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THE ELEMEIT OF MYTH IN THE POETRY OF N. H. AUDEN

7“,

Patricia Jean fiendall

A THESIS
Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies of Michigan
State College of Agriculture and Applied Science
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS

Department of English

1949

TH ESIS

 

PREFACE

Because Auden'e poetry is recent and somewhat obscure, if it is read
at all, it is usually in scattered places that the casual reader may happen
to encounter it, in anthologies. periodicals. or perhaps in separate small
volumes of Anden’s verse. the impression which results from such a lim-
ited familiarity with his work is in meet cases a false one, for Auden's
literary development has been so varied and. in a sense. so widely experi-
mental that in order to say with any confidence that one understands the
nature of his work it is necessary to read a good deal of it, and to approach
it by following duden's degelepnent through the various personal discoveries
which he used in his poetry, and also through the various relationships that
exist between scientific. political and literary movements --- in a broader
sense. the impact of contemporary life upon poetry.

This does not mean that single poens cannot be read with pleasure. A
small acquaintance with Auden's poetry can reveal to the perceptive reader
its basic and residual qualities. and although it may be difficult. cehtem—
perary poetry. like poetry of any century can be enjoyed without specialized
knowledge, either biographical or historical. However. because of Auden's
affiliations with certain nedern subject matters. Psycheleg. Marxian. and
the more traditional compact with Christianity. still contemporary, however
because it is connected with a literary movement that has come out of the
peculiar circumstances of our own times. he is frequently misplaced in one
or another of these categories. Those who have read the early Auden are
apt to think of hia entirely in terns of "Get there if you can and see the
land you were once proud to ewn.‘ or I'tiir, no man's enemy...." fhose who

have sampled the middle period may characterise Auden by the no less serious,

eeenxn

11

but more nature complexity of “September 1, 1939.' or “the New Year Letter.
Others may be distantly aware of the religious nature of his later work.

what I am trying to suggest is that Auden's poetry has a variety and
breadth sometimes misleading to a casual reader. who may mistake the tem-
porary exploratory phase. the tentative and hence partly superficial affil-
iation for the real thing. Auden is in no sense a specialized poet in the
sense that Hopkins can be considered specialized. and although he may be
opinionated. his work cannot be limited to a narrow category. In his ver-
satile use of form as well as in the various disciplines which hare pro-
vided not only a source for imagery, but a way out of the labyrinth in
which modern Art finds itself, his poetry reflects his capacity for wide
experience, which, in turn. is formed to his personal vision. and expressed
always. no natter how conventional the form he uses, in a distinctly in-
dividual style.

In attempting‘a study of this sort. one generally finds himself re-
stricted to a narrower path than he feels the nature of’his subject de-
mands. .Although it may be impossible to do Justice to Auden's complexity,
I have tried. by following one basic aspect of his work through the early,
middle. and recent poetry. to present a more comprehensive picture than
that which might be ggined from a limited approach. one that was not of
a developmental nature.

Ihis thesis is concerned with a problem which is partly aesthetic
and partly ideological. It is an attempt to demonstrate how‘Auden.has
tried to resolve the perpetual dilemma which confronts artists from time
to time, and which has attained. because of the excessive. unbalanced
and uncertain character of modern life. a peculiar prominence in our own

times: the recognition of a division between Art and Life. with the

iii

attendant moral choice of whether to establish the aesthetic as its own
criterion of value. or whether to assign to poetry the important but sub-
serviant office of bringing an ethical or religious order into life. The
proper solution to this problem is. of course. not either one of the mem—
bers of this indissoluable but sometimes disunified partnership in a su-
perior position but to erase their division, although not their difference,
which can never be obliterated. by giving them a common direction. lhat
the direction is to be is. in the last analysis. a matter of belief. that
is. an explanation of the world. with the attendant set of values involved
in such an explanation. to which both poetry and life can give full alle-
giance, the discovery. in short. of a myth which.being more than an ace-
thetic convenience. or a severe discipline that regards art as a distract-
ing and frivolous escape. can give to both Art and Life. in their orien-
tation to its single unifying effect, a proper relationship with each other.
Anden's particular definition of the relationship between.Art and.Ldfe sets
up a myth or series of myths through which Life can. in a free and figura-
tive sense. be reflected without distortion in the mirror of.Art. Art be-
comes. in turn. the medium through which can be apprehended the prevail-
ing and final values. the “Wholly'Other Life.I fhis thesis is an attempt
to trace through.Auden's use of myth in his poetry. his arrival at this
particular solution of the Lifqurt problem, and to suggest on the way.
something of the essential character of his work.

I should liha to thank Dr. A. J. M. Smith and Dr. Bernard Duffey. for
advice and encouragement that made working on this slippery subject not
only possible. but pleasant and exciting as well. I wish also to thank
Hrs. Beth Shaw Leppert for indispensable help in getting the manuscript

into its proper form.

CONTENTS

.'PART I

PART II
PART III
PART Iv

BIBLIOGRAPHY

page

1

K)
O\

69

82

THE ELEMENT OF MYTH IN THE POETRY OF W. H. AUDEN

I

Although the strenuous objection to the treatment of contemporary
literature or contemporary critical problems in a paper of this sort has
dwindled with the years into a mere lifting of eyebrows. there still re-
mains a question to be answered --- why should the scholar or the serious
critic tax his digestive powers in a field where the material_is, for the
most part. neither permanently nourishing, nor even palatable. The si-
tuation is, in some ways, a local one, for in Dr. Johnson's day. publish-
ing never reached the industrial proportions that it has in ours, nor was
there a vast company of people who, although they might have no literary
gift, thought writing the solution to their inability to pursue with in-
terest and success, any other occupation. Of these contemporary would-
be writers, Auden has observed,

One would expect that a certain percentage would imagine they

had a talent for medicine, a certain percentage for engineer-

ing, and so on. But this is not the case. In our age, if a

boy or girl is untalented, the odds are in favor of their

thinking they want to write.

The universal desire to express oneself in print has raised a mountain

of material which anyone scientifically interested in the contemporary
would find it hard to comprehend with any thoroughness. Still, the amount
of trash being written now does nothing to blur the image of the few ma-
jor figures outlined against our horizon, and although cautious scholar-
ship may warn against a serious commitment of allegiance to a poet still

alive and developing, or yet fresh in the grave, we can, as well as Mat-

thew Arnold, who had no doubts about the future greatness of Wordsworth,

 

I W. H. Auden in Poets at Work, 166.

Keats, Byron and Shelley discover the qualities in poets of our own time
that are permanent and fruitful.

If we can assume that in spite of the apparent deluge of mediocrity,
our times have their just quota of truly talented writers, there remain,
beyond the task of supporting them with intelligent interest and weeding
the good from the bad, other duties requiring both knowledge and intui-
tive insight which contemporary writing brings into being by the very
peculiarities of its own nature. For many reasons, which could not be
preperly examined here, contemporary poetry and prose have added to the
difficulty of the condensation of complicated thought and feeling always
present in major literature the further hardship of an obscurity stemming
sometimes from the use of private allusions, imagery, and personal vi-
sion, or from the evolutional process reflected in the perverse distor-
tion of language and form to wrench from words themselves and the pecu-
liarities of position an emotional effect that might correspond more in-
timately with the prevailing atmosphere of disruption in our times. Even
more disturbing than obscurity in the tools of communication is the diffi-
culty of deciding what a poet, no matter by what means he chooses to ex-
press himself, is trying to say. No two or three systems, philosophies,
faiths exist today from which can be drawn the framework of a belief, but
rather there are as many as history, and not always occidental history,
cares to provide: or from a restless inability to find form for thought
in anything ready made, a poet may, as Yeats did, manufacture his own
world of belief. Under the circumstances, contemporary poetry is begin-
ning to accumulate in its wake, a number of interpreters who may provide

with special knowledge of the particular affiliations of their subject,

a talent for history, and sometimes a sensitivity beyond that of the or-

dinary reader a link between the irresponsible poet and his often indif-
ferent audience. Such a task, it seems to me, lies partly in the field
of scholarship and not at all in the field of journalism, whose blunter
sensibilities and distorted knowledge offers neither the sensitive intu-
ition and sympathy of a fellow practitioner nor the dryer, but Just as
necessary offices of historical scholarship. The work of the three great
contemporary poets, Yeats, Eliot and Auden, requires certainly for the
most thorough examination, both a delicate emotional response and a know-
ledge not only of literature, but of other fields as well: philosophy,
theology, theosOphy, anthropology and psychology. This staggering bur-
den of knowledge is impossible for any one critic to carry, but its size
indicates at least that the minimum requirement for approaching the work
of writers who are as erudite, although not systematically under the nar—
rower discipline of scholarship, is at least a comparable training and
knowledge.

Other objections to approaching a contemporary subject, especially
the work of a man who is still alive, is the wasted energy of misconcep-
tion, without proper historical perspective, and the impossibility of
catching in a permanent mould, that is, drawing permanent conclusions a-
bout an artist who, still changing, may turn his back upon himself after
his critics have settled the nature of his work and the direction in which
he is going. There is always the possibility that a really good critic
can provide illuminating insights into work that already exists as Mat-
thiessen has done in The Achievement of T. S. Eliot. Enlarged once to
provide for Eliot's latest development, it could be enlarged again with-

out destroying the essential nature of any of Matthiessen's observations.

Not all critics, however, are as successful as Matthiessen, nor are all
contemporary posts as easily comprehended as Eliot, whose interests are
mainly traditional and whose beliefs are orthodox, and the misconceptions
which may arise because of confusion within the critic himself, or be-
cause of the novel and unsettled nature of the material from which the
poetry is drawn, (in Auden's early work the shifting lines of political
doctrine, and the rambling paths of Freudian psychology) make it neces-
sary that the controversy, if there is any, be carried on while the poet
is still alive to defend himself. A critic can also, because he is a
contemporary, participate in the various fashions, enthusiasms or special
quirks of interest that may have an important reflection in the work he
has to decipher.

In a serious approach to contemporary work, however, the problem is
not to untangle obscure poetry for the purpose of presenting it rolled in-
to a neat ball that the lazy reader may unwind it more easily. Part of
the pleasure in reading poetry is its resistence to relaxed attention,
the creation in the reader of an intense and heightened state of mind
where each slow discovery, because it is attained only with the greatest
difficulty has the greatest effect. No precis can be a tenth as excit-
ing as the poem itself and the interpreter can only help by pointing out
certain general things, or may, by focusing attention on some central
thread. illuminate the work so that the details may fall more correctly
into place. Certain details may always remain ambiguous, either through
the poet's intention or by his failure, but the various layers of mean-
ing that good poetry usually contains can only be penetrated by recreat-

ing the poem as far as one's own experience and capacity for feeling will

take one.

In spite of the sometimes imposing difficulty of Auden's work, for

this reason, very little explication de tgztg will be offered. The paper

 

will rather concern itself with what it hopes to determine is the central
problem with which.Auden is concerned and in that way to indicate the ba—
sic and steadfast order, that upon close reading, becomes apparent in his
work.

The problem which occurs throughout Auden's poetry, implicitly in the
early poems, more clearly in the autobiographical passages in Letters from
Iceland, The New Year Letter, and finally in climactic statement in ‘Thg

Sea and_the Mirror, For the Time Beipg and The Age of Anxiety is the pro-

 

per relationship between art and life, and the tool that I have chosen to
pick apart the enigmatic nature of that relationship and its various shifts
in Auden's poetry is the examination in his work of the element of myth as
it involves belief. The relationship between the three elements,art, life,
and myth becomes clearer when that relationship is set against the back-
ground of the circumstances from which it sprang. I do not intend to at-
tempt here a sketch of the industrial revolution nor the effects of philo-
sOphical Darwinism on our own times, but only to indicate what prevalent
feeling about belief, myth, religion has produced a religious revival a-
mong artists and dilettantes, what has launched thousands of oarless boats
into the indifferent sea in quest of salvation.

When Auden says, in The New Year Letter,

The situation of our time

Surrounds us like a baffling crime2

he does not refer to a local instance, although "crime" includes the war,

which may have prompted the observation, but uses the image of the un-

 

fl- ---— —~

2 w. H. Auden, The New Year Letter (from Collected Poetgy), 272.

 

 

solved crime to express what Eliog did in the wasteland, an atmosphere
of pervasive spiritual disorder and death. The poet is, in one sense,
a clinical observer. He can bring into the light through symbols the
malignant forces that only deform those who have not the instruction of
the imagination to help them. Expressed in the dialect of a detective
story, this is what Auden has sensed in his time:

Yet our equipment all the time

Extends the area of the crime

Until the guilt is everywhere,

And 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.3

After the wasteland has been charted, it remains for its inhabitants

to take one or another of the paths to salvation. Every serious person
has the difficulty of deciding which path will, if it does not lead to
a general paradise, at least remove him from contamination and put him
in touch with some sort of vivifying spiritual experience. He may have
also to make the delicate moral choice between believing in some occult
power for its thereputic value to himself and believing in God because
He really exists, apart from any benefits which might be gained by inven—
ting Him. The burden that weighs on the twentieth century of finding or-
der in moral chaos, of rediscovering Good and Evil, of opening up again
the ancient channels between man and the supernatural offers itself with
even greater urgency to the artist, but he has the added responsibility

of his art to consider as well. Myth stands then in the same relation-

ship to art as it does to life --- and the artist must ask not only that

 

3 W. H. Auden, The New Year Letter, op. cit., 272.

myth give him a better life but that it provide material for his poetry.
Yeats, who is perhaps the most dramatic figure of all the poets who have
felt the necessity for myth, was certainly interested in the latter ad-

vantage. In a letter to his father, J. B. Yeats, he says of the Visigp.

 

the enormous myth that he created from seances, automatic writing, signs,
omens, and all the paraphernalia of spiritualism:

Much of your thought resembles mine ... but mine is part of a
religious system more or less logically worked out. A system
which will, I hope, interest you as a form of poetry. I find
the setting of it in order has helped my verse, has given me
a new framework and new patterns. One goes on year after year
getting the disorder of one's mind in order and this is the
real impulse to create.

But Yeats, of course, was intensely interested in life. His public ca-
reer as well as his magnificently vital later poetry testify to this. Yet
the tradition, grace, harmony of his poetic is aesthetic rather than mo—
ral, and although he was faced with the same problem that obsessed Auden
and Eliot, the lack of traditional belief, he made his choice along the
lines that were most available to him, between beauty and ugliness, be-
tween the militant dullness of science and the freedom of the imagina-
tion. For the generation in which Yeats spent his early manhood, which
included Wilde, Pater and the most important of the Art for Art's sakers,
Auden sketches a world:

... where the great conflict was between the Religion of

Reason and the Religion of Imagination, objective truth

and subjective truth, the Universal and the Individual.

Further, Reason, Science, the general, seemed to be

winning and Imagination, Art, and the Individual on the

defensive. Now in all conflicts it is the side which takes

the offensive that defines the issues which their oppo-

nents have to defend, so that when scientists said, ”Science

is knowledge of reality, Art is a faeryland,” the artists
were driven to reply, "Very well, but fairies are fun,

 

E W. B. Yeats, Letter to J. B. Yeats, quoted in an essay by Donald A.
Stauffer, "The Modern Myth of the Modern Myth," English Institute Essays,

3.

 

science is dull." When the former said, ”Art has no relation

to life," the latter retorted, "Thank God." ... Thus ... we

find Yeats adopting a cosmology apparently on purely aesthetic

grounds i.e., not because it is true but because it is inter-

esting.5

On the surface, this resume of his reasons for choosing what Eliot
calls a "highly sOphisticated lower mythology"6 makes Yeats seem almost
frivolous. His escapism is rebuked also by the stern voice of I. A.
Richards, who said, "After a drawn battle with the drama, Mr. Yeats
made a violent repudiation, not merely of current civilization but of
life itself in favor of a supernatural world."7 Yet this criticism of
Yeats is too severe, and.Auden suggests an excuse for Yeats' choice of
an eccentric and aesthetic supernaturalism when he points out that science
had drawn the battle lines not on the basis of morality but had placed
the choice between a materialistic conception of the real and the unreal,
between the world of hard discernable fact, and the flimsy and childish
world of the imagination. It would be foolish, of course, to maintain
that Yeats' poetry is a repudiation of life. What he did was to set
up an individual relationship between imagination and reality. Yeats'
approach to life is perhaps best expressed in his quotation from an "old
play:' "In dreams begins responsibilities."8 and by dreams he meant
the union with the reservoir of archetypes that resides within all men,
the area where fumbling civilization has no place and where thoughts

and actions, determined by a force beyond human comprehension move close

to a natural order which may be uncovered by symbols in art.9 Recalling

 

. Auden, "Yeats as an Example," Kenyon Review, X, no. 2, 189.
. Eliot, After Strange Gods, 46.

. . Richards, quoted in After Strange Gods, 45.

. B. Yeats, Later Poems, 173.

. B. Yeats, Essays, 33.

O

 

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the "great mind and the great memory" as well as refreshing the stale
crust of experience, introduces into the world again the underground
awareness of spiritual forces brought to expression by art, the defini—
tion of which is extended to include as well as the most highly contrived
and sophisticated products, primitive folk tales and accounts of dreams.
Yeats' position in the controversy between Life and Art is a use-
ful index to Auden's attitude as it is reflected in his early poetry. In
a general sense, the various shifts in this attitude can, I think, be
ranged in a scale from the elementary and emotional assertion of Pater's
that life is a poem and that "Not the fruit of experience, but experience
itself, is the end.'10 to a recognition of the divided harmony between
life and art than can be supplied through belief in the Christian myth.
In his early poetry, Auden has this in common with Yeats, that in search-

ing for a Weltanschauung he also seized upon several beliefs that had la-

 

ter to be discarded. Yeats moved in his affiliations from the more su-
perficial immersion in Irish politics, the revival of the theater, Irish
folk motifs, to arrive at a belief which, although personal, was more
universal and hence more valuable to his poetry. As far as efficacy of
belief is concerned, where Yeats ended, Auden began, and the assuming of
a final incidental moral responsibility in Yeats' later work forced sim-
ply by learning from passionate experience is what Auden had to begin
with, an unovert recognition of the moral relationship that must be pre-
sent in the balance between Art and Life. If Auden went beyond Yeats

in Juggling the three silver balls, Art, Life, and Myth, he is not a
better poet for that reason. Poetry does not depend upon ability to

resolve philosophical problems or to arrive finally, after many false

 

'15 Walter Pater, The Renaissance, 236.

lO

loves at the true faith of Christianity: It means only that Auden was
more successful than Yeats in getting back to the proper position of the
artist in society in completely comprehending and hence being supported
by the fruits of the deepest and most complicated relationship that can
be derived from the supernatural. From this point he can go on without
groping, without stepping for novelties, and, released from the time
wasting process of fumbling for conviction, he can enjoy the paradoxical
freedom of development within a system that Eliot describes in "East Co-
ker" when he says:

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion.

11
In more general and less mystical terms, what the final goal of the ar-
tist should be, is to ”bring order and coherence into the stream of sen-
sations, emotions, and ideas entering his consciousness, from without
and within,“ by doing for himself "what in previous ages had been done
for him by family, custom, church, and state, namely the choice of prin-
ciples and pre-suppositions in terms of which he can make sense of his
experience."12

The lack of any prevailing system for organizing experience is so
acute in modern times that instead of an artist expressing a variation
within an established order, if he is fortunate, he can achieve a limi-
ted order within a vast variation. Although the chaos comprehends a
number of local disciplines most of them are barely on speaking terms,

and the individual who is conscious of the need for making order must

either, by choosing several at once, split himself into a compartmental

 

H T. 5. Eliot. Esaaisas’ests.
12 W. H. Auden,”Yeats as an Example.” 00. cit., 192.

11

man, or else by choosing only one, look at the world through an ideologi-
cal peephole. Auden, being both versatile and voracious of systems of
belief, has, in a sense, done both at the same time, for he managed to
orient his work according to belief in different things at different
times, keeping dormant within himself a number of other and perhaps con-
tradictory affiliations while he seemed apparently to organize his exper-
ience according to one major conviction. It has been suggested that the
intrusion of art considerably complicates the already confusing relation-
ship of the individual to his life and to his actions. For Auden, the
discovery that he was interested in writing poetry had the effect of di-
viding his mind into two camps. His early aesthetic development, grounded
in the battles of the nineteenth century proceed along lines suggested in
a passage from Letters frgp Iceland:

Aesthetic trills I'd never heard before

Rose from the strings. Shrill poses from the cor:

The woodwind chattered like a pro-war Russian

Art boomed, the brass, and 'Life' thumped the
percussion.

The attempt to synchronize the brass and the percussion is part of
the final goal of the quest. In simplest terms, that is precisely what
Auden's deve10pment has represented, the reward being a multifold cha-
lice made up, first of all, of purity, love, recognition of good and
evil in a word, the positive values that can be achieved in life and re-
flected in art, and next, related to the first, a way of organizing ex-
perience, and making it available for us in poetry. How experience is
to be translated is the major question and Auden has solved it accord-
ing to the precedence of his age, to find a belief and to use its struc-

ture, the mythical element both in the exterior sense of providing a

 

—Tj W. H. Auden, Letters from Iceland, 209.

 

12

framework upon which to hang his perception, and also as a liberating
agent for the creative energies within, controlled, ideally by the frame-
work of belief.

Auden's development is not as sharply divided into "periods" as
common journatlistic criticism would have us believe. The three compart-
ments, Communist, Freudian and Christian are not water—tight,partly be-
cause none of them are wrong, or even useless for writing poetry, but
all, although the first two may be more limited than the third, are not
able to offer the final explanation, or give the most complete informa-,
tion about the way, to use both.Auden's and James' terminology, to the
Great Good Place. They have also in common, that in spite of their short-
comings, they are both pointed and in the same direction, to find the
hidden springs of grace, through which man can live most fruitfully with-
in himself and with his neighbors, through which life can become again
fertile and meaningful. The spiritual energies released, the dark wood
illuminated by the recognition of the paradoxical metaphysic that can be
expressed only in figurative terms, that is, the language of myth. For
these reasons, no rigid chart can be made of the various shifts in em-
phasis upon Auden's belief itself. or the imagery to which it corres-
ponds. The effect is a cumulative one, and in his latest work, The Age
of Anxiety, Auden has incorporated wherever they can best be usedk all
the channels through which he had approached the hypothetical and invi-
sibly shining absolute before; this, however, with the orientation, which
was only dormant in his earlier work of orthodox Christianity. I

Any kind of organization of a poet's work necessarily injures it,
for it sets up a pattern which may not be refined enough to represent its

complexity and intricacy with careful fidelity. Therefore, analyses of

13

this sort have to be taken tentatively for what light they can shed on
what will always be an enigmatic subject. In hope, then, of avoiding
dogmatic rigidity, this paper will attempt to point out, by following

the three twisted threads, Art, Life, and Myth through an approximately
chronological arrangement of those sections of Auden's work which are

most pertinent, the series of changes that occur in Auden's orientation

to poetry and to experience. Expressed in its briefest form, the point
that this paper hopes to make, is that throughout the development of his
work, so far as it has gone, Auden is trying through the use of Myth, to I
bring closer together Life and Art by discovering the vital connection and
the inevitable difference between them. Part of the responsibility for
the shift in emphasis, from Art to Life or vice versa, can be attributed
to the kind of myth that Auden is using at various times. When politics
and psychology have the upper hand, as they do in the early poetry the
attempt to bring meaning both to Life and to Art draws them into a com-
paratively simple relationship with each other. The search for grace, the
quest theme which is central in Auden's work settles upon finding for it-
self a natural order. Art becomes both a means and an end, for Art is a
talisman for balancing the outer and the inner life, for establishing a
harmony in the macrocosm without and the microcosm within. The framework
which Auden uses in the early poetry is the primitive folk legend and myth,
the crude vitality of the Icelandic sagas, the imaginative truth of fairy
tale, and another king of myth, that which resides in dreams, fantasies,
both the personal vision of the inner life and its expression in writers
like Carroll and Lear who made almost exclusive use of the language of

archetypal symbol. The end of Art is, of course, having satisfied the de-

14

sire to create something, but the emphasis in the early work falls most
heavily upon Life. Auden is using art as a sort of magical discipline
which will help him by releasing the wisdom of the id14 to live a more
satisfactory life in the sense of regaining a flower-like freedom from
choice. He sought the impetuous and natural expression of the self un-
restrained by rational caution and the Prufrockian distrust of natural
impulses. His hypothetical state of grace in the early poetry, a condi-
tion that D. H. Lawrence also shared, and his emphasis on Life, appear

in one of the autobiographical sections of Letters from Iceland:15

 

1” The id is a somewhat controversial term, and although its extreme com-
plexity in relation to its most precious development in the Freudian sys-
tem, its rather fuzzy connection with another difficult term, libido, can-
not be covered here, it might be helpful in the beginning to indicate
Auden's own approach to it. The id is sometimes thought of as a sort of
"beast in the jungle,” a blind, selfish impulsive force, employing no res-
traint, and no foresight, but ready to pounce on whatever will most quick-
ly and opportunely satisfy its desires. The id, to Auden's way of think-
ing, is a more benevolent creature, containing within itself the know-
ledge of a natural grace and harmony. Further examination of Auden's psy—
chological doctrines and their sources will be taken up in the next chap-
ter.
15 Self revelatory passages like this one appear fairly frequently in
Auden's work, clearing a path through the immense tangle of personal refe-
rences, private jokes, puzzling syntax and poetiflal ambiguity. The three
notable instances of where he has taken stock of himself occur in Letter
to Icelgpd (1937), _flhe New Year Letter (1941), The Sea and the Mirror
(1944). All of these passages are, if not primarily about, at least ob-
liquely concerned with the Lifqurt problem, and the evidence of Auden's-
position and its various fluctuations can be approached both from the evi-
dence which the poetry itself presents, and.Auden's own discussion of it.
The Iceland journey itself is curiously bound up in the self con-
scious way in which modern writers are forced to solve their problems.
The trip had, of course, its exterior motives, the interest of the prob-
lem being probably the greatest, but what Auden and MacNeice expected to
get for themselves beyond the important remuneration was a removal from
the chaos of EurOpe, and a renewed sense of stability that only occurs
in the isolation of an island, where the faces change as slowly as the
landscape and where, undisturbed by the superficial hustle of modern life,
only the important outlines remain. Synge hoped to accomplish the same
thing when he lived among the Aaran Islanders, and from it, gained a
true sense of the tragedy of death, an emotion which, if we believe Eve-
lyn Waugh, has become negatively apparent by its absence in our commer-
cial rituals. MacNiece writes:

 

15

Then to Berlin, not Carthage, I was sent
With money from my parents in my purse,
And ceased to see the world in terms of verse
I met a chap called and he fed
New doctrines into my receptive head.
Part came from and part from D. R. Lawrence
Gide, though I didn't know it then, gave part.
They taught me to express my deep abhorrence
If I caught anyone preferring Art
To Life and Love and being Pure-in-Heart.
I lived with crooks but seldom was molest d
The pure-in—heart can never be arrested.

The form and imagery of the early work also reflect the daemonic
source of Auden's inspiration. The id is necessarily random, organized
only in snatches with its illuminating figures governed, if at all, by
a dark and mysterious god. The early poetry, attempting to capture and
make use of primitive and magical symbols, is often as oblique as a dream.
Nothing is clearly said, although the impression is that a great deal is
being felt. In this swift preview of Auden's Odyssey the next major change
occurs in_The New Year Letter (1944), where Auden's gradually mastering
Christian tendencies become evident. Archetypal myth is pretty much laid
aside here, the form is austere, and Auden is as prosaic as it is possible
for him to be. The Christian element was, of course, present in Auden
from the beginning, but the private and amoral inner source of expression

had precedence until it began to appear insufficient, both as an approach

to truth and as a source for poetry. Auden says in an article written a

 

but we must mortify.
Our blowsy intellects before we die,
Who feed our brains on backchat and self-pity
And always need a noise, the radio or the city,
Traffic and changing lights, crashing the amber,
Always on the move and so do not rememher
The necessity of the silence of the islands,
The glacier floating in the distance out of existence,
(Letters from Iceland,. 32).
16 W. H. Auden and Louis MacNiece, "Letter to Lord Byron IV, Letters from

Iceland, 209.

 

 

l6

few years before The Double Man, where the New Year Letgg; first appeared,

 

was published:

For the private world is fascinating, but it is exhaustible.

Without a secure place in society, without an intimate rela—

tion between himself and his audience, ... the poet finds it

difficult to grow beyond a certain point.17

In the added complexity of their relationship, Art and Life take up
a new orientation in their perpetual commerce with each other. The rela-
tion is, in a sense, a split between them, for Art, now felt to be a pro-
duct of the diseased will, and not of a mysterious, but reliable inner
light, is suspect: and so long as it remains an entirely human product,
governed by the human will, it can never be completely trusted to reveal
the path through the spiritual wilderness, nor diagnose the illness of our
time. The New Year Letter seems to indicate that Auden has left the oasis
where D. R. Lawrence settled for life, and has proceeded on the Quest,
whose requirements become increasingly difficult. It is significant that
in The New Year Letter the mythical framework, with the important excep-
tion of the figure of Satan, and a few minor embellishments drawn from
fairytale and classical myth, has vanished almost completely.

The final step, final so far as Auden has gone,is, in a sense, a
synthesis and a solution of the LifeeArt problem, through the agencies of
the Christian myth. In the last works, The Sea and the Mirror, For the
Time Being, and The Age of Anxiety, one part of the Quest seems to have
been completed, that is the finding of a belief which will not only offer
the deepest and most complex and universal order for chaotic experience
-to follow, but will also sanction, because it can criticize, the other
sources for poetry, the Ursprung of the dream world and primitive myth,

imparting to them a new moral orientation. Auden's idiom regains the

 

‘TI w. H. Auden, The Oxford Book of Light Verse, xvi-xvii.

1?

lushness and magical myth-creating faculty that it had in the beginning,
but under the discipline of an orthodox belief, these images, which be-
fore were often more suggestive than definite are usually obscure only so
far as the complexity of Auden's thought and feeling moves beyond the
capacity of the reader. Life and Art, although they draw closer together,
being connected by the controlling spirit of the Christian myth, retain
the separation outlined in.The New Year Letter. Arnold's aestheticism
now seems to be completely discarded, for poetry can save neither its
creator nor its readers, and the deadly serious business of life is not
becoming so sensitive to experience that every situation is heightened

by the lurid glare of perpetual intensity, but it is rather to save one's
soul: the process of writing poetry is only incidental, just as any type
of occupation is incidental to the desperate problem of salvation. Never-
theless, the final result of the Quest is not so interesting to the audi—
ence as the memoirs written along the way and even if, as Auden said in
his poem "In Memory of W. B. Yeats,”

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its saying ... 8

its survival is to be the most important. In a recent lecture on Yeats
Auden defined the terms by which the modern world is to make its choices
as being
not between Reason and Imagination but between the good and
the evil will, not between objectivity and subjectivity but
between the integration of thought and feeling and their
dissociation, not between the individual and the maises but
between the social person and the impersonal state. 9

What matters most to us, is that Auden has been a successful catalyst

in performing the offices of good poetry, that he has retained the mythi-

 

18 W. H. Auden, Collected Poetyy, 50.
19 W. H. Auden, "Yeats as an Example," on. cit., 190.

 

18

cal approach which T. S. Eliot describes as "a step toward making the
modern world possible for Art, toward ... order and form..."20 he has
managed through that means to unite thought and feeling, so that the
wealth of the unconscious by supplementing and revitalising traditional
myth, is harnessed to provide material to correspond with the complexity
of his thought, both moral and philosophical.

This sort of approach of Auden‘s work requires an approximately chro-
nological procedure in the examination of the various evidences of the
changes in his use of myth. Not all the poems can be dated, however, since
no chronological arrangement appears in the Collected Poems and the early
volumes, which could have been used for definitely determining when a par-
ticular poem appeared, are not all available. Nevertheless, through a
process of elimination most of the poems can be assigned to some position
in relation to other work, and the major poems can be arranged in order.
Although Auden's poetry does not fall neatly into three theological cate—

gories as Eliot's does,21

there are certain convenient divisions, the
best for the purposes of this paper being a three—fold one, centering

first around Paid on Both Sides (1930) and The Orators (1932), second,

 

The Double Mg; (1941), and third, For the Time'Being (19uu) and The Age
of Anxiety (l9h7). Incidental poems are to be included in their respec-
tive periods wherever they appear especially pertinent. With so large a
mass of material as Auden has produced so far, some limitation must be
made to fit the scope of this paper. I shall leave out any special con-

sideration of major works, other than those already mentioned, since they

 

20 T. 5. Eliot, "Ulysses, Order and Myth," The Digl, (19235, tag.

The conventional division of Eliot's work is to compare it with the
three divisions of the Divine Comedy, "Wasteland" representing ”Inferno:"
"Ash Wednesday," "Purgatorioz" and "The Four Quartets," "Paradisio."

19

are most pertinent to the point at hand. The two travel books, Letters
from Iceland and Journey to a war, all the plays, some of which were writ-
ten in collaboration with Isherwood, and the separate volumes of poetry,
reserving the right to use passages from them or refer to them when it
appears necessary to do so.

Before plunging into the paper itself, one last explanatory word
should be offered about myth and the peculiar interest that it seems to
inspire in modern life. As an approach to literature it has reached Ra
steadily increasing vogue in all fields of criticism including the contem—
porary. The same impulse that caused Eliot, Joyce, Yeats and Auden to em-
ploy a mythical method seems to have seized the scholars also, and from
fields outside literature, psychology, anthropology and art history in
particular there have come a number of books which use literature as a basis
for tracing certain basic symbolic figures such as the hero and the magi
cian and the sin eater, or recurrent ideas such as the Oedipus story. Se—
parate departments of folk lore have risen in universities, and researchers
are scouring the back country, as Yeats did many years earlier, to record
and preserve the lost traces of naive imaginative life in a society which
is steadily becoming duller and more stultified by its mass—production way
of living. In the literary field proper, the mythical method has many
uses, and myth itself has a variety of definitions. When myth is used for
tracing the history of ideas, it does not matter especially what particu-
lar facet or aspect of it the investigator believes to be valid, but when
the problem is to trace the presence of myth in a particular period, or
in the work of an individual author, some definite approach should be se-
lected. The concept of myth used in literary criticism ranges from an

extreme conservative position to radical originality where the critic tries

to create for himself a new definition of myth to fit in with the amount

of information gathered around it in our times, especially that material
which has come most recently from investigations of psychology and an-
thropology into the nature of primitive ritual and symbolism. 0f the

modern critics, the first sort is most ably represented by Douglas Bush,

who, in his two books, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English
Poetry and Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry never
ponders over the various aspects of myth, but leaving out definition al-
together, assumes that a mythical poem is one which uses the figures,

stories and various imaginative motifs that appear in classical litera-

ture. He finds in modern poetry no diminution in the use of myth. "Beau-
tiful simply as tales,” he says, "the myths have constituted for modern

poets a kind of poetic shorthand of infinite imaginative and emotive value."22
In limiting his definition, however, to a particular time and place, to
Greek and Roman culture during the classical period he overlooks the myths
of other cultures just as important to English poetry, the most notable
examples being the Celtic and Teutonic elements which have been used al-
most exclusively by local colorists such as Arthur Machen and Mary webb.
The limitation which Bush uses is attractive for its neatness, but it does
not cover sufficiently the mixed affiliations of most contemporary writers.
Auden, Eliot and Yeats all use, as well as classical myth, the fairies,
demons, the fisher kings, the heroes of primitive English folk tradition.
Auden uses, in particular, material from the Icelandic sagas to connect

the present with the past and to translate the apparently accidental war-

I

fare of modern times into the more meaningful simplicity of the primitive

archaic outlook.

 

1’2 Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry, Li.

21

The other extreme in the range of meanings that myth can have is the

aesthetic approach. represented by Richard Chase in Quest for Myth. Chase

 

would include Bush's definition and whatever additions in the form of other
myths which might be made to it, but refuses to limit himself to the past
or to second-hand material. Myth, for him, is created from emotional in-
tensity, and "a poem which out of present emotional necessity, 'whether
personal or social,’ becomes mythical and then fuses itself with an old
myth is a truly mythological poem ... but ... it does not need the old
myth to become mythical."23 After considering some of the complicated
historical theories which try to account for myth, Chase asserts simply
that myth is art, the myth itself emerging from the hidden regions of the
id, to manifest itself in dreams and intuitive revelation, and then ulti-
mately through the offices of the super ego, to be codified and captured
in the art form where its mysterious and magical influence upon the reader
announces its true status. Chase's definition is an interesting approach
to myth itself especially in the use he makes of Freudian psychology, point-
ing out the irrational dream sources and the process through which they
move until they are given meaning, and in some cases, moral value by the
pressure of the outside world. As an approach to poetry, however, it
places too great a burden upon the visceral responses of the reader who
must depend on a tingling of the spine or a feeling of heightened inten—
sity in order to separate the mythical from the non-mythical.

What Chase means by myth seems to be an ingredient common to all
successful poetry, the condensation of strong or deeply felt emotion,

evoking a universal response because it penetrates to the common root

 

23 Richard Chase, Quest for Myth, 112.

22

from which the separate flowers have sprung. A theory like Chase's is
the inevitable result of a self conscious probing into mental, emotional
and spiritual processes which were facebly regarded in earlier times. E-
ven in such an interest, having the flavor of a patient's curiosity about
his own disease, reflects an unhealthy condition in society, it brings
back the reassuring news that poetry, at any rate, has not exhausted its
sacred front, and that out of the rubbish of contemporary life it is still
possible to create relationships which will invest the too literal facts
with a mythical vitality.

A recent prosaic statement about myth, which offers a flexible ad-
justment to the requirements of whatever case happens to be at hand appears
in Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces. His summary is also
a useful compilation of the various theories of myth that have been most
influential both for explaining and for shaping contemporary literature.
The list includes a variety of approaches, coming from the social sciences,
psychology and theology:

Mythology has been interpreted by the modern intellect as

a primitive, fumbling effort to explain the world of nature

(Frazer); as a production of poetical fantasy from re—histo-

ric times, misunderstood by succeeding ages (Muller); as a

repository of allegorical instruction, to shape the individual

to his group (Durkheim); as a group dream, symptomatic of arche-

typal urges within the depths of the human psyche (Jung): as

the traditional vehicle of man's profoundest metaphysical in-

sights (Coomaraswamy); and as God's Revelation to His children

(the Church). Mythology is all of these. The various judg—

ments are determined by the viewpoints of the judges. For

when scrutinized in terms not of what it is but of how it func-

tions, of how it has served mankind in the past, of how it may

serve today, mythology shows itself to be as amenable as life

itself to the obsessions and requirements of the individual,
the race, the age.

For the purposes of this paper, the best definition of myth is one

which will comprehend Auden's own use of it. This does not mean, of

 

3“ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. '152

J C

23

course, that myth is to be fitted to the peculiarities of Auden's poetry,
but rather that its definition should be broad enough to reflect the vari—
ety of his mythological references and to provide some pattern into which
they might be fitted. Since the serious task of the poet in our times is
to reorient himself and society in terms of values that impassive mater-
ialism can never supply, writing poetry, as Auden puts it, involves "throw-
ing caution to the winds, accepting the subjective as God-given, wildly
taking sides, becoming in fact what Mr. Yeats has described as a "foolish
passionate man." 25 It involves, in short, finding a Weltanschauung, or
belief, and through the symbols inherent in, or accessory to its structure
to express experience of the irrational and supernatural, to transform
passive reality, in the material sense, by a meaningful vision of the hidden
forces which lie beneath it. Physical experience itself is like the tip

of a nearly submerged pyramid; it represents only a minute fraction of the
total life, most of which can be expressed only in the figurative terms
which make up the body of myth. In the continual investigations with which
men are concerned there are two kinds of truth, one spelled with a small,
and one with a capital letter. The scientists and factual scholars are
interested in the first, the artist in the second (as the amount of capi-
talization in Auden's poetry can easily attest), but the second, being
elusive can only be described in non-literal terms, through imaginative
processes which create, rather than real times or places, states of being.
In Auden's poem, "Casino," where the gamblers' spiritual death as indica-
tive of the terrible paralysis of modern times is expressed by a reference

to Greek myth:

 

‘55 W. H. Auden, "A Novelist's Poems," Poetry, IL, 224.

24

But here no nymph comes naked to the youngest shepherd:
The fountain is deserted: the laurel will not grow:
The labyrinth is safe/but endless, and broken
Is Ariadne's thread.20

The observation and the relationship which is set up is entirely on an
intuitive and spiritual level. And whatever figurative terms describe
such states of being, whether they fit in with beliefs which are psycho-
logical, political or religious, are to be considered as belonging pro-
perly to the realm of myth. Spender applies to Auden's poetry the idea
that myth can concern systems of belief and their various attendant sym-
bols when he sayd “... he is well acquainted with modern tendencies of
thought in philoSOphy, psychology, and politics, and he regards these
tendencies as modern myths which he exploits in his poetry."27 Myth con-
sidered as a Weltanschauung is a way of penetrating to the deeper reality
that lies beneath the surface of the physical world. It is tempting here
to call it a mirror of truth, for every spiritual symbol must stand for
a spiritual fact. It is, however, Auden's conviction, and the point that
this paper hopes to develop, that although myth itself may be a mirror
for reality, its presence in poetry does not make the poetry a reflection
of truth, for between the vision and its use, lies the abyss of the di-
seased human will which in its striving for perfection without knowledge
twists and perverts what it sees to fit its own limited outlook.

This paper may appear to be dealing with two problems, the LifeaArt

balance,with which Auden as an artist is preoccupied, and his use of myth
to provide symbols for his poetry. They form, however, in the light of

Auden's intense seriousness about both Life and.Art, an indissoluable

relationship. The best way to express the manner in which Art, Myth and

 

25 W. H. Auden, Collected Poetry. 91.
27 Stephen Spender, "Have English Writers Marked Time?" Saturday Review
of Literature, XXIX, 5.

 

 

 

25

Life revolve around each other is to use Auden's own symbol, the sea and
the mirror. The sea is Life, the mirror is Art, and the selecting fac-
tor that determines what it is out of the enormous flux that will find
its way to arrangement and order within the controlling boundaries of
the mirror is the element of myth.

Rummaging into his living, the poet fetches
The images out that hurt and connect.

From Life to Art by painstaking adaption.28
The connection between the images, and the images themselves, in so far
as common use or experience has given them more than a private meaning
. are supplied through myth; the final picture in the mirror, whether it

be a true or distorted representation, can only become coherent through

its form-giving medium.

 

28 W. H. Auden, Collected Poetry, 5.

 

 

PART II

There occurs throughout Auden's early poetry a mixture of two se-
parate but related philos0phies, Marxism and psychoanalysis. Without any
intention of separating them, for they depend upon each other in this res-
pect at least, that each is a way of restoring order, in the first case,
to society, in the second, to its members, I think that it might be help-
ful in the beginning to indicate how Auden has used them in constructing
his shifting Weltanschauung. That ideas should be important in his poetry
suggests a didactic Drydenesque quality, a return to the rationalism of
the eighteenth century. This, however, is not entirely what comes about:
the regression, if Auden's intellectual interests can be described in that
way, is rather to the seventeenth century, to T. S. Eliot's fusion of
thought and feeling, away from the romantic dissociation of sensibility.
The emotional force that lies behind such potentially dry material as
Communist theory and psychoanalysis comes from what Louis MacNiece calls
"taking sides.'I Auden is not so much interested in the ideas themselves
as in how they can be used, no matter how extravagantly, to explain, or
to divide or to diagnose the various confusing phenomena of modern life.
In an cpen letter printed in the Auden issue of New Verse, MacNiece writes:

With regard to content, the subject matter of your poems is

always interesting and it is a blessing to our generation ...

that you discharged into poetry the subject matters of psycho-

analysis, politics and economics. Mr. Eliot brought back

ideas into poetry but he uses the ideas, say, of anthropology

gore academically and less humanly than you use Marggof Grod-

eck. This is because you are always taking sides.

Taking sides involves a transformation of whatever ideas are being used,

and ideological systems having been assimilated and rearranged to suit

 

‘29 Louis MacNiece, "Letter to W. H. Auden," New Verse, Nos. 96-7 (NOV., 1937).

27

the needs of the user, lose their impassive, standard outlines and be-
comes recognizable only through the emotional attitude that inclines them
in one direction or another. In Auden's case, the perception of conflict
is not limited to the automatic course of dialectical materialism but to
a profounder level and the observations of psychoanalysis are expressed
in more figurative terms: "the liar's quinsey," or "the coward's stance."
Of the two ideologies, Marxism is perhaps the most oblique. In the

first half of the thirties, Auden, Spender, and Day-Lewis were linked to-
gether as three Communist poets, but now that the atmosphere of the thir—
ties has somewhat evaporated, it is not so easy to understand what could
have made Auden's work appear so clearly Communistic to the reviewers.
Someone reading only the Collected Poetgy would find no evidence of for-
mal Marxism, although some of the poems in the early radical period have
been retained, and some of the same kind of observations that character-
ized Auden's Marxist tendencies prevail in later poems. In the early
work appear luxurious diseased figures, landscapes laid waste, all to be
taken, at least on a certain level, for an expose of a dying bourgeois
culture.

Watch any day his nonchalant pauses, see

His dextrous handling of a wrap as he

Steps after into cars, the beggar's envy.

"There is a free one," many say, but err.

He is not that returning conquerer,

Nor even the pole's circumnavigator.

But poised between shocking falls or razor-edge

Has taught himself this balancing subterfuge
Of the accosting profile, the erect carriage.30

The spectre of a ruined industrial scene occurs even more frequently:

the sources of wealth and their various mechanisms which belong to the

 

30 W. H. Auden, "Iv:fiiPoems, 43.

middle class are broken, deserted, scattered, while the owners spend their
frivolous lives trying to avoid the serious business of life, either in
the empty amusement of perpetual games, or in the emptier amusement of
bath chairs.

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:

Smokeless chimneys, damaged bridges, rotting wharves and choked canals,
Tram lines buckled, smashed trucks lying on their side across the rails;

Power-stations locked, deserted, since they drew the boiler fires:
Pylons fallen or subsiding, trailing dead high-tension wires:

Far from there we spent the money, thinking we could well afford,
While they quietly undersold us with their cheaper trade abroad:

At the theatre, playing tennis, driving motor cars we had,
In our continental villas, mixing cocktails for a cad.

At the end, the members of a diseased society, of which Auden himself is
presumably a member, are exhorted to reform:

Shut up talking, charming in the best suits to be had in town,
Lecturing on navigation while the ship is going down.

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; 1
If we don't it doesn't matter, but we'd better start to die.3_

To do Auden justice, however, it is necessary to assume that he voices
more than a lament for a shaky industrialism, and rather tries to reveal
the vast spiritual disorders that underly the complacence not only of the
middle class but of every one. Although Day-Lewis expresses a similar

feeling:

Drug nor isolation will cure this cancer:

It is now or never, the hour of the knife

The break with the past, the major operation.32
31 W. H. Auden, "XXII,“ Poems, U3. _
32 Cecil Day Lewis, "Consider These, for We Have Condemned," quoted in Thg
Little Treasury of Modern Poetgy, 300.

 

29

his poem has a local, incendiary spirit that Auden's lacks. It would be
impossible for Auden to write a line like the one which occurs in a sonnet
by Day Lewis: "Yes, why do we all, seeing a Communist, feel small?” 33

He is neither so specific nor so subservient to a system as limited as

 

Marxism, and although he may use it as he does in The Dance of Death (1933)
where bourgeois society, in the form of a dancer, dances to its death be—
fore a shifting backdrop of resorts and night clubs, the audience shouts,

One two three four

The last war was a bosses' war.

Five six seven eight

Rise and make a workers' state

Nine ten eleven twelve

Seize the factories and run them yourself.34
and the figure of Marx appears at the end, to utter these solemn words
over the dead dancer: "The instruments of production have been too much
for him. He is liquidated."35 Marxism is never followed in as dogged a
manner as its more orthodox followers would have it.

What has made Auden's reputation as a Marxist is probably both his
limited, and at the same time widely implicative use of Marxist concepts,
and the ignorance of those among his classifiers who were not even in the
position of being political dilettantes. Those within the dates were ne-
ver deceived, and ChristOpher Caudwell, in his criticism of English poetry,
written from the standpoint of a thoroughly orthodox Communist considers
the trio, Spender, Day-Lewis and Auden as helpful but irresponsible fellow
travellers, 36 headed in the right direction, but their real service to

the party ruined by their bourgeois conception of freedom. Even if they

are prepared to join the party, he says, speaking now in general of the

 

3308011 Day Lewis, quoted in Stephen Spender‘s The Destructive Element, 252.
W. H. Auden, "The Dance of Death," Poems, 195.
35 Ibid, 218.
Christopher Caudwell, Illusion and Reality, 283.

30

artist sympathetically inclined toward Communism,

this anarchistic quality in their alliance takes a character—

istic form. They announce themselves as prepared to merge

with the proletariat, to accept its theory and its organiza-

tion, in every field of concrete living except that of art.

Now this reservation -- unimportant to any ordinary man ---

is absolutely disastrous for an artist, precisely because

his most important function is to be an artist. It leads

to a gradual separation between his living and his art --

his living as a proletarian diverging increasingly from his

art as a bourgeois.

Auden stopped short of accepting Communism as a total faith, although
he found aspects of it to be usable both as a Weltanschauung and as a
source of images for poetry. The wasteland comprehends politics as well
as art, religion, and daily life, and in contrast with the well meaning
but hopeless anarchy of liberalism, communism offered and still offers
the most vigorous remedy for corruption and disorder. It was also, in
the thirties eminently available as a way of expressing dissatisfaction
with the old system, whether or not its ideology could be completely
accepted for building a new one.

According to Spender,

Auden "arrived at" politics by way of psychology. His early

poems began by being preoccupied with neuroses in individuals,

but this gradually extends (at the time when he had left Ox-

ford and gone to live in Berlin) to an interest in the epoch

and capitalist society.3
This accounts, in part, for the mysteriously oblique Marxian allusions,
the ambiguity of references which could possibly have political implica-
tions, but because they are not flatly levelled at the reader as threats,
promises, or persuasions, maintain for themselves and the reader, the free—
dom of several layers of interpretation.

Auden's approach to psycho—analysis, more definite in outline that
his Marxist affiliation, is more difficult to define because it has de-

___—-

37 Christopher Caudwell, Illusion and Reality, 283.
38 Stephen Spender, "Oxford to Communism," New Verse, 9—10.

31

veloped a complexity which requires, properly, the comment of an expert.
On top of the doctrines of Freud and Jung, available, at least for inspec-
tion, are built the more esoteric teachings of minor followers, Layard,
Homer Lane, and Groddeck. The first two have published no article (except
for two by Lane on the conduct of boys' reformatories), making scholarship
impossible. Groddeck was more prolific, having published at least five
books and several articles, none of which, unfortunately, are available
except through the unsatisfactory medium of the psychological abstracts.
The problem is further complicated by the fact that Auden never refers to
Groddeck in his poetry although he does several times to Layard and Lane,
but from the evidence of people, who, knowing Auden, assume Groddeck's in-
fluence, and from the correspondence between the shadowy outline of Grod-
deck's teachings which can be found in the psychological abstracts and

the beliefs which Auden expresses in his poetry, it may be safe to assume
that there was such a relationship.

Two of the conventional features of psychology which Auden uses in
his poetry, both as a source for imagery and as an orientation to life,
are the concept of the id, the repository for desires so primitive that
they must be seived through the refining mechanism of the ego, that is,
the self, and the superego, social convention, before they reach the level
of action, and the Jungian concept of the four faculties, thought, feeling,
intuition, and sensation. The first concept has its greatest part in the
early poetry, where it provides not only the knowledge that there,is, no
matter how shrunken and literal the life outside, an inner capacity for
intense and passionate experience, but also a tremendously rich source
for poetry, for experiencing the unconscious truth of dreams and fantasies,

for releasing an intuition that can permeate poetry not only with the

depth of universally shared emotion through archetypal imagery, but can
also provide the harmony that supplies the startling, and yet perfect
combination of words. Auden's interest in psycho-analysis as it reflects
the vivid inner life, is also responsible for his affection for Alice in
Wonderland, Through the Looking Glags, and the poetry of Edward Lear, and
his use of them as myth, his use in particular, of Alige will be included
with the more orthodox psychological myth. Jung's concept of the four
faculties has a metaphysical application and should be considered with
the later work where his mysticism fits .uden's religious development,
while Freud, who provides no moral guide other than instinct and "the wis-
dom of the blood," has his proper place in the early poetry. These few
callous words about Auden's affiliation with Freudian doctrine are per-
haps inadequate for conveying the profound and fruitful influence that

it has had on his work. In one of his later occasional poems, "In Memory
of Sigmund Freud" (1940), he exercises one of his finest talents, writing
about a public man with the warmth that one would use in speaking of a
good friend, which these figures, no matter how remote, turn out in fact
to be even if the love is all on the side of the observer. Auden writes
of Freud with the advantage of retrospect, but with the sense of what

had been valuable in the beginning and still remains valuable:

If often he was wrong and at times absurd
To us he is no more a person
Now but a whole climate of Opinion.

He quietly surrounds all our habits of growth;
He extends, till the tired in even
The remotest most miserable duchy

Have felt the change in their bones and are cheered,
And the child unlucky in his little State,

Some hearth where freedom is excluded,

A hive where honey is fear and worry,

33

Feels calmer now and somehow assured of escape:
While as they lie on the grass of our neglict,
So many long-forgotten objects
Revealed by his undiscouraged shining

Are returned to us and made precious again:
Games we had thought we must drop as we grew up,
Little noises we dared not laugh at,
Faces we made when no one was looking.39

The radical applications of Freudian psychology have a more specific
application to Auden's verse and the infallibility of the id and its over-
powering effect upon physical organs goes hand in hand with his vision of
a pervasive illness in society. According to Groddeck and Lane, both func-
tional and organic diseases take their source from basic disturbances in
the id. As Isherwood explains, Lane's doctrine is his semi-fictitious
account of his association with Auden:

There is only one sin: disobedience to the inner law of our
own nature. The results of this disobedience show themselves
in crime or in disease: but the disobedience is never in the
first place, our own fault -- it is of those who teach us,
as children, to control God (our desires) instead of giving
Him room to grow. The whole problem, when dealing with a
patient, is to find out which of all the conflicting things
inside him is God, and which is the Devil. And the one sure
guide is that God appears always unreasonable, while the De-
vil appears always to be noble and right....

(_ Conventional education (I am paraphrasing Bernard's
LLayard'§]own words, from a letter Weston [Auden] once showed
me) inverts the whole natural system in childhood, turning
the child into a spurious adult. [proddeck's Das Zwerges-
chlecht des Menchen states the same theory, adding to the
assertion that man retains his childhood unaltered within
him, the observation that he is bisexual as well, making

two sets of dichotomies, the man-child and the man-woman]

... later when the child grows up physically into a man, he
is bound to try to regain his childhood --- by means which,
to the outside world, appear even more and more unreasonable.
If the conscious mind were really the controlling factor,

God would remain in prison, the world would become a bedlam
in a few generations, and the race automatically die out. So
diseases and neuroses come to kill off the offenders or bring
them to their senses. Diseases are therefore only warning
symptoms of a sickness of the soul; they are manifestations

 

 

739 W. H. Auden, "In Memory of Sigmund Freud," Another Time, 118-9.

a“

of God -—- and those who try to "cure" them without first cur-

ing the soul are only serving the Devil. The disease of the

soul is the belief in moral control: the Tree of the Knoww

ledge of Good and Evil, as against the Tree of Life.)40
Isherwood's analysis, although it may be slightly exaggerated for effect,
clarifies a good deal of the early work, where, in the unrefutable waste- //
land of modern life, Auden sees, rather than dead trees dry stone and
broken images, an aggregation of distorted and diseased peOple, hears
rather than the incessant sound of crickets, and the noise of rats' feet
on broken glass, the blatant voices of "the enemy," mouthing slogans,

cliches, catch words.

Three enemy questions --- Am I boring you? --- Could you
tell me the time? -- Are you sure you're fit enough

Three enemy catch words —-— insure now --- keep smiling --—
safety first.h1

These two disciplines, Marxism and psychology represent the sort of
modern myths that Auden employs as a means for poetic expression. They
are not the only ones that he uses —-- the others will be taken up in the
course of examining the poetry itself -- but they are perhaps the most
important, and being also the most difficult, they require a special ex-
planation. The perhaps imprOper emphasis placed on Marxism and psycho-
analysis by considering them apart from the poetry may have the effect
of suggesting in the beginning that Auden's method of writing poetry is
more intellectual than it really is, that he is a sort of faddist adopt-
ing whatever new notion is esoteric enough for his purposes, a poet who
goes through stages that bring him finally no closer maturity. Although
there is an adolescent quality in Auden, especially in the early work,

its oftentimes grotesque overbalance is compensated for by an overall

 

Christopher Isherwood, Lions and Shggows, 300-1.

40
“1 W. H. Auden, "Journal of an Airman," The Orators, 55.

 

seriousness and unity of purpose. bout Auden's emphasis on ideas, Ste-

phen Spender writes:

His gift is the peculiar gift of a writer who does not write
from rejecting his experiences, nor from a strict selection
among many appearances, but accepting more and more of life
and ideas as he goes on experiencing .... The peculiar kind
of experience which his poetry offers is an organic living
experience, made up sometimes of contradictions and which
is sometimes irresponsible and evasive. It is a mistake to
suppose his poetry is primarily one of ideas: it is a cha-
meleon poetry which changes its colour with the ideas which
it is set against: but the life is in the chalemeon, in the
poetry itself, not in the ideas which are seen through it.
It is a poetry of life which deals with ideas, but which is
not ruled by them. 2

Spender's remarks about the subservience of ideas in Auden's early
poetry to a central concern with life itself raises two additional points:
the quest theme, and Auden's way of adjusting the scales upon which are
placed the two balanced or unbalanced entities, Art and Life. It is
quite true that Auden is aware that the variety and paradoxical nature
of life can't be crammed into the narrow spaces provided by a few limited
ideologies, but what is more important, I think, at least for the poetry
itself, is a recognition of a central focus in his work, the quest theme,
to which all the attempts at putting to rights the untidy chaos of the
world are merely servants and tools. The quest as a unifying myth is

used in the same sense in which it appears in The Divine Comedy, in medi—

 

eval legends, or in fairy tales. It also forms, in a sense, a link be~
tween Life and Art in the early poetry because, with its various satelite
henchmen, it attempts to find an assumed order in life, and through the
subjective vision of poetry tries to bring together the two fractured mo-
ieties, the outer world of solid appearance, and the shifting personal

inner world.

 

32 Stephen Spender, The Destructive Element, 276.

The inner life has an increased vogue since the fourteenth century.
Its exploitation in modern times turns out to be sometimes, at least for
the writer, an art form only in an incidental way. Rilke considered his
Journal of My Other Self as a sort of cathersis to prepare for a more ob«
jective way of writing, with an emphasis on die Denge, on concrete deli-
cate detail, on Rodin's concept of form. Kafka wrote, for one reason,
to exorcize the witches that tortured him, was always planning when he
should settle into the new and hopeful life to write differently. Their
object seemed to be at that particular point to explore the inner life,
and through illuminating its dusky caverns, to throw some little light
on the world outside. By imagining himself a dog or a cockroach, Kafka
could express his relationship to society, to his father, or to God. What
is most important about this sort of writing is that it places the heaviest
emphasis not on Art, although the preoccupation with form and creation is
always there, but upon Life, and Art becomes a means for an intuitive ex-
ploration of life, a way of thinking and feeling about it that dredges
from it some meaning, even if it be an unhappy, or a surrealist sort of
outlook.

This is also the impression one gets upon reading Auden's early poetry,
that Life and Art are somehow intimately connected, with Art taking its
turns from Life, rather than the Opposite relationship which one feels in
a writer like Henry James. In the early work, the contents of the id are
poured, sometimes, it seems, almost unsorted, into whatever receptacle is
large enough to hold them. Impulse reigns, the inconsequential for its
suggestive power is all important. And giving form to the apparently
molton mass is the network of myth, which forms a bridge between the still

unuttered emotional orientation and its expression as art.

The mythical method of writing about modern life is a curious mix-
ture of a carefully observed factual reality and a distortion of relation-
ships that, by disturbing the complacent balance of a surface observa-
tion of life, expresses what lies beneath the surface. The best example

is, of course, Alice in Wonderland. In Kafka's parable, The Castle, there

 

are also many evidences of this Juxtaposition, the most obvious being the
detailed and accurate description of the ant-like habits of the bureau-
crat, observed from his own experience in an insurance office. As they
appear to K, however, the officials are so exaggerated and surrounded with
such mystery, that they no longer move in a familiar and literal reality
but are clothes in all of the horrible implications of their trade. Al-
though no so successful as Kafka in creating a unified effect, Auden's
charade, Paid on Both Sides (193) is an approach to reality through the
same sort of distortion that gives Kafka's work its mythical flavor.

What PaiQZQn Both Sides is supposed to be about can only be tentatively
determined. It seems to be an examination of a society which is fighting
revolution, not necessarily a class war, for there is no difference between
the two.sides, but a senseless feud springing from the disease of a persis—
tent social disunity. There are three factions altogether, the two ima-
ginary states, Lintzgarth, and Nattrass, which are fighting with each other,
and another group made up of a number of commentators, the same sort of
device that Eliot uses in the wasteland, when he introduces a unifying
agent in the figure of Tiresias. The whole play as it stands, however, is
hopelessly confusing and impossible to untangle in detail. What we are
concerned with are the kinds of myths that Auden is using as a means of

expression, and the relationship implicit in the poetry between Art and Life.

(‘0

i
The whole atmosphere of the Charade seems to be a combination of the

primitive frontier quality of the Icelandic sagas with their continual
raids, ambushes, disputes over property, and a sort of futuristic twenty—
fifth century scene, where all the placid and complacent evil that is pre—
sent now in society has born its fruit, and the inhabitants, their super—
ficial civilization stripped away, have turned into worse than savages,
for experience has lost even the elementary meaning that primitive mytho-
logy offers, and war proceeds without issue, merely from habits of deceit
and treachery for its own sake. The account of the war takes sometimes
the cryptic form of primitive Icelandic or old English poetry:

Day was gone. Night covered sky

Black over earth When we came there

To Brandon Walls where Red Shaw lay

Hateful and sleeping Unfriendly visit.

I wished to revenge quit folly

Who my father at Colefangs valley

Lying in ambush cruelly shot

With life for life.
Or, as an expression of the futuristic element, there occurs a rhetorical
incoherence, an attempt to reduce language to its basic suggestiveness a
la Gertrude Stein. One of the characters says:

A forward forward can never be a backward backward.)+4

or, to express a tragic vision of death, the same suggestive power in words
is used in a sort of incantation.

Not from this life, not from this life is any

To keep: sleep, day and play would not help there

Dangerous to new ghost; new ghost learns from many

Learns from old termers what death is, where.

Who's Jealous of his latest company

From one day to the next final to us

A changed one; would use sorrow to deny
Sorrow, to replace death: sorrow is sleeping thus.

“3 W. H. Auden, "Paid on Both Sides," Poems, 14.
“4 Ibid, 8.

Unforgetting is not today's forgetting
For yesterday, not bedrid scorning,
But a new begetting

An unforgiving morning.“5

There is also in the charade an element of primitive wisdom, a con-

sideration of basic questions, what is man, how does he live, what is the

element common to all men. The Chorus which provides a commentary through~

out the play, has a clear sightedness and universal vision that contrasts

with the individual sorrows or the narrow business-like considerations of

those involved in the war.

Chorus:

Can speak of trouble, pressure on men

Born all the time, brought forward into light
For warm dark moon

That prize held out of reach

Guides the unwilling tread,

The asking breath,

Till on attended bed

Or in untracked dishonor comes to each

His natural death.

The chorus exposes the life we live now as false:

We pass our days

Speak man to men, easy, learning to point
To Jump before ladies, to show our scars:
But no

We were mistaken, these faces are not ours.
They smile no more when we smile back:
Eyes, ears, tongue, nostrils bring

News of revolt, inadequate counsel to

An infirm king.

and finally it invokes a purposely mysterious power who tears away the

epidermis that hides the festering sores, all the pretenses and superfi—

cial paraphernalia of a life which has extended itself into trivia.

O watcher in the dark, you wake
Our dream of waking, we feel
Your finger on the flesh that has been skinned,

By your bright day

h

45‘9. H. Auden, "Paid on Both Sides." Poems, 8-

to

See clear what we were doing, that we were vile. - ,
Your sudden hand shall humble great

Pride, break it, wear down to stumpfléold systems which await
The last transgression of the sea.

In this sort of life, the basic meaning of tradition, ritual, law,
had disappeared. Father Christmas appears as a comedy character and Christ-
mas has degenerated into an excuse for giving toys to children. Where
religion was important before, superstition only has endured:

Sometimes we read a sign, cloud in the sky,

The wet tracks of a hare, quicken the step
Promise the best day. But here no remedy

Is to be thought ot, no news but the new death:

... last night at Hammergill
A boy was born fanged like a weasel.

47

At the trial of a Spy. we hear the flat empty statements of politicians:
Yes, I know we have and are making terrific sacrifices, but
we cannot give in. We cannot betray the dead. As we pass
their graves can we be deaf to the simple eloquence of their

inscriptions, those who in the glory of their early manhood
gave up their lives for us? No, we must fight to the finish.

48
Although the play is short, there are so many characters, representing

one thing or another, so many comments of different sorts, that any com—
plete examination of them would resolve itself into hopeless monotony. As
might be expected in this world of perpetual warfare, the doctor is an im—
portant character but, like Father Christmas, he is also a comic figure,
able to diagnose "Tennis elbow, Grave's Disease, Derbyshire neck and House—
maid's Knees," besides having discovered the origin of life.”9 He and
Father Christmas, and some of the other commentators provide a vaudeville

background for the serious business of the war, with its perpetual am-

bushes, raids, schoolboy exchanges of vows and knives, its darkly muttered

 

45—W. H. Auden, "Paid on Both Sides," Poems, 8-9.
3: Bus. 13.

Ibid, 18.
49 Ibid, 21.

understatements, based probably on the sagas. "It shall be as you like.
Though I think that much will come of this, chiefly harm."50
At the end of the Charade, the two sides make uncertain peace through

the marriage of characters on opposite sides: but their peace is broken
immediately by the intervention of one of the mothers (an uncertain but
important symbol in Auden's work, especially that which he did in collabo—
ration with Isherwood) who forces her son to treacherously renew the feud
again by killing the bridegroom. The play ends on a defeated note. The
bereaved bride says:

Now we have seen the story to its end.

The hands that were to help will not be lifted,

And had followed by worse leaves us tears,

An empty bed, hope from less noble men.

After reading this obscure play, one wonders where, exactly, it is

to be applied. Is it, as some critics have decided, the expose of in-
dustry at war with itself, or does it have deeper religious and psycholo-
gical implications. I think that it might be partially explained in terms
of its being Auden's version of the wasteland theme, not a slavish imita—
tion but only a different approach to the same subject, made possible,
perhaps, by Eliot's example. One of the poems which Auden has preserved
in the Collected Poetry from "Paid on Both Sides" begins "The Spring un-
settles sleeping partnerships,"52 suggesting the opening of "The waste

Land:" "April is the cruellest month,...." The poem ends:

... Better where no one feels,
The out-of—sight, buried too deep for shafts.53

echoing an earlier expression of the same theme:

 

H. Auden, "Paid on Both Sides,"Poems, 21.
d: 33-“.

Ibid, 17.

Ibid, 18.

 

 

Knuxknka
UNH

 

Could I have been some simpleton that lived

Before disaster sent his runners here:

Younger than worms, worms have too much to bear.

Yes, mineral were best: could I but see

These woods, these fields of green, this lively world

Sterile as moon.5
Auden's wasteland, however, is a more vigorous place that Eliot's: unlike
Eliot's living dead, his characters have not lost the will to action, but

1*
their impulses are usually in the wfong direction. The world which he

f

I

presents is a painful one, offering paths in all directions, some leading
back to the old life, which is finished, some promising a new future,
WBeg fruit, eagles above the stream."55 but no one knows the way, and
life is random and usually vicious.

One of the difficulties with "Paid on Both Sides" is that it includes,
to use Auden's figure, too much of the sea within the mirror. The theory
to be found in psychology that the random thought is the most suggestive
seems to be enthroned here, and while it may be true, it lacks the virtue
of providing a logical system, or at least a possibility for development
that will finally perfect, round off, finish a work of art so that it re-
presents a separate world in harmony with itself. "Paid on Both Sides"
misses being in itself a finished myth, as Kafka's work succeeds in being,
although its impact is a mythical one partly because, trying to make a
universal statement, it generalizes, draws from the past, and transforms
the present into symbols. That one controlling myth, or figurative approach
to reality isn't present in "Paid on Both Sides," has its reflection also
in the Life-Art relationship, that is, that the great variety of notions

and ideas which Auden derives from life are scrambled and condensed into

 

5‘+ W. H. Auden, "Paid on Both Sides," Poems, 17.
55 Ibid, 3h.

1+3

poetry which seems to have rather than a communicative function, an evo-
cative one, both for the poet and for the reader.

Most of the poems in the 1930 volume have the same atmosphere of a
lurking disaster that one finds in "Paid on Both Sides:" they present the
same vision of disorder and menacing corruption. One, in particular,
seems to be pointed toward Marxism:

Financier, leaving your little room
Where the money is made but not spent,
You'll need your typist and your boy no mops:
The game is up for you and for the others.“0
but they raise the same question that seemed always about to be answered
in "Paid on Both Sides," Who are the evil ones? What is the deadly di-
sease? Auden is more definite in the last poem in the collection.
Sir, no man's enemy, forgiving all
But will his negative inversion, be prodigal:
Send to us power and light, a sovereign touch
Curing the intolerable neural itch,
The exhaustion of wearing, the liar's quinsy,
And the distortions of ingrown virginity.
Prohibit sharply the rehearsed response
And gradually correct the coward's stance.57
Here the disease is classified in psychological terms, and the two sides
seem to draw apart, making a pathway through the earlier confusion, and
supplying a clearer Weltanschauung than the earlier perception of a uni—
versal disease and disorder.

Although there remains always a necessary ambiguity in his work, the

next major poem, The Orators (1932) demonstrates that Auden is moving in

 

the direction of greater clarity, and that whether or not he is interested

now in communication, as he is later in The New Year Letter, because his

 

point of view has begun to crystalize more than it had when he wrote "Paid

 

Eth. H. Auden, "XXIX," Poems, 78.
57 W. H. Auden, “XXX," Poems. 79.

on Both Sides," Art and Life take a step apart, and the impressions ex-
pressed in the earliest poetry have now a concrete application, there is

still, here, the direct concern with life: The Orators is a series of

 

observations specifically about the English middle class although it has
its application to the general life, but there is in the separate poems
a greater concern with logic, not of a random sort, but that which may,
without the psychiatrist's key, finally become apparent to the reader.

The method of communication also shifts in The Orators from suggestive

 

and evocative language, from the manufacture of symbols and a personal
myth to something more general. The imagery of fairy tale becomes more
prominent here: the people who flashed past before we could decide whe-
ther they were good or evil stop and talk: the individual poems, we feel,
try to make a definite point. The vision, of course, remains individual,
and probes beneath the surfaces in order to discover, by turning every-
thing inside out, the root of the disease and what metaphysic can be

adopted as a cure. The point of view in The Orators is mainly psycho—

 

logical and anthropological. It also has, what was only a little appa-
rent in "Paid on Both Sides," a clinical flavor, the sharp acerbity of
the physician who knows what he is about, even though the symptoms of

his own disease are not entirely clear to him. Finally, in The Orators,

 

the quest theme begins to emerge, particularly in "The Journal of an
Airman," where the Airman, also engaged in the same local skirmishing
that went on in "Paid on Both Sides," if he doesn't free himself from
the common contamination, at least discovers what he is, and in that way
gains his advantage over the others, the enemy, who are blind to their

illness.
The Orators, with all of its advantages over the earlier work, is

a sprawling and somewhat incoherent book. When he put together the

r.-
K n

Collected Poetry, Auden included only a few sections, explaining that The

 

Orators belongs to a certain class of work "the good ideas which ... in-
competence or impatience prevented from coming to much."58

For this reason partly and for reasons of time and space, this paper
will deal only with what seems to be the most important sections, Book I,
"The Initiates," and Book II, "The Journal of an Airman."

One of the elements only implicit in the earliest work, that begins

to become apparent in The Orators, is the use of the Christian myth. In

 

the earlier work Auden is obsessed with the confusion in his world: the
prominent note in his poetry is the unhealthy disorder of modern times.
Even the last poem in the 1930 voluem, "Sir, no man's enemy forgiving all,”
could be called properly a Christian poem although Auden's inclusion of
it in the Collected Poetry since his conversion may have made it so now.
God and salvation are equally dim in the early work and the only desperate
suggestion for change is "death of the old gang."

We know it, We know that love

Needs death, death of the grain, our death,
Death of the old gang: would leave them

In sullen valley where is made no friend,
The old gang to be forgotten in the spring,
The hard bitch and the riding-master

Stiff underground: deep in the clear lake
The lolling bridegroom, beautiful there. 9

In The Orators there appears to be a merging of psychOIOgy and Christianity.
Sin is presented imaginatively as it is in Dante's Inferno, this time how-

ever in a combination of sermon and case study.

To start with then, the excessive lovers of self. [Auden is
talking about Dante's classification of excessive, defective,
and perverted love;] What are they like? These are they who

 

38W. H. Auden, Preface to Collected Poetry.
59 w. H. Auden, "XVI," Poems, 61.

even in childhood played in their corner, shrank when addressed.

Lovers of long walks, they sometimes become bird watchers,

crouching for hours among sunlit bushes like a fox, but pre~

fer as a rule the big cities, living voluntarily in a tap

room, the curiosity of their landlady...With odd dark eyes

like windows, a lair for engines, they pass suffering more

and more from cataract or deafness, leaving behind them

diaries full of incomprehensible Jottings, complaénts less

heard than the creaking of a wind pump on a moor. O
This added sharpness in the characterizing of "that old gang" is a clearer
expression of what Auden has said modern poetry is properly concerned with,
the division between the good and evil will and it is, in part, this sort
of orthodoxy that orients the sometimes too random effects of psychologi-
cal Weltanschauung.

The religious element in Auden's psychology has been examined by Mal-
comb Cowley, who proposes a pat but fairly useful set of correspondence.61
According to his analysis, original sin represents for Auden, Narcissism
or self pride: Hell is the predicament of self—centered man in his isola—
tion: salvation is an escape from selfhood: eternity is a mystical ex-

perience. Although when Cowley published the article in l9h5, Auden's

theology had outstripped so worldly a definition, in The Orators it clear-

 

ly Joins hands with Homer Lane's semiemystical approach to the diseased
personality.

There are at least three ways of interpreting The Oratogs, all of

 

them, I think valid. They are not arranged in levels, as are the various
kinds of allegory in The Divine Comedy, so that one can read the poem con-
sistently on whatever level is possible for him, but the different elements
are scattered throughout the book so that as in a kaleidoscope, from time

to time the pattern shifts, changing, but not breaking the consistency.

 

60 W. H. Auden, "Address for a Prize-Day," The Oratggg, lh—S.

1 Malcomb Cowley, “Virtue and Virtuosity: Notes on W.H.Auden," Poetry, V,
65 (March, 19u5) 208.

L7

The explanations range from the concrete to the occult. The first views
The Orators as an expose of the decadent middle class, a social tract
with undertones of war and revolution. The second proposes an ingenious
application of Homer Lane's or Groddeck's psychological principles with
the purpose of revealing through a commentary upon their actions, which
involuntarily reveal their hidden disease, the corruption that feeds
upon "the old gang" who form, apparently, the majority of those peeple
under observation. The third is more vague. There is a suggestion of
the quest theme which Auden has used in all of his work even more con-
sciously than his near contemporaries, Yeats and Eliot. Most of the early
poetry is a negative expression of the quest where the corruption cries
for a deliverer. In The Orators the airman conquers the dragon, but his
salvation is limited. It is only himself that he saves, Just as, Auden
tells us, the poet, no matter how hard he may try or how much his actions
resemble those of the hero who plunges into the wilderness of himself to
find salvation for everyone, can never become the messiah because, for
one thing, poetry has not so powerful a grip on the common life nor does
it properly have the function of propaganda, for, as Auden puts it,

... poetry is not concerned with telling people what to do,

but with extending our knowledge of good and evil, perhaps

making the necessity for action more urgent and its nature

more clear, but only leading us to tgg point where it is possible

to make a rational and moral choice.
The quest, then, could perhaps best be described as a personal odyssey,
offering no more than an example for the general public, its victories
necessarily personal because they are paid for by struggle. The parti-

cular odyssey described in this version of the quest is the development

from adolescence into the next level, not so boldly physiological as its

 

452 W. H. Auden, quoted in an article by Kerker Quinn, "Poets into Play-
wrights," Virginia Quarterly Review, Autumn XIII, 619.

 

us

statement here seems to imply, but a spiritual development, what would
be described in anthropological terms as rites of passage.

Auden is fond of historical summaries, some of them ontogenetic and
some autogenetic. He may even go back as far as the worm in order to re-
locate the several connections without which the world, to his eyes, is
ricochetting madly into nowhere. More often his retrospections are accounts
of his experience of development either specific, applying only to him-
self, or intuitive, applying to a general state of being. One of the fi-
nest poems in the early collection (1930), It was Easter as I walked in
the public gardens, contains, among other things, this developmental
theme:

This if the account of growing, of knowing:
First difference from first innocence

Is feeling cold and nothing there,
Continual weeping and oversleeping,

Is mocking, nudging, and defense of fear:
Verbal fumbling and muscle mumbling,
Imagination by mispronunciation.

Sebaceous belly, swollen skull,

Exchanging hats and calling dear

Are rich and silly, poor and dull. 63

In The Orators, I think Auden set about recreating a certain part of his

 

childhood with, of course, the impersonality required by T. 5. Eliot for
paying the proper respect to tradition.

Although much of this explanation may seem beside the point, Th2
Orators, unless it is to be studied thoroughly in itself, requires some
sort of general characterization in order to rescue the scattered bits
which must represent it in this paper from an effect of total bewilder-

ment. As far as the LifeeArt problem is concerned, The Orators represents

 

an experimental, tentative, and yet unformulated relationship. Over the

 

53 w. H. Auden, "XVI," Poems, 60.

 

A9

chasm that yawns between appearance and fantasy is thrown a makeshift
bridge of beliefs of which one feels, Auden is not finally convinced,
but which are useful to him for achieving the airman's view of reality.

Consider this and in our time
As the hawk sees it or the helmeted airman:64

And it is reality, that is, an emphasis on life that still remains im—
portant. Poetry has predominantly the function of untangling confusion.
of discovering the difference between good and evil, of providing for
poets "a mirror in which they may become conscious of what their own
feelings really are...."65 Still, as the various kinds of Weltanschauung
begin to pierce the gloomy confusion, Art itself also takes on a more
crystaline organization. Auden has, from the beginning been a formalist,
but in the early poetry he uses form in a more exterior sense. Within
the strict bounds of Icelandic alliteration and stress, the terza rima,
the tricolets, there is still an uncontrolled and undigested virtuosity
of feeling, a richness of suggestion which, by its sheer jungle-like
growth of exotic images, presents a complication, not so much of conden-
sed and paradoxical thought, as the later poetry does but of a haze of
imagery made to express a comparatively simple level of ideological and
emotional experience. Such a poem as this one, which appears in the 1930
volume has what seems to be an unnecessary turgidity. Its subject, birth
and the wasted richness of "Life stripped to girders, monochrome. Deceit
of instinct"66 is perhaps suited to a groping, inchoate expression, but

its suitability to HOpkin's alliterative sprung rhythm, which has always

 

6E W. H. Auden, "XXIX," Poems, 76.
65 W. H. Auden, "Poet of the Encirclement," New Republic, 109 (Oct., 'MB) 579.
66 W. H. Auden, "XIII," Poems, 53.

about it a sprightly tension, and a Jumping logic that illuminates rather
than confuses, is doubtful.

Bones wrenched, weak whimper, lids wrinkled, first dazzle known,
World wonder hardened as bigness, years, brought knowledge, you:
Presence a rich mould augured for roots urged --- but gone,

The soul is tetanous: gun barrel burnishing
In summer grass, mind lies to tarnish, untouched, undoing,
Though body stir to sweat, or, squat as idol, brood,

In duriate the fire with bellows, blank till sleep
And two-faced dream -—- "I want," voiced treble as once 67
Crudely through flowers till dunghill cockcrow, crack at East.

There is about this poem, whether intentional or not, it would be hard to
say, a heavy untidiness that is corrected in the later poetry. The last

poem in The Orators is an example of the inner clarity that becomes in-

 

creasingly apparent in Auden‘s work:

"0 where are you going?“ said reader to rider,
"That valley is fatal where furnaces burn,
Yonder's the midden where odours will madden,
The gap is the grave where the tall return."

“0 do you imagine," said fearer to farer,

"That dusk will delay on your path to the pass,
Your diligent looking discover the lacking
Your footsteps feel from granite to grass?"

"0 what was that bird," said horror to hearer,
"Did you see that shape in the twisted trees?
Behind you swiftly the figure comes softly,

The spot on your skin is a shocking disease?"

"Out of this house" --- said rider to reader
"Yours never will“ --~ said farer to fearer
"They're looking for you" —-- said hearer to horror
As he left them there, as he left them there,
A small part of the credit for the increasing clarity in Auden's

work can, I think, be laid, to his developing perception of how myth is

to be applied to poetry. The first poem in Book I, "Address for a Prize-

Day" is an extremely complex combination of Christian myth, psychology,

 

6? W. HL Auden, "XIII," Poems, 53.

51'

Marxism, and a fusion of these abstract disciplines with humorously con—
crete references taken from daily life. The tone of the poem is sophis-
ticated naivity: written as a parody of speeches given by one of Auden's
pre-school masters, it captures the over—simplification, the rhetorical

attractiveness, the direct organization of those communications designed

for the young.

Commemoration, Commemoration. What does it mean? What
does it mean? Not what does it mean to them, there, then.
What does it mean to us here now? It's a facer, isn't it,
boys? But we've all got to answer it. What were the dead
like? What sort of peOple are we living with now? Why are
we here? What are we going to do? ... What do you think?

What do you think about England, this country of ours where
nobody is well?68

All of the questions except the last one have the tiresomely familiar

ring of general considerations uttered on all public occasions. They are,
however, the very questions that modern life, because it has no answer

for them, has evaded for years, and in the light of the underlying serious-
ness of the poem, commemoration represents a sort of day of judgment,

the end of the old regime.

The combination of sermon and case study has already been touched
upon. Another amusing incursion of the contemporary is Auden's mock-
serious device of bringing divinity up to date. Just as Kafka's heaven
is an immense and complicated bureaucracy, Auden's angels, specialists
in spiritual fields, descend upon England like a body of trained govern-

ment agents.

Imagine to yourself a picked body of angels, all qualified
experts on the human heart, a Divine Commission, arriving
suddenly one day at Dover. After some weeks in London, they
separate, one passing the petral pumps along the Great North
Road ... one to the furnace-crowded Midlands ... another to

 

58 w. H. Auden, "Address for a Prize—Day," The Orators, 13-h.

 

52

Cornwall where granite resists the sea and our type of thinkn

ing ends, and soon. And then when every inch of the ground

has been carefully gone over, every house inspected, they re—

turn to the capital again to compare notes, to collaborate

in a complete report which made, they depart as quietly as

they came. Beauty of the scenery apart, would you not feel

some anxiety as to the contents of that report. Do you con-

sider their statistics as to the average number of lost per—

sons to the acre would be a cause for self congratulation?O

From the easy, urbane manner of "Address for a Prize Day," Auden
travels underground into the regions of "Paid on Both Sides." This time,
however, the sides have shifted, the "old gang" is clearly separate from
the secret band of revolutionaries, the few chosen frontier fighters, who
live among the others unknown but waiting for a chance to strike.

Smile inwardly on their day handing around tea. (Their

women have the faces of birds.) walking in the mountains we

were persons unknown to our parents, awarded them little, had

a word~of our own for our better shadow.
The expression of myth that Auden uses here is the idiom of the boys' sec-
ret society, magic pass words, private jokes, references to a mysterious
leader, the atmosphere of mountain fighting, the peculiar innocence of
military life. The use of myth in this case is an artificial one, the
sephisticated creation out of other myths, not necessarily believed in,
of a representation of psychic functions partly religious, and partly
manifestations of the id that are present in that group of adventurers
who have become conscious of a spiritual world within themselves. In
language partly Biblical, partly taken from fairy tale, Auden expresses
in a manner removed from sentimentality because of the suggestion of paro—
dy, the imaginative excesses of the chosen few:

If it were possible, yes, now certain. To meet Him alone
on the narrow path, forcing a question, would show our unique

Knowledge. Would hide Him wounded in a cave, kneeling all
night by his bed of bracken, bringing hourly an infusion of

 

9 H. Auden, "Address for a Prize-Day," The Orators, 13-4.
0 . H. Auden, “Argument," The Orators, 20.

 

 

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bitter herbs: wearing His cloak receive the mistaken stab,
deliver his message, fall at His feet, He gripping our mori-
bund hands, smiling.7l

This section has the effect of a humorous nightmare, a tangle of
random comments, "Murder of a rook by weasels"74 --- the rock is a sym-
bol of prosperity and grace. There is a parody on ritual, witty and some-
times obscene:
A Schoolmaster cleanses himself at half-term with a vege-
table offering; on the north side of the hill, one writes with
his penis in a patch of snow "Resurgam."73
Secret the meeting in time and place, the time of the off—
shore wind, the place where loyalty is divided. Meeting of se-
ven, each with a talent.7
This grotesque landscape is what is hidden by the door behind which
no one looks. Its schoolboy spirit of adventure‘is in a way, a compensa-
tion for a world where heroism is neither welcome nor even possible. It
is a serious and comic manifestation of the spirit that sponsored Lawrence
of Arabia, or that caused D. H. Lawrence to look at his characters in terms
of their capacity for passion. It is a counter attack on the morbid lethar—
gy, the shallowness, the death wish of "the old gang," an attempt to escape
"the tragic fate of the insects"7ér of the Hollow Men for whom
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the shadow.76

In itself, the world which Auden creates is a system of myth, the purpose

of which is to encompass and reveal the surface of life, and to suggest the

 

71 W. H. Auden, "Argument," The Orators, 22.
78 Ibid, 28.
73 Ibid, 22—3.
7“ Ibid, 20.

5 Ibid, 24.

5 T. 5. Eliot, "The Hollow Men," Collected Poems, 10a.

 

 

suffering and captive forces beneath the shallow crust. It could per-
haps best be described as a school boy saga, modeled upon the Icelandic
sagas, with the conscious addition of Freudian symbolism, and a shift
in tone from the naive to the sophisticated, from the innocently crude,
to a deliberate return to primitivism.

Book II of The Orators, "Journal of an Airman," also makes use of
the school boy saga. It provides a body of contrived folklore found in
the notebook of its central character, the airman. The "Journal" ree
sembles, in a way, Rilke's Journal of my Other Self, where, under the
guise of autobiography, Rilke created for himself a traditional ancestry,
a number of childhood anecdotes, a history, in short, that might give
him the roots that he lacked, cut off, as he was, and as most modern
people are, either from an immediate ancestral past or from the past of
his race which is kept alive by ritual and tradition.

The airman represents the exceptionally sensitive person, in this case,
a homosexual, who from the vantage point of his isolation can see life as
it really is, not being caught in the deceptive meshes of ordinary exis-
tence. With his extraordinary vision to guide him, the airman fills his
notebooks with a number of random Jottings --- definitions, bits of poetry,
pseudo-scientific laws, plans for attack, description of the enemy, using
Freud's theory that in the inovert habitual actions we reveal ourselves
most clearly.

Three signs of an enemy letter —-~ underlining --- parenthesis
in brackets --- careful obliteration of cancelled expressions
Three signs of an enemy house --- old furniture ~a~ a room
called the Den --— photographs of friends

Three terms of enemy speech --- I mean --- quite frankly -——
Speaking as a scientist, etc.

 

Y7 W. H. Auden, "Journal of an Airman," The Orators, 55.

 

In order to discover the enemy, if description is not sufficient, the
airman provides several psychological figure tests and draws up his rela-
tionships in terms of complicated geometric patterns. One important
point that he makes about the enemy is that "THE ENEMY IS A LEARNED NOT
A NAIVB OBSERVER."78 He is a perversion of the scientific man, the crafty
manipulator of statistics, the professor of education, the advertising
researcher: his mind is controlled, patterned, precise; he is the "rea-
sonable" one, as opposed to the extravagant and childlike personality of
the airman and his friends. They are, on the other hand, the ones who
are truly alive, who do not live by negation.

Of the Enemy's definitions by Negation

Unless you do well you will_pg§ be loved.

I'm afraid of death (instead of I want to live).

Pleasure—is the decrease of pain (olives --- whiskey).79
Following the advice of Lane and Groddeck, the airman and his friends are
guided by intuition rather than reason, and their childishness, their de-
light in practical Jokes is only their refusal to stifle the natural re—
actions of the child which lies beneath the surface of their maturity.

The airman's construction of his geneaology represents a rather pe—

culiar inversion of the usual Freudian Oedipus complex. Starting with a
simple biological dominant and recessive chart, using black and white for
characteristics, the airman proves that in the F3 generation, the true an-
cestory of the pure white individual is the uncle. This corresponds to
some types of primitive ancestor classification where the maternal uncle

assumes the education and initiation of the neophyte. As it is used here,

the relationship suggests homosexuality:

 

78 W. H. Auden, "Journal of an Airman," The Orators, 43.
79 Ibid, 71.

 

It wasn't till I was sixteen and a half that he invited me

to his flat. We had champagne for dinner. When I left, I

knew who and what he was —-— my real ancestor. 0
Although Auden may seem to be straining the boundaries of poetry with
devices such as this one, they do not appear out of place in the par—
ticular medium that he uses, Just as prose passages in his later work
are perfectly in keeping with the more traditional forms. Science is

treated facetiously all the way through the "Journal:"

The second law of tEermo dynamics -—- self care or minding
one's own business.“1

Auden uses the psychological Weltanschauung in connection with the
quest theme to form a sort of semi-religious framework for the "Jour-
nal." The airman suffers from a mysterious disease, manifested in an
inability to control his hands. His affliction suggests Groddeck's
statement that the id inflicts punishment upon those parts of the body
which have denied its commands, and the airman, who is frantically
searching for purity before the terrible collapse of civilization which
threatens throughout the "Journal" is not cured until he realizes that
"God the desires ... means to be obeyed."

The peculiar structure of The Orators is a function, perhaps, of

 

the kind of myth which it uses. Like looking at a dim star out of the
corner of your eye, the obscure but important aspects of life can be
captured only through indirection, through random thoughts connected by
a hidden logic, through an intuitive manipulation of experience. And

it is still experience that counts in The Orators; it is not a poem which

 

offers emotion designed for the luxury trade, providing a delicate fla-

 

80 W. H. Auden, "Journal of an Airman," The Orators, 61-2.
81 Ibid, 41.

 

\A n
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vor not to be found in ordinary life, elevating, or ennobling, but rather
with all the vehemence of a judgment day warning, it points out the evils
of the whole structure of life. It has the quality as Eliot's verse has
also of demanding action, either an acceptance or rejection and its moral
purpose imposingly overshadows the aesthetic. Although Auden's moral
purpose never diminishes, his art, by sheer necessity of his talent, re-

fines, develops, moves into a new position in relation to its more func—

tional purpose in the early work.

PART III

In the nine years between The Dggbl§_flap and The Orators Auden pub-

 

lished four volumes of poetry, (Eggmg 193M, Look Stranggr,,§pgin,,§pgth§g
‘Tim§), two travel books (Letters from Iceland, Journey to a War), four
plays,written in collaboration with ChristoPher Isherwood, (The Dance of
Death, The Dog Beneath the Skin, The Ascent of F6, On the Frontier) and
one anthology (The Poet's Tongue). One may wonder why in this brief ex-
cursion through Auden's poetry, all these stations have been by-passed,
and The Double Man chosen for at least a partial stop. Time and space,

of course, prevent a complete examination of Auden's work, and The Double

 

Eéfl is particularly pertinent to this paper because, for one thing, the
poem which fills the main body of the book, "The New Year Letter," pre-
sents a detailed account of Auden's intellectual and emotional develop-
ment, his ideas about politics, metaphysics, Life and Art, and for another,
The Double Man is representative, in relation to the other work, of a cer—
tain point which Auden has reached in his ascent of the glass mountain.

If the early poetry can be said to correspond roughly with Eliot's"Wast3‘
land" period, this middle point of development might find its counter—
part in Ash Wednesda , the dry time of waiting for grace, with full reali—
zation of helplessness in forcing the gates of heaven.

In this period, Auden has discovered not only the usefulness, but
the truth of the Christian myth. The moral impulse has found its proper
expression, but nothing has yet been resolved: the healing waters have
not been released either for Life or for Art and although the painful or-

der that Auden must make for himself and for others is slowly creeping

out of confusion, its effects are yet to be fully realized.

59

The advantages gained in the past have not been entirely discorded,
but they have been re-examined, criticized, and put away to be brought
out only for occasional use. Lane and Groddeck reappear from time to
time, are viewed with regret, and dismissed because they have seen only
half of the dichotomy, good and evil. The freedom of the unconscious, the
emptying of the storehouse of the id is also no longer possible, at least
for use in poetry.

0 hour of images when we sniff the herb
Of childhood and forget who we are and dream
Like whistling boys of the vast spaces
Of the inconsistent racing towards us
With all its appealing private detail. But
Our ways are revealing: crossing the legs
Or resting the cheek in the hand, we
Hide the mouths through which the disregarded
Will always enter. For we know we're not boys
And never will be: part of us all hstse life,
And some are completely against it.82
But with the decrease in emphasis upon psycho-analysis and Marxism Auden
shows no diminution of interest in politics or in human error, both his
own and that of other people. His preoccupation cannot change because
stubborn outlines of the world still remain, no matter from how many
different angles they are examined. The change is rather in his shift
to the Christian myth, with its attendant theOIOgical complexities, in
his adoption of a belief which has not only the Arnoldian virtues of be—
ing useful for pruning the wilderness of life, and for extending its or-
der and its sources of inspiration to poetry as well, but also because it
is the truth, is able to bear the allegiance of full belief. Marxism and

psycho-analysis were never permanently accepted. Auden tells us in his

article on Yeats that

 

 

82 w. H. Auden. "Prologue," The Double Mag, 11.

 

L?“

Q)

You cannot use a Weltangghgggng like psycho—analysis or Marxism

or Christianity as a poetic myth unless it involves your emo-

tions profoundly, and if you have not inherited it, your emo-

tions will never become ingolved unless you take it more seri-

ously than as a mere myth. 3
Earlier in the article, Auden makes the statement that

in poetry all dogmas become myths: that the aesthetic value of

the poem is the same whether the poet and/or the reader active-

ly believes in what it says or not. The poet is apt, then to

look around for some myth -—— any myth, he thinks, will do ---

to serve the same purpose for himself. What he overlooks is

that the only kind of myth which will do for him must have one

thing in common with believed dogma, namely, that the relation

ofathe former to tga poet, as of the latter to the soul must

be a personal one.

This personal relationship is what the Christian myth promises in "The
New Year Letter," although as a source for poetic material, the fountain
is still dry, the arguments prosaic, the entrance into the garden yet to
be effected.

"The New Year Letter” is a long and complex poem. It ranges from a
discussion of Auden's literary influences to a brief-history of New Eng-
land. Although every part of the poem is useful for understanding Auden's
work, only two aspects can be presented in this paper, the Art—Life rela-
tionship, and Auden's use of Christian theology, if not yet as myth, as
an approach to solving some of the difficulties of the quest, both as it
affects every man and as it is concerned with the artist's eternal riddle
of striking a balance between Life and Art.

The first section of the "Letter" contains a discussion of the Life-
Art relationship. Listenin. to music, Auden feels the attractive order
which Art can offer, not however real, and therefore to be equated with
Life, but an ideal order, a wished for perfection, which leaves still the

howling wilderness to be faced outside the limited garden.

83‘W. H. Auden, "Yeats as an Example," Kenyon Review, X, no. 2, 191.
8’4 Ibid, 91.

 

61

Where Buxtehude as we played

One of his pgssacagliag made

Our minds a civitas of sound

Where nothing but assent was found,

For art had set in order sense

And feeling and intelligence,

And from its ideal order greg

Our local understanding too.
This is the small but wonderful gift that Art can offer, a glimpse of an
ideal order from which may even spread by contagion order in Life as well.
But here Kinekegaard enters the picture, through whose help Auden sets
up a metaphysical distinction between Life and Art.

Art is not life and cannot be

A midwife to society.

For art is fact accompli.

What they should do, or how or when

Life-order comes to liVing men

It cannot say, for it presents

Already lived experience

Through a convention that crggtes

Autonomous completed states.

At the end of To the Lighthouse Lily Briscoe, who has been waiting
all her life for some sort of fulfillment, puts the final stroke to her
painting. "Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue,

I have had my vision."57 This mystical equation of Life and Art is what
Auden denies in "The New Year Letter." Life is never completed and the
vision is never final (as it is in Art) until death draws the final stroke.
Grace is a condition of perpetual striving, perpetual suffering, of an
attempt to find an elusive balance which is never quite within reach. This
is, of course Eliot's paradox, "In my end is my beginning“?8 for accord-

ing to Auden paradise is not to be enjoyed on earth but only its promise,

seen in the distance over the ridges of the endless Purgatorial mountain.

 

85 w. H. Auden, "The New Year Letter," The Double Man, 16.
Ibid, 17.

87 Virginia Woolfe, To the Lighthouse, 310.

88 T. S. Eliot, "East Coker," The Four_§uartets, l7.

 

 

 

But perfect Being has ordained

It must he lost to be regained,

And in its orchards grow the tree

The fruit of human destiny,

And man must eat it and depart

At once with gay and grateful heart,
Obedient, reborn, re-aware;

For if he stop an instant there,

The sky grows crimson with a curse,
The flowers change color for the worse.
He hears behind his back the wicket
Padlock itself, from the dark thicket
The chuckle with no healthy cause,
And helpless sees the crooked claws
Emerging into view and groping

For handholds on the low round ceping,
As horror clambers from the well:

For he has sprung the trap of Hell.89

What this passage implies is only one of the relationships possible,
or not possible between Art and Life. Auden is saying that Life should
not be regarded as if it were Art, and therefore capable of being willed
to completion. There is, of course, a necessary commerce between Art and
Life and the practical question which must finally be answered is how is
experience to be translated, to be made into a form that will be sepa-
rated from life and yet share in the fidelity of fact. For Auden, the
ordre logique seems to lie in his use of the Christian myth. The leap
from the early poetry in "The New Year Letter" emphasizes the enormous
distance that has been traversed between the two regions of intuitive and

rational knowledge. Rilke's Das Anders and the equally expansive but

 

much brighter kingdom of theology. The frontier myth is no longer useful,
and the "old gang" although still in force, are no longer to be exter-
minated but viewed in the sympathetic light of an understanding of human
error. Although Marxism and psychology have always some valuable point to

make because they are at least in part true, they contain the fundamental

 

 

89 W. H. Auden, "The New Year Letter," The Double Man, 44-5.

 

O\
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error of promising a paradise on earth which, even if it were possible,
would be only scantily fitted out with the few harmonious but limited bits
of fnrniture that disciplines circumscribed by materialism can offer. In
the notes to "The New Year Letter" Auden finds psychology dangerous be-
cause:
... it tempts a man to think that since the suffering of his
tribulation can he removed, he will not have to suffer at all;
that, since the way to cure tribulations is to treat them aes~
thetically, that is, not to repress them by will but to admit
them and examine them, temptations can be dealt with in the
same way by yielding to them.90
Christian theology in Auden's poetry is an almost inevitable outlet
for his moral or ethical passion because both his poetry and his way of
thinking have moved consistently in the direction of tradition, knowledge
and classicism. No other discipline could organize and criticize as the
Christian ethic does in "The New Year Latter," the jumbled and divergent
insights and pieces of knowledge ranging historically from Aristotle to
Kierkegaard which are reflected through Auden from the chaos of the modern
world. Finding an order, however, is not the goal of the quest, nor does
its process provide an entirely satisfactory subject matter for poetry.
The texture of "The New Year Letter" varies from dry syllogistic state—
ment, the charm of which lies in its verbal ingenuity:
I see it now. The intellect
That parts the Cause from the Effect
And thinks in terms of Space and Time
Commits a legalistic crime
For such an unreal severance
Must falsify experience.

to a lyric passage like this one. Although Auden often misses by his em-

phasis on the prosaic, the happy fusion of thought and feeling:

 

90 w. H. Auden, "The New Year Letter," The Double Man, 131.

 

5h

0 Unicorn among the_cedars,

To whom no magic charm can lead us
White childhood moving like a sigh
Through the green woods unharmed in thy
Sophisticated innocence

Convict our pride of its offense

In all things, even penitence,
Instruct us in the civil art

Cf making from the muddled heart

A desert and a city where

The thoughts that have to labor there
May find locality and peace,

And pent-up feelings there release,
Send strength sufficient for our day
And point our knowledge 8n its way

‘9 gg guod jubes, Domino. 1

The function of myth in this transitional poetry is then more heavily
balanced on the side of Weltanschauung than in the sense that Yeats used
it on the side of poetic release, of finding a source of images for poetry:
the emphasis falls more heavily upon the explanation of doctrine and its
application than on the "unicorn among the cedars" and it is not until

the recent poetry that Christian mythology fulfills this evocative func-
tion.

Another kind of myth, which has been mentioned before in connection
has also its connection with theology, for Auden looks upon fairy tale as
a symbolic expression of the prevailing religious spirit of the past. In
his review of Grimm's Fairy Tales he interprets briefly the formula of the
three brothers who have set out on a competitive quest:

From the formula of the three brothers the reader will

learn that the hero -—- is, the one who becomes an individual

person, for that is what it means to be the exception who

marries the Princess and inherits the kingdom -- is not a

superman with exceptional natural gifts. The third son succeeds
not through his own merit but through Divine Grace. His con-

 

V—..‘ -— ‘-

91 W. H. Auden, "The New Year Letter,“ The Qouble Mag, 269-70.

 

tribution is, firstly, a humility which admits that he cannot
succeed without Grace; secondly, a faith which believes that
Grace will help him, so that, when the old beggar asks for
his last penny, that is, when, humanly sneaking he is doom—
ing himself to fail, he can give it away, and lastly, a will-
ingness, unlike his elder brothers who always carry aspggin,
to accept suffering. He is the one who is not anxious.

The way in which Auden uses myth in the sonnet sequence called "The Quest"

which makes up the last section of The Double Man is perhaps the most

 

successful as far as poetry itself is concerned. Although in "The New
Year Letter," sheer virtuosity and the contageous excitement surrounding
ideas that are experienced with genuine feeling and enthusiasm carried
off the dryer sections. "The Quest" is closer to Eliot's fusion of thought
and feeling. Where the "New Year Letter" was didactic and exact, "The
Quest" returns to the ambiguity and magical suggestiveness that makes it
possible for a poem to be experienced without being understood. Auden
uses myth here as he has done sometimes in the earlier work, to connect
the past with the present, to give a universal and impersonal flavor to
his poetry. Life is figuratively represented, as it was in the Middle
Ages, in terms of a pilgrimage or a journey, the failures and successes
expressed humorously and ironically in a mixture of myth and the idiom
of contemporary life.

They noticed that virginity was needed

To trap the unicorn in any case

But not that, of those virgins who succeeded

A high percentage had an ugly face.93

01'

Fresh addenda are published every day
To the encyc10pedia of the Way

Linguistic notes and scientific explanations
And texts for schools with modernized spelling and illustrations.

 

92 w. H. Auden, "The Brothers Grimm," New York Times Book Review, Nor. 12,
1944, 1-28.
93 W. H. Auden, "The Presumptuous," The Double Man, 174.

 

 

Now everyone knows that the hero must chose the old horse
Abstain from liquor and sexual intercourse

And look out for a stranded fish to be kind to:

Now everyone thinks he could find, had he a mind to,
The way through the waste to the chapel in the rock
For a vision of the Triple Rainbow or the Astral Clock.

Forgetting his information comes mostly from married men
Who liked fishing and a flutter on the horses now and then.

9h

"The Quest" is important because it is, in a sense, Auden's own per-
sonal myth. Although the striving toward perfection takes many forms,
involves numerous conversions, the idea that there is a perfection to
reach for but not to gain remains the same. And whether it is to bring
together the two fractured halves of man's nature, reason and emotion, or
to solve the artist's moral dilemma, the translating irresponsible Life
into responsible Art, or to attain the double, although unequal grace of
writing well and putting himself in relation to God, the Quest has its
versatile and useful application.

Although it might seem that his stringent moral attitude toward Life

and toward Art might be exactly parallel with Eliot's moral severity in

 

After Strangg Gods, there is a redeeming elasticity in Auden's ethical
orthodoxy. In a poem, published a short time before "The few Year Letter"
he savs of W. B. Yeats

You were silly like us: your gift survived it all;
and of Kipling and Claudel, although here he is more critical, not having
entirely pardoned Kipling himself:

Time that is intolerant

To the brave and innocent

And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique,

 

 

 

94 W. H. Auden, "The Wav," The Double Man. 178.

Worships language and forgives

Everyone by whom it lives;

Pardons cowardice, conceit,

Lays its honors at their feet.

Time that with this strange excuse

Pardoned Kipling and his views

And will pardon Paul Claudel Q

Pardons him for writing well./5
In a critical sense the problem is perhaps unable to be resolved, for no
matter how much in variance a writer may be with the moral code which
Auden now holds to be the final and inevitable truth, how can he discard
the aesthetic excellence, that, as a writer he cannot resist, although
he realizes that it must, in the end, be subservient to his morality.

For himself, Auden has solved the problem through his use of the Christie

myth which he applies now, in the later work, both to Life and to Poetry.

 

 

"Hum“.-mm” a—a—o

 

SECTION IV

One might erpect that upon his dedication to the Christian myth Auden
would go the whole way and become_what is known as a religious poet, a
writer of devotional verse. For Auden, however, considering the situation
of our time, such a reaction would be a retreat, for between the affirma—
tion vision and its erpression in poetry stretches the whole disgraceful
and untidy world which is not to be forgotten by retiring into a private
singing chamber. "The Sea and the Mirror," the nert major poem of tie
Eomlle Man is, in a way also a transitional work, for its subject is a
fuller and more figurative treatment of what was briefly examined in "The
New Year Letter," the relationship between Life and Art. It may be called

transitional because it is, like Rilke's Malte Laurid, Brig"e an examina-

tion of certain problems that face an artist and in the greater clarity

gained by the examination, it is a preparation for things to come.

"The Sea and the Mirror," an extended epilogue to The Tempest, is con-

 

cerned with the problem which is implicit in the action of the play and
with which Auden, his voice growing steadily more affirmative, is also pre-
occupied in his own work. The problem is this: is it justifiable for Art
in its parable of human experience to prevent a harmonious and Joyful vi-
sion of man's prOper state on earth, slighting, although it may not ignore,
the disharmony that reality necessarily projects into the magic circle. In
the words of Caliban, through whom Auden addresses the audience, this is
Shakespeare's and any artist's dilemma.
Having learnt his language, I begin to feel something of
the serio-comic embarrassment of the dedicated dramatist, who,

in representing to you your condition of estrangement from the
truth, is doomed to fail the more he succeeds, for the more

i

truthfully he paints the condition, the less clearly can he
indicate the truth from which it is estranged, the brighter
his revelation of the truth in its order, its Justice its
joy, the fainter shows his picture of your actual condition
in all its drabness and sham, and, worse still, the more
sharply he defines the estrangement itself...the more he
must strengthen your delusion that an awareness of the gap
is itself a bridge, your interest in your imprisonment a
release, so that, far from your being led by him to con—
trition and surrender, the regarding of your defects in
his mirror, your dialogue, using his words, with yourself
about yourself, becomes the one activity which never...
lets you down, the one game which can be guaranteed, what-
ever the company, to catch on...96

This dangerously euphoric pastime is what Jung calls transcendence:
The greatest and most important problems are basically all
insoluable; they must be so because they express the neces-
sary polarity immanent in every self-regulating system. They
cannot be solved but only Eggnscended...’7

Auden maintains, however, that transcendence is deceptive in so far

Art makes us believe that we have, by the deepening of our emotions

Life's problems. After an evening at the theatre, having lived, as

were, another life, having run through a gamut of emotions and come

cleansed and elevated:
We are wet with sympathy now,
Thanks for the evening but how
Shall we satisfy when we meet,
Between Shall-I and I-Will,

The lion's mouth whose hunger
No metaphors can £111798

as

solved

it

out

In order to make his point about Life and Art, Auden has underlined

the symbolism of The Temoegt even more heavily than Shakespeare did.

 

Ariel

represents Art, Caliban, imperfect mortality and Prospero, the artist. In

dismissing Ariel, Prospero makes a choice, not however, in favor of Cali-

ban, who remains as a reproach to his self-deception and negligence,

 

 

but

96 W.-H:i&uden, "The Seafand the Mirror," Collected Poetry,-§§§:HOO.
97 C. G. Jung's Thq.§egrgt_gf_the Golden Floggg, 88, quoted in Jacobi's

 

 

The Psychology of Jung, 126.
96 W. H. Auden, ”The Sea and the Mirror," on. cit., 351.

m

but turning his back on his magic which always made everything too easy,
he embarks upon the journey of the moral life.
And now in my old age, I wake, and this journey really exists,
And I have actually to take it, inch by inch,
Alone and on foot, without a cent in my pocket,

Through a universe where time is not forshortened
No animals talk, and there is neither floatirs nor flying.99

‘b

This is the journey that faces everyone, and the artist in particular,
while his Art may lead him into graces has always the danger of discover—
ing too late that the temporary harmony he created for himself is only a
shabby approximation of the real Word, that in his mirror, because of his
imperfect knowledge and shaking will "all our meanings are reversed"100
and the feeble reflection, far from being worthy of any allegiance for
its own merits, is a mere shadow of the "perfected Work which is not ours."101

The shift in relationship between Life, Art, and Myth which was ex-
pressed in "The New Year Letter" now becomes even clearer. Myth looms up
before the other two which, in their human falibility, crouch at its feet.
And this time, myth is not simply an idea which will orient the world in
a certain convenient way, but the only possible answer, the final perfec-
tion beside which the dreadful confusion of history in which both Ariel
and Caliban have a part, final perfection beside which the dreadful con-
fusion of history in which both Ariel and Caliban have a part is like grand
Opera rendered by a provincial touring company.

Our performance ~~~ for Ariel and I are ... just as deeply

involved as any of you ... has been so indescribably in excu—

sably awful....We floundered on from fiasco to fiasco, the

schmalz tenor never quite able At his big moments to get right

up nor the ham brass right down, the stud contralto gurgling

through her maternal grief, the ravished coloratura trilliné
madly off-key and the redunited lovers half a bar apart...1 2

 

 

 

99 W. H. Auden, "The Sea and the Mirror," op. cit., 351.
100 Ibid, 402.
101 Ibid, uOP.
102 Ibid, uni.

 

\‘3
|. J

When the whole awkward performance is finished, its players who are all
of us, discover that the noise, the fame properties, the foolish pretenses
have been nothing but an evasion of the terrible reality.

Yet, at this very moment when we do at last see ourselves as

we are, neither cozy nor playful, but swaying out on the ul—

timate wind-whipped cornice that overhangs the unabiding void

--- we have never stood anywhere else -—— when our reasons

are silenced by the heavy huge diversion --- there is nothing

to say.103
But before he condemns the artist to eternal silence Auden, turning around
on himself, reinstates Art in its humble, but still useful position as a
bridge, although a feeble one between the Ultimate and its shabby subjects.
The position that Matthew Arnold held is now completely reversed in Auden.
Religion, rather than being a handemaiden to poetry is now comfortably
seated on the throne where neither Caliban nor Ariel can ever replace her.
In their subject state, however, they draw closer together for Auden no
longer draws his line between Life and Art, but between perfection and two
kinds of striving toward perfection, both of them faulty and doomed to be

' only an approximation, but inseparably connected in their relationship to

the "Wholly Other Life."

The most important way in which Auden uses myth in "The Sea and the
Mirror" is in the orientation of the poem itself. ts foundation rests
upon the Christian myth although its problems are resolved this time not
in terms of an intricate legalistic theology but in terms of the bare con-
ception of the ultimate Word.

"For the Time Being," the Christmas oratorio that follows "The Sea

and the Mirror" represents Auden's fullest use of the Christian myth. Here,

through its directive medium the divergent pieces of Auden's vision are

103 W. H. Auden, "The Sea and the Mirror," on. cit., #02.

7S

pulled together, and we meet again the psychological and political ex-
planation of the disease of our times, but this time, the diagnosis is
oriented in terms of Christianity.

The poem uses the story of the miraculous birth, not in any orna-
mental sense, but for its real and serious application to the modern world.
The historical analogy is a complete one, for, as the poem develops, we
discover that we ourselves are the Romans,that our world is only an ex~
tension of theirs. The situation of our time requires the same grace-
giving redemption that was to descend two thousand years ago. When the
chorus describes the condition of unenlightened waiting, the terrible
period of estrangement from God, the point in history when paganism on
one hand, and the unleavened law on the other had taken man as far as
they could and left him perched on a glacier where he could neither go
up without assistance, nor down without breaking his neck, we recognize
our own dilemma as Auden envisions it.

0 where is that immortal and nameless Centre from which our points of

Definition and death are all equi-distant? Where
The will of our wish to wander, the everlasting fountain
Of the waters of joy that our sorrow uses for tears?
0 where is the garden of Being that is only known in Existence
As the command to be never there, the sentence by which
Aelphs of throbbing fact have banished into position, 1
The clock that dismisses the moment into the turbine of time? 0

Not only if the poem drawn directly and unmistakably from our own
times, but also it uses what Auden has found to be the prOper application
of the modern disciplines, Marxism and Psychology. Jung's four elements

in the human personality introduce the Annunciation. They are the four

fractured parts of the Whole, which was split apart by the fall,

 

‘——-

155 W. H. Auden, "For the Time Being," ggllected Poems, 412—3.

 

Q
\_.J

We who are four were
Once but one

Before his act of
Rebellion105

Auden, however, does not regard them in quite the same light in which they
are presented in Jung's work, for instead of juggling them as Jung does
into an uneven and constantly shifting equilibrium, feeling having the
upper hand in youth, thought being the ruler of old age: Auden, whose
point of view is removed from the practical and the secular, would con-
sider their ideal state a complete union, where no disharmony is possible
because there are no parts to get out of adjustment. As it is, however,
the lack of understanding between the four faculties must inevitably send
man off in foolish and wrong directions, and although it is only through
their help that he may have a brief glimpse of the garden, they stand just
as ready to lead him into error as into Grace.

As a dwarf in the dark of
His belly I rest:

Feeling

A nymph, I inhabit
The heart in his breast:

Sensation

A giant, at the gates of
His body I stand;

Thought

His dreaming Ergin is
My fairyland. O

The proletariat receives his share of attention in "For the Time Ee—

ing" but he is not, apparently to receive the heaven on earth that Marxism

 

IU5 W. H. Auden, "For the Time Being," Collected Poems, hlh:._
106 Ibid, 41L~5.

 

tries to provide, but must satisfy himself in his dull waiting with the
promise that things will be better after the miraculous birth, or if thit
is not to be realized, with the faint but positive voice of the Unknown
Who answers for our fear
As if it were His own
So that we reply
Till the day we die;
"No, I don't know why,
But I'm glad I'm here?"107
The shepherds who are Auden's symbol for the proletariat are naturally
resentful toward the insincere voice of Capitalism, softened by the lie
of sentimentality.
We observe that those who assure us their education
And money would do us such harm,
How real we are just as we are, and how they envy us,
For it is the centreless tree
And the uncivilized robin who are the trulynhappy,
Have done pretty well for themselves:‘”
Nevertheless, they, as well as everyone else, are supposed to realize th;t
it is not the secular goal toward which their expectant eyes are to be
directed in their case, revolution and management of their own labor, but
the entirely other Reality, the promise of salvation.

In "For the Time Being," Auden states again his resolution of the
aesthetic problem, that through the sanction of the Christian myth, Art
has its justification and its raison d'etre.

Because in Him the Flesh is united to the Word without magi—

cal transformation, Imagination is redeemed from promiscuous

fornication with her own images.

Auden's final pronouncement about Life and Art, final in so far as his

work has progressed, is that Life must extend itself into Art and Art in—

 

 

ifi? w. h. Auden, "For the Time Beirg,” op. cit., #39.
108 I‘Uid’ “'17.
109 Ihid, Lko

 

to Life --- that although between them yawns a chasm that will never close
again since one is accomplished, and the other is perpetually in a state
of being, Art must incorporate within its finished wall the broken spot
where the recognition of imperfection may creep in and Life, on the other
hand, may perceive in Art the other Perfection toward which it is so
blindly grOping.

In "For the Time Being" Auden's use of Christian myth fulfills the
same purpose that the gdygggy did in Joyce's"Ulysses,"making it possible
to extend to the stubbornly prosaic equipment of our times some of the
symbolic flavor of the past. Auden's early use of symbols such as pylons,
deserted factories, ruined industrial towns, although they derived a cer-
tain force from their natural desolation, was not entirely satisfactory
because it lacked a traditional connection. Under the auspices, however,
of Christian mythology and the Quest, modern life takes on a bold and
curiously effective symbolism. Auden presents humorous aspects of Jo—
seph's situation in terms of ordinary life, maintaining, as he does so
well, the light touch that relieves the over-balance of excessive ear-
nestness. Even in light verse, Auden's approach is never frivolous: his
manner only to lighten the heavy burden of seriousness for

... Truth, like love and sleep, {igents
approaches that are too intense.

Joseph, therefore, can be presented in a farcical way without in the least
injuring his biblical dignity and —-— under the title "The Temptation of
St. Joseph" appears this verse:
My shoes were shined, my pants were cleaned and pressed,
And I was hurrying to meet

My own true love:
But a great crowd grew and grew

 

110 W. H. Auden, "The New Year Letter," The Double Man, 2“.

 

76

Till I could not push my way through,
Because
A star had fallen down the street;
When they saw who I was,
The police tried to do their best.111
Although to Auden's mind Art is a looking-glass world where the right
hand becomes the left, where the relationships are reversed so that the
failure becomes a success and the old witch turns out a beautiful prin-
cess, its accuracy can be sharpened and refined by its dependence on what
he believes to be the Truth of Christianity. Of his own art the Truth
requires two things, first that it represent the perfection that is al-
ways in sight, but barely discernable against the horizon, and second,
man's separation from it during his life and perhaps for eternity. For
this reason "For the Time Being," because it is a parable of modern times,
ends without success or failure. In the age of anxiety which is our own
times, the well-meaning but mistaken Herods have created, because of their
fear of the supernatural a fantastic defensive order. The flight to Egypt,
however, has made salvation still possible, and although the modern world,
like a timid bather shrinks at the edge of the icy ocean, the burden of
suffering which may lead to grace is waiting to be assumed.
The night of agony still to come; the time is noon:
When the spirit must practice his scales of rejoicing

Without even a hostile audience, and the soul endure n
A silence that is neither for nor against her faith.114

Auden's last published book, The Age of Anxiety, is a reversed approach
to the theme of For the Time Being. The necessity for salvation is pre-
sented here in terms of material rather than figurative reality. There is,
however, an effect of realism, for the four characters, Quent, Rosetta,

Emble, and Malin, are clearly symbolic of the various modern types which

 

Til W. H. Auden, “For the Time Being," op. cit., 422.
112 Ibid, 466.

are separated from God, and their lives reveal a faulty orientation to
its proper objective, the theme, again, of the quest toward whose goal,
Auden believes, everyone is compelled unwittingly to struggle, no matter
how blindly and unsuccessfully.

Although The Age of Anxiety has a realistic rather than a mythologi—
cal setting, it is infused with the Christian belief. Through a device
which Auden himself has always found to be useful for getting at the un—
derlying truth behind appearances, the action of the poem shifts from a
relatively literal to an imaginative expression, without, however, des—
troying its essential unity. The four characters, surrounded by the mean—
ingless and aimless futility which is life without grace, through their
contact with each other, and with the aid of a few drinks, are driven to
think and talk about themselves, their childhood, and thence to create a
fantasy which might reflect the vital and important problems of life. Al-
though their observations are aimless, not from indifference but from their
inept unfamiliarity with the "Wholly Other Life," from their wanderings
takes on a sort of coherence, in their gradual recognition of a metaphy—
sical unity toward which they should strive. This use of the inner re-
sources as a wavering approach to the truth, is not at all unlike Auden's
earlier doctrine, the wisdom of the id, but now it is transformed by a
belief in Christianity, the tool which Auden uses now for charting the ex—
panses of the inner life is the quest, and upon the introspection of the
four characters, he imposes a medieval system of categories, The Seven Ages,
and the Seven Stages, both allegorical representations of life as a Jour-

ney toward some definite goal.

In The Age of Anxiety, the quest theme becomes ever more clearly re-

 

ligious than it appeared to be in The Double Man. According to Auden, those

 

who set out upon their journey in error, who are deceived that God does
not exist and that their materialistic preoccupations are more practical
and more sensible than the elusive life of the spirit, are never really
out of relationship with God: their very striving is an evidence of the
need within themselves to attain the perfection which their fractured be-
ing is forever attempting to regain. Auden's adaptation of the quest in
The Age of Anxiepy is expressed through the medium of religious myth,
fairy tale, and modern idioms. Through this means, he tells us that mo-
dern life has taken the negative way. The hero is not in this case equipped
with a shining horse, nor does he pursue a golden radiance, but
On an old white horse, an ugly nag,
In his faithful youth he followed

The black ball as it bowled down hill
Piers Ploughman psychology and images from modern life join forces in both
a literal and figurative diagnosis of the contemporary situation.

Then he harrowed hell

Heated the abyss
Of torpid instinct and trifling flux,

For he ignored the Nightmares and annexed their ranges,
Put the clawing chimaeras into cold storage.

In the high heavens,
The ageless places,
The gods are wringing their great worn hands
For their watchman is away, their world-engine
Creaking and cracking. 11,
One element which is conspicuously lacking in The Age of Anxiegy is
any mention of the Lifqurt problem. Is it, one wonders, a temporary 0-
mission, or is it no longer there because, having discovered the proper

relationship, Auden finds it no longer necessary to make this relation-

ship a part of the subject matter of his poetry. In the continual shift-

 

 

-~~.—.~ ..--.-—

TIB w. h. Auderff'rhe Age of Anxiety.

ing of ideas and beliefs from the early period to the late, there has, I
think, been a qualitative change in the balance between Life, Art, and
Myth. In the beginning the difficulty was able to be solved in a prag—
matic manner. The disturbing chaos of modern life, which must always
make it seem a heavy burden to those who live it, weighs, of course, as
heavily on Auden as it does on every one else. As an artist, he has the
possibility of making art an escape, at least temporarily from an uneasy
reality. Choosing a different approach, however, Auden has grappled with
the problems of life through the clarifying and revelatory medium of Art,
the relationship between them expressed through myth or belief which in
the early period is derived from the modern disciplines, Marxism and Psy-
chology. Although they are approaches to the truth, these beliefs, as
far as Auden is concerned, are not to be taken with a final seriousness
but to be valued for their efficacy in forming a pattern which life, both
the inner life of the spirit and the outer life of the world, can follow,
and to provide in lieu of any prevailing traditional explanation, an
approach to the serious problems that modern life has carefully concealed
beneath the factual facade.

In the later work, with the acceptance of the Christian Myth, the re-
lationship changes. Art through its reflection from Life is a channel
which, though faulty, is the only approach man has to God. Myth is no
longer a method for imposing order upon chaos, for making for life a self«
contained system or for transforming the material of life into its figura~
tive truth through Art. The authoritarianism of the Christian doctrine
decide all moral and aesthetic questions, and Auden substitutes the limited
order that man can make for himself for an approximation of a Divine or—

der.

The critical problems, however, are still to be solved. The early
work discovers certainly a rich source of imagery through evocative use
of psychological theory, but the necessarily personal nature of the sym-
bolism derived from the underground caverns of consciousness makes the
poetry, while it has a vigorous and magical effect, an unsatisfactory
communication to the world. Vith the adoption of the Christian myth, al—
though Auden's idiom never becomes easy, a greater clarity appears.for one
reason, because Christian theology has not been entirely forgotten --- its
imagery and language is traditional and by its familiarity it can be com—
prehended by a nominally Christian society, and for another, that with
greater humility, although no less fidelity to his Art, Auden believes
that communication is necessary.

Christianity also brings to Auden's work an added assurance and depth
of feeling. From a renewed commerce with Christian tradition both Art and
Life can regain the moral direction which Auden believes they must per-
petually attempt to find. And in Auden's work itself are reflected the
fruits of his struggles, the important people he has met in the course of

the quest, and the wonderful sights that he has seen along the way.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Major Works of W. H. Auden
(Arranged chronologically)

"U

oems, London, Faber and Faber, 1930

 

The Orators, London, Faber and Faber, 193?
Poemg, London, Faber and Faber, 1932

The Dance of Death, London, Faber and Faber. 1933

 

PU

gemg, New York, Random House, 193k

The Dog Beneath the Skin, London, Faber and Faber, 1935

 

The Post's Tongue, Iondon, G. Tell and Sons, 1935

I3

he Ascent of F6, London, Faber and Faber, 1935

Look, Strggger,.London, Faber and Faber, 1936

 

Spain, London, Faber and Faber, 1937

Letters from Icglgpd, London, Faber and Faber, 1937

 

On the Frontier, Iew York, Random House, 1938
gpurney to a Wag, New York, Random House, 1939
Another Time, London, Faoer, l9k0

The Double Man, Few York, Random House, l9hl

For the Time Being, New York, Random House, 1944

The Collected Poetr* of W. H. Auden, Few York, Random House, 1945

The Age of Anxiety, New York, Random House, 19L?

II. Books

uden, W. H., in Poets at Work, New York, Harcourt Brace and Co., 1948

 

Bush, Douglas, gythQIOgy and the Renaissance Traditign_in English Poetry,
Minneapolis, The University of Minnesota Press, 1932

 

 

Campbell, Joseph, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, New York, Pantheon Press,
194

 

Caudwell, Christopher, Illusion and Reality, London, Lawrer ce and "wish art,
1947

 

Chase, Richard,‘guest for Myth, Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University
Press, 19L?

 

 

---------- , Collggted*jgem§, New York, Harcourt Brace and Co., 1936
---------- , Fougjguggtets, Few York, Harcourt Brace and Co., 1943

 

Isherwood, Christopher, Lions and Shadows, New York, New Directions, 1947
Jacobi, The Psychology of Jung, Few Haven, Yale University Press, IBLB

Pater, Walter, The Renaissance, London, Macmillan and Co., 1920

 

Spender, Stephen, The Destructive Element, Boston, Houghtcn Mifflin, 1936

sh Insti-

H.

on ald A., "The Modern Myth of the Modern hyth," Engl
§_VS: Lew York, Columbia University Press, l9h8

H...—

 

4», r: 1";
903W 4.;
S

tute 3

-- ———-——

Williams. C.,ed,,The Little Tr€as 1r y of Modern Poetzy, New York, Scribners.
1940

Yoolfe, Virginia, To the Lighthouse, Xew York, chern Library, 1927

 

I

Yeats, W. 3.. gsavs, flew York, Macmillan and Co., 19?“

----- , Later Poems, New York, Macmillan and Co., 19?“

III. articles

Auden, W. H., "A Fovelist's Poems," Poetrv, IL (1935),

 

 

 

----- , "Poet of the E circ lament, " New Reoublic, CIX (Oct., lQLj), 57“-
----- , "The Brothers Grimm," Few York Times Book Review, For. 1?, l9bL,l~28
————— , ”Pref ace to Kierkegaard," New Republic, CX (l9h4), 683-h

----- , "Yeats as an Example," Kenyon Review, X (no. 2), 187—95

 

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XV (Jan. - March, 1945), 202-9

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Eliot, C. 3., "Ulysses, Order and Iyt h," The Dial, LXXV (July — Dec., l9”3),

“C' 3

Flint, F. Cudworth, "New Leaders in En ngl-ish Poetry, " Virginia Cuert er1v_Ze -
vial-r, XIV (1934 , 502-18

 

Fremantle, A., ""ise Man' sSons,” Com onwealth, IXL (Dec., 1944), 194-6

 

Grace, W. J., "The Dou ole Kan," Com: onwealth, XXZH (19Al), 27 7-81

 

Grigson, Geoffrey, "Hotes on Contemporary Poetry, " 2 Norman, YXXII (193 x”),
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Lechlitner, R., "Odyssey of Auden," Poetry, LIVI (1945),

Macfiiece, Louis, "Letter to W. H. Auden," Yew Verse Nos. 26-7 (Fov., 1937),
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- L

Literature, ifiIX (Jan., 1946),
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------ , "This Age n Poetry, " Bookman, LXXXIII, 13

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