Early Auden, Later Auden

A Critical Biography

Edward Mendelson

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781400882946
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Presented in one volume for the very first time, and updated with new archival discoveries, Early Auden, Later Auden reintroduces Edward Mendelson's acclaimed, two-part biography of W. H. Auden (1907–73), one of the greatest literary figures of the twentieth century. This book offers a detailed history and interpretation of Auden's oeuvre, spanning the duration of his career from juvenilia to his final works in poetry as well as theatre, film, radio, opera, essays, and lectures. Early Auden, Later Auden follows the evolution of the poet's thought, offering a comparison of Auden's views at various junctures over a lifetime. With penetrating insight, Mendelson examines Auden's early ideas, methods, and personal transitions as reflected in poems, manuscripts, and private papers. The book then links changes in Auden's intellectual, emotional, and religious experience with his shifting public role—showing the depth of his personal struggles with self and with fame, and the means by which these internal conflicts were reflected in his art in later years.Featuring a new preface by the author, Early Auden, Later Auden is an engaging and timeless work that demonstrates Auden's remarkable range and complexity, paying homage to his enduring legacy.

Later Auden

Introduction to Later Auden

In 1939, soon after he made his final decision to remain in the United States instead of returning to his native England, Auden wrote a series of poems and essays in which, at the age of thirty-two, he reinterpreted his childhood. Two themes recur in these works. One was his early “conviction (though I am unaware of ever having held any supernatural beliefs) that life is ruled by mysterious forces.” The other was his sense that what mattered most in life were the lonely choices of love and attention that one made without any external compulsion, as in the “passionate love affairs” he had from the age of four to thirteen “with pictures of, to me, particularly attractive water-turbines, winding-engines, rollercrushers,” and other obsolete mining machines, and the even more passionate love he felt for the rusting and abandoned machines themselves when he visited the lead mines of northern England at the age of twelve.

These two beliefs debated with each other in different forms throughout his career. He alluded to the first when he expressed the hope, in a love poem, that his beloved would be sustained “by the involuntary powers,” and to the second when he gave thanks, in another poem, that he had been granted “your voluntary love.” The first belief informed the political poems in which he imagined an inevitable future state brought about by “history, that never sleeps or dies, / And, held one moment, burns the hand.” The second informed the poems in which he understood history as the realm of human time, in which “We live in freedom by necessity,” uncontrolled by historical forces or recurring cycles: “Abruptly mounting her ramshackle wheel, / Fortune has pedalled furiously away.”

“For a poet like myself,” Auden wrote late in life to his fiction-writing friend James Stern, “an autobiography is redundant since anything of importance that happens to one is immediately incorporated, however obscurely, in a poem.” Even when he wrote a commissioned or occasional poem for an academic ceremony or a niece’s wedding, he incorporated the significant events of his life. But he confronted each time a new variation on his inner debate: whether those events were better understood as the product of involuntary necessity or of free choice. The body, left to itself, belonged to the world of necessity, joining “plants in their chaster peace which is more / To its real taste,” while the mind, until recalled by the senses to a world it has only limited freedom to alter, imagines itself “Unhindered, unrebuked, un-watched, / Self-known, self-praising, self-attached.” The same person, Auden wrote, could be the author of two unrecognizably different autobiographies; in one, the writer would appear passive, “lacking in a capacity for affection, easily bored and smaller than life-size,” in the other active, “a passionate Knight forever serenading Faith or Beauty, humorless and over-life-size.”

The “new problems of Form and Content” he faced in each new poem extended from the technical details of verse to the largest questions of meaning. Traditional forms and regular metres were among the means by which he evoked an order that existed prior to any personal intervention: physical laws, bodily instincts, social conventions, beliefs and habits inherited from a family or a culture. Irregular metres, newly invented or modified forms, prose poetry, and forms and metres that had not yet been naturalized into English verse—all these served in his work to evoke voluntary, unpredictable acts, newly found accommodations between, on one hand, the world of nature and the instinctive body and, on the other, the world of history and the individual face. But the metrical form of Auden’s poems typically presented only one side of his poems’ arguments with themselves. The most conventional-seeming form, such as the eighteenth-century couplets of “New Year Letter,” could mask the most unstable and innovatory content; the most unconventional form, such as the extravagantly varied prose of Caliban’s impersonations in “The Sea and the Mirror,” could contain uncompromising statements of psychological and ethical necessity.

Through all his changes in form, style, and content, Auden faced the issue of two opposing ways to write or read a poem: whether to treat the poem as a myth, a statement or imitation of some overarching necessity that no one can evade or control, or as a parable, a statement or imitation of acts and feelings that both writer and reader are free to choose or renounce, free to treat as an example or a warning. Auden gave different names at different times to these two views of poetry and their implications for the role and status of the poet: nature and history, number and face, poet and historian, the Ariel-dominated poet and the Prospero-dominated poet. Their exponents, he said, were the Grecian urn that says “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty,” and Samuel Johnson, who said, “The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”

The category of myth, as Auden treated it, ranged from traditional beliefs in which individual lives are in the hands of an inexorable god or fate, to modern beliefs, like those derived from Marx, in which history moves inevitably toward the dictatorship of the proletariat, or those derived from Freud, in which the forces of super-ego and id are locked in struggle to rule over the ego. Myth also comprised all statistical and official versions of reality, all quasi-magical beliefs that the forces that ultimately shape the world are the impersonal powers of social restraint or the grammatical structures of language.

The characteristic myths of twentieth-century writing were those decreed by the writers themselves. The great modernist poets and prose writers of the generation preceding Auden’s were justifiably proud of their command of myth. W. B. Yeats devoted half a lifetime to the task of organizing the events of his time and the personalities of his friends into a system built on the phases of the moon and the oppositions of malleable face and controlling mask. T. S. Eliot, in his 1923 essay “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” described Joyce’s method of “a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity” (a method also used, although Eliot did not say so, in The Waste Land) as having “the importance of a scientific discovery,” and as something as inescapable as a physical law: “Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him.” This method, “already adumbrated by Mr. Yeats,” was, Eliot explained, “a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.”

Auden was as intent as Eliot was to give shape and significance to his work, but he wanted more to discover the shapes and meanings of history than to impose his own, and he was less certain that the disasters of his time were the product of futile anarchic disorder rather than of effective purposive evil. He grew up in a household in which the scientific and psychological inquiries of his father maintained an uneasy truce with the ritualized religion of his mother. After his mother’s death in 1941, much of his later career was an effort to set both her concerns and his father’s into productive conflict within his own work and thought.

Auden began writing poetry at fifteen—he discovered shortly afterward that he had lost his religious faith—and, after four or five years of adolescent imitations of Wordsworth, Hardy, and other poets of rural life, suddenly began writing about an imaginative world of his own invention, half-archaic, half-modern, in which the metres of Old English poetry evoked the industrial landscape of northern England and the conflicts analyzed by modern psychology. This was a largely mythical world in which any individual attempt to find love is baffled by hatreds inherited from past generations. Auden later alluded to the language of these poems as “magical lyrical phrases which seem to rise involuntarily to the consciousness.” But in his mid-twenties he began to think about poetry as a dialogue with its readers, as a means of breaking the limits of personal isolation. Deliberately turning away from the incantations of his earlier style (“Obscurity is a bad fault,” he told a friend who had objected to it in a review she wrote about his first published book, in 1930), he experimented with the vocabulary and rhythms of popular songs, adapted the public and accessible styles of Burns and Byron, and explored the problems of public poetry in a book-length poem in prose and verse, The Orators.

In the mid-1930s he wrote: “There must always be two kinds of art, escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep, and parable-art, that art which shall teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love.” Escape-art was in the same realm of necessity as involuntary powers, parable-art in the same realm of freedom as voluntary love, but when Auden wrote this formulation, at twenty-seven, he hoped that art could serve persuasion as well as freedom by guiding its readers into making the right free choice instead of the wrong one. He believed his verse could serve social causes, and to that end wrote parabolic plays in collaboration with his friend Christopher Isherwood, The Dog Beneath the Skin, The Ascent of F6, and On the Frontier, which, with varying degrees of irony and ambiguity, recommended left-wing political action.

Similar hopes impelled him to visit Spain early in 1937 with the intention of serving and witnessing the struggle of the socialist government in its civil war against the nationalist forces led by Franco and supported by Mussolini and Hitler. He returned after a few weeks, disturbed by the injustices committed by his own side and justified or concealed by propaganda. But because he was certain that the opposing side was worse, and that a victory for the Spanish nationalists would be a triumph for Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, he said nothing about what he had seen beyond privately observing to friends that political expedience was no justification for lies. In 1938 he wrote:

The primary function of poetry, as of all the arts, is to make us more aware of ourselves and the world around us. I do not know if such increased awareness makes us more moral or more efficient: I hope not.

I think it makes us more human, and I am quite certain it makes us more difficult to deceive, which is why, perhaps, all totalitarian theories of the State, from Plato’s downwards, have deeply mistrusted the arts. They notice and say too much, and the neighbours start talking.

In the same mood, he gave a broadcast talk, “In Defence of Gossip,” praising the untidy and unintimidated personal voice that countered all collective impersonal official ones. By now he was celebrated as the leading political poet of his time—London papers reported his departure for Spain in the news pages, not the gossip columns—but he found this position false and constricting and wanted to escape it. Yet at the same time he felt a moral obligation to act in practical, rather than symbolic, ways against the ever more threatening and victorious evil of Fascism.

Auden insisted repeatedly in the later 1930s, as if arguing against an imaginary opponent, that one could not change one’s life by going to some distant place, that any hope of finding another life in another climate was futile and delusory. “The promise is only a promise, the fabulous / Country impartially far,” he wrote after travelling to Iceland, the source of his paternal ancestors, in 1936. “The journey is false; the false journey really an illness,” he wrote during a six-month voyage with Isherwood to report on the Sino-Japanese War in 1938. Then, on their way back from China, he and Isherwood travelled across “absolutely free America,” as Auden called it in a poem a few months later, visited New York for two weeks, and decided to return for an indefinite stay. During the rest of 1938 Auden spent most of his time in Brussels, returning to England as little as possible and, when he was there, devoting much of his energy to political causes. (“I get very depressed running all over the place chatting about China,” he wrote to a friend. “Does it do any good?”)

After he sailed from Southampton to New York on 19 January 1939 he dropped his argument about the futility of changing one’s climate, because he found that the journey was real, the fabulous country close enough to settle into. From 1939 until his death in 1973 he moved his home four times from one country to another. Each move coincided with fundamental changes in his work and outlook, and brought him to the landscape he thought most suitable to the kind of poetry he wanted to write. He left England partly to sever his involuntary, inherited relations with his family and country and his oratorical relations with an audience that admired him for his politics. After he arrived in the United States, which he saw as the loneliest and most isolating society on earth, he began experimenting with styles and metres that allowed him a new inwardness and depth of emotion while avoiding much of what he now regarded as preaching and heartiness in his earlier work. Within a few months he returned, tentatively at first, to the Anglican communion, but his beliefs took the form of a lonely existentialist Protestantism quite ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface to the One-Volume Edition
• Early Auden
• Later Auden
• Postscript
• Notes and Index
• Reference Notes
• Index