AWK John Ashbery, As We Know (New York: Penguin, 1979). BBP Adrienne Rich, Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986). CLS James Merrill, The Changing Light at Sandover (New York: Knopf, 1992). CN James Merrill, Collected Novels and Plays (New York: Knopf, 2002). [Auden] CP W. H. Auden, Collected Poems (New York: Vintage, 1991). [Merrill] CP James Merrill, Collected Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002) ix Wasley_final.indb 9 9/8/10 6:32:45 AM x Abbreviations CPM James Merrill, Collected Prose (New York: Knopf, 2004). DCL Adrienne Rich, Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974–1977 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993). DF Adrienne Rich, Dark Fields of the Republic (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995). DM W. H. Auden, Double Man (New York: Random House, 1941). DH W. H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand (New York: Vintage, 1989). EA W. H. Auden, The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings 1927–1939, Edward Mendelson, ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1986). FD Adrienne Rich, The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New 1950–1984 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984). HL John Ashbery, Hotel Lautréamont (New York: Knopf, 1992). Libretti W. H. Auden, The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Libretti 1939–1973, Edward Mendelson, ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 1993). LSS Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979). MS Adrienne Rich, Midnight Salvage (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999). Prose W. H. Auden, The Complete Works of Auden: Prose Volume II 1939–1948, Edward Mendelson, ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). RS John Ashbery, Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles 1957–1987 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). S Adrienne Rich, Sources (Woodside, CA: Heyeck Press, 1983). [Ashbery] SP John Ashbery, Selected Poems (New York: Viking, 1985). Wasley_final.indb 10 9/8/10 6:32:45 AM Abbreviations xi [Auden] SP W. H. Auden, Selected Poems (New York: Vintage, 1979). ST John Ashbery, Some Trees (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1956). TP John Ashbery, Three Poems (New York: Ecco, 1989). TPlays John Ashbery, Three Plays (Manchester, UK: Carcanet, 1988). VN John Ashbery, The Vermont Notebook (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1975). WFT Adrienne Rich, What Is Found There (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993). Wasley_final.indb 11 9/8/10 6:32:45 AM Wasley_final.indb 12 9/8/10 6:32:45 AM When W. H. Auden died in 1973, Elizabeth Bishop offered this tribute in a special memorial issue of The Harvard Advocate: When I was in college, and all through the thirties and for- ties, I and all my friends who were interested in poetry, read him constantly. We hurried to see his latest poem or book, and either wrote as much like him as possible, or tried hard not to. His then leftist politics, his ominous landscape, his intimations of betrayed loves, war on its way, disasters and death, matched exactly the mood of our late-depression and post-depression youth. We admired his apparent toughness, his sexual cour- age—actually more honest than Ginsberg’s, say, is now, while still giving expression to technically dazzling poetry. Even the most hermetic early poems gave us the feeling that here was someone who knew—about psychology, geology, birds, love, the evils of capitalism—what have you? They colored our air and made us feel tough, ready, and in the know, too.1 xiii Wasley_final.indb 13 9/8/10 6:32:46 AM xiv preface As Bishop recalls, for American poets of her generation, including Randall Jarrell and Robert Lowell, Auden’s poetry exerted a glamorous and influential appeal. His honesty, his boldness, his engagement with science and politics, and his facility with form all seemed to suggest for these poets a promising path out of the Waste Land, and a number of them—particularly Jarrell—early on began to import characteristically Audenesque diction, imagery, and attitudes into their own work. But for these poets it was the English Auden—the Auden of the 1930s—that mattered, and by the time he arrived in New York in 1939, their careers were already underway, their poetic identities formed, and Auden’s im- portance to their writing was on the wane. Indeed, by the early 1940s, Jarrell had begun to turn on his mentor, harshly attacking Auden in re- views and inaugurating a critical assault on Auden’s perceived American decline that Jarrell would forcefully pursue for the rest of his career. But the poets of the generation after Bishop and Jarrell had a very different relation to Auden. For them, it was the American Auden who had the greatest impact on their careers. This generation began writing poetry during an extended historical period—from the early 1940s to the late 1950s—when Auden reigned as his adopted nation’s chief arbiter of poetic fashion and form. From his famously cluttered apartment on St. Mark’s Place in Greenwich Village and his summer home on Ischia off the coast of Naples, Auden presided over the American poetic land- scape, turning his legendary industriousness not only toward remaking his own poetic project, but toward shaping, fostering, and guiding the generation of American poets who would follow him. These poets not only read Auden, many of them actually got to know him personally during crucial early moments in their poetic growth. He was, for count- less younger writers, a defining figure for post–World War II American poetry and a major influence on their own poetic art. The Age of Auden explores the scope and depth of that influence. When introducing American poetry to British readers in 1956, Auden observed, “The first thing that strikes a reader about the best American poets is how utterly unlike each other they are” [DH, 366]. If American poetry has always been defined by its diversity, one of the aims of this book is to show how the expatriate Auden himself helped point an enormous range of American poets on their own different paths, and to argue that it is impossible to talk about American poetry in the second half of the Wasley_final.indb 14 9/8/10 6:32:46 AM preface xv twentieth century—in all its diversity—without talking about Auden. An important frame for that argument is the tension posed by the ap- parent paradox in the first poem Auden wrote after moving to America, in which he claims that “Poetry makes nothing happen” and yet can still be “A way of happening.” American poets after Auden arrange them- selves in relation to his influence often in terms of how they read those two competing lines, and the obsessive recurrence of this tension in the poems of Auden’s inheritors—and necessarily in this book—is one more way of gauging what Auden makes happen in American poetry. This is a book about poetry and people, since the story of Auden’s American influence is one of human connections almost as much as it is about links across texts. It proposes a new literary history that sees Auden as a central figure in postwar American poetic culture while also suggesting new readings, not just of Auden’s American project, but of those of a number of his major American successors. And while read- ers of American poetry and readers of Auden—especially academic readers—have at times occupied opposing critical turf, I hope this book can put these two readerships in fruitful and friendly conversation, since Auden and American poets were themselves most certainly talking to, and occasionally getting drunk with, each other.