Notes 1. Taming the Monster 1. Geoffrey Grigson, ‘Auden as a Monster’, New Verse, 26–7 (1937), 13–17 (p. 13). 2. New Signatures appeared for the first time in 1932, New Country in 1933; New Verse was published from January 1933 until January 1939, New Writing from Spring 1936 until 1950. See Samuel Hynes, The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s (London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1976), pp. 74–5, 102, 114, 198. 3. Richard Hoggart’s Auden: An Introductory Essay (London: Chatto & Windus, 1951), the first and surprisingly good study of Auden’s works, set the tone with the remark ‘Auden’s poetry is particularly concerned with the pressures of the times’, p. 9. 4. François Duchêne, The Case of the Helmeted Airman: A Study of W. H. Auden’s Poetry (London: Chatto & Windus, 1972) is an unpleasant example of this vivisection attitude that regards the author as a part of the texts and endeavours to supply its reader not only with a textual analysis, but glimpses of the author’s psyche. Herbert Greenberg, Quest for the Necessary: W. H. Auden and the Dilemma of Divided Con- sciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968) is a more sensitive study. 5. Auden himself proves a perceptive commentator on such attitudes when he writes in the preface to The Poet’s Tongue of 1935, ‘The psy- chologist maintains that poetry is a neurotic symptom, an attempt to compensate by phantasy for a failure to meet reality. We must tell him that phantasy is only the beginning of writing; that, on the contrary, like psychology, poetry is a struggle to reconcile the unwilling subject and object; in fact, that since psychological truth depends so largely on context, poetry, the parabolic approach, is the only adequate medium for psychology’ (Pr 108). 6. Grigson, ‘Auden as a Monster’, pp. 13–14. 7. New Verse, 26–7 (1937), p. 25. 8. Rainer Emig, Modernism in Poetry: Motivations, Structures and Limits, Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature (London and New York: Longman, 1995). 9. Wolfgang Welsch, Unsere postmoderne Moderne, 2nd edn., Acta Human- iora (Weinheim: VCH, 1988). 10. Edward Mendelson, Early Auden (London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1981), although still linking texts and biography, is an important step in the direction of a long-overdue close reading. Stan Smith, W. H. Auden, Rereading Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985) manages to place Auden’s works in a larger theoretical and political framework. Günther Jarfe, Der junge Auden: Dichterische Verfahrensweisen und ihre 213 214 Notes Bedeutung in W. H. Audens Frühwerk (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1985) is an impressive structural analysis of Auden’s early writings, unfor- tunately not available in translation. The latest additions to this list are John R. Boly, Reading Auden: The Returns of Caliban (Ithaca and Lon- don: Cornell University Press, 1991) and Anthony Hecht, The Hidden Law: The Poetry of W. H. Auden (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Har- vard University Press, 1993). 11. I am therefore proposing to take ‘poetics’ in the double sense of ‘underlying structures of poetry as well as the norms created out of them’ and ‘general structures of transformation and exchange between signifying systems and discourses’. Linda Hutcheon’s useful study A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York and London: Routledge, 1988), while summarising neatly some of the general features of postmodernism, restricts her inquiry almost exclusively to fictional texts, mainly contemporary novels. Her defini- tion of poetics is ‘an open, ever-changing theoretical structure by which to order both our cultural knowledge and our critical procedures’ (p. 14). While I agree wholeheartedly with this general approach, I would also insist on an inquiry into the area in which openness and change manifest themselves in a self-referential manner, i.e. poetry. 12. Before that, one of Auden’s poems had been published in Public School Verse (1924), and some others in Oxford Poetry 1926 and Oxford Poetry 1927. John Fuller has traced an even earlier publication in Auden’s school magazine, The Greshams. See his essay ‘W. H. Auden’s First Published Poems’, Notes and Queries, 16 (Spring 1974), 81–6. 13. The relevant section is quoted in Monroe K. Spears’ seminal study (written in consultation with Auden), The Poetry of W. H. Auden: The Disenchanted Island (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 178. 2. Early Auden: Farewell to the Signified 1. Justin Replogle, Auden’s Poetry (London: Methuen, 1969), p. 3. 2. Mendelson, Early Auden, p. 33. 3. Ibid. 4. Mendelson suggests that the last three lines describe the funeral, the ‘wooden shape’ the coffin: Ibid., p. 34. 5. John Fuller, A Reader’s Guide to W. H. Auden (London: Thames & Hud- son, 1970), p. 40. A revised edition is about to appear. 6. William Logan, ‘Auden’s Images’, in W. H. Auden: The Far Interior, ed. Alan Bold, Critical Studies (London: Vision Press, 1985), pp. 106–8. 7. For a detailed theoretical discussion of ambiguity and obscurity see Michael Riffaterre, Text Production, trans. Terese Lyons (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), pp. 26 ff. 8. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Roy Harris (London: Duckworth, 1983), p. 66. 9. ‘The link between signal and signification is arbitrary’; Saussure, Course, p. 67; and ‘[a language as a structured system] exists only by virtue of a kind of contract between the members of a community’; p. 14. Notes 215 10. Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith, Cape Editions, 3 (London: Cape, 1967), pp. 48–9. 11. Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Answering the Question: What is Postmod- ernism?’, trans. Régis Durand, in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Masumi, Theory and History of Literature, 10 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 71–82 (p. 81). 12. Logan, ‘Auden’s Images’, pp. 101–2. 13. Stan Smith also recognises this, yet is overly optimistic when he writes ‘But these ghosts can be laid. The way involves memory restoring that which was lost’; W. H. Auden, p. 69. Memory, I would argue, is not re- conciliatory in Auden’s early writings, but more often than not unset- tling and threatening. 14. Logan, ‘Auden’s Images’, p. 101. 15. Ibid., p. 107. 16. Jacques Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 278–93 (p. 278). 17. Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign and Play’, p. 280. 18. ‘Event’ should be understood in the broadest sense, since the concept derives from a general theory of discourse; Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Texas Chris- tian University Press, 1976), pp. 6–12. 19. Hoggart, Introductory Essay, p. 14. 20. Mendelson, Early Auden, pp. 27–8. 21. Its final line echoes the Anglo-Saxon poem ‘Wulf and Eadwacer’, and brings in further complication. 22. Mendelson compares the ‘deity’ of the poem to an electric generator, and adds that the line contains a private pun on Auden’s erotic use of the word ‘power’; Early Auden, p. 87. 23. Spears, Poetry, p. 44. 24. Ibid., p. 4. 25. Mendelson, Early Auden, p. 87. 3. Libidinous Charades: The Auden-Isherwood Plays 1. Fuller, Reader’s Guide, p. 13. 2. John Boly rightly points out that the social parity of the families leaves no room for a material explanation of the conflicts; neither do they display ideological differences; The Returns of Caliban, p. 65. 3. Jean-François Lyotard describes postmodernity precisely as a farewell to master narratives and an embracing of a plurality of narratives: Postmodern Condition, pp. 31–7. 4. This programme note to Auden’s The Dance of Death of 1933 is repro- duced in Fuller’s Reader’s Guide, p. 13. 5. This might be an echo of ‘Winter kept us warm’ in the ‘Burial of the Dead’ section of Eliot’s The Waste Land. Yet what is a personal utterance that symbolises a spiritual state in Eliot’s poem becomes a psycholo- gical statement that stands for a socio-political argument in Auden. 216 Notes 6. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Thinking Gender (New York and London: Routledge, 1990). 7. Humphrey Carpenter, W. H. Auden: A Biography (London: Allen & Unwin, 1981), p. 172. Yet whether the feet simply represent instinct and reason, as he claims, remains questionable. This view might itself be class-biased. 8. Carpenter draws a detailed picture of the complex writing process behind the plays in Auden, pp. 169–73. 9. Carpenter, Auden, p. 59. 10. There might be a further implication in this apparent rift between Stagmantle and Britishness. Auden, who repeatedly turns the new- paper barons of the 1930s into figures in his writings, might be allud- ing to the Canadian background of Baron Beaverbrook and/or the Irish ones of Viscount Rothermere (Harold Sydney Harmsworth) and his brother Lord Northcliffe (Alfred Charles William Harmsworth). 11. Here Ransom echoes some of the sentiments prominent in classical modernist poems of the denunciation of the masses, as in Eliot’s The Waste Land and its ‘hooded hordes swarming’, and more explicitly Pound’s ‘rabble’ and ‘unkillable infants of the very poor’ in ‘The Gar- den’ and the frequent outbursts in The Cantos. The élitism of the truly strong man is a modernist feature rather than a postmodern one. 12. Sigmund Freud, ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’, On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, ed. Angela Richards, The Pelican Freud Library, xi (15 vols.; London: Pelican, 1984), pp. 59–97. 13. I have discussed this problem in the section ‘Modernist Poetry as a Universal Compensation Strategy’ in Modernism in Poetry, pp.