Steve, Aidan—
The question of Auden’s Americanness is interesting, but I’m going to defer that to focus for a moment on the substance of Auden, and, for the sake of argument, to foment some disagreement. Both you and Steve have made excellent cases for Auden’s strengths—cases with which I do agree—but perhaps have skimmed over his limitations. Namely, on the level of language, what Auden does can be unsatisfying. He’s a poet whose work can seem strangely indifferent to the range of sensations that poetry, uniquely, can capture. The reason for this is one we’ve touched on. Auden himself spent a lot of time puzzling over the two possible functions of poetry: First, its power of unconscious incantation, its manner of eliciting deeply human apprehensions that can’t be captured in prose; second, its role as social wisdom and political argument.
The two needn’t be exclusive, but when Auden got interested in his essayistic message, he sometimes skimped on the meter and the rhyme and mystery of the first—in many of his expository poems, there’s no shimmer, as there often is in Milton’s, as there surely was in Shakespeare’s. Auden relied on language as a transparent screen when he wanted to write a poem that made a broader point. And here is where—this may be the poet in me speaking more than the critic—I stumble up against the great mystery of Auden: how a poet with such a tremendous lyric gift—what Anna Akhmatova called “lyrical wealth”—could have been content to let it molder while he wrote lines like: “For every day they die/ among us, those who were doing us some good,/ who knew it was never enough but/ hoped to improve a little by living.” No wonder Bloom apparently dismissed him as “paraphraseable” and Jarrell felt betrayed! The lines are dull. They may say something that is not dull, but as poetry, they are flat.
Obviously, the larger significance of Auden’s work is more complex than whether a few lines snap, crackle, and pop, and Aidan, I wholeheartedly second your beautiful reading of how “Musée Des Beaux Arts” engages us in textual work as a path to life-work. But I think there is a deeper issue here, one that may even connect us back to the issue of Americannness. In my experience of Auden as a reader, I find that when Auden turns toward rational language—in an effort to steer us toward top-of-the-head decisions—he imposes his will on his poems in a fashion that often swerves away from a level of sublimity, a level of unconscious vision, a level of illogical logic that is inherent in language.
Highly skilled, Auden could, as Seamus Heaney once put it, subjugate “all the traditional poetic means to his own purposes.” Yet, odd though this may sound, the origins of great poetry, I think—and especially great American poetry—have less to do with subjugation than with submission, and I don’t find a lot of submission in Auden. By submission, I mean that there is a profound tension in the American poets I love best, Whitman and Dickinson, and on through Stevens, Frost, and Bishop, between the forces of order (embodied by art, and those who create it) and the forces of chaos (the world, that which is the material for creation). In all these poets, there is a profound recognition—and even exultation in—the idea that to be an artist is a little like that American pastime, bronc riding: You’ll get bucked off the poem and lose yourself, and that’s the point.
The fact is, Britain has a stronger tradition in the didactic mode, and America has less of one. So, in this sense, Auden doesn’t seem a thoroughly American poet to me at all. (Indeed, tellingly, he once said he considered it impossible to have a visionary intuition of love toward a person of a different class, which I imagine is easier to believe if you are British than American; and it meant that in order to pursue his exploration of democratic love, he felt he had to eschew the visionary and the sublime.) Consider the end of “New Year Letter,” which you pulled out, Steve, as a joyous repudiation of fascism and Eliot:
Convict our pride of its offense
In all things, even penitence,
Instruct us in the civil art
Of 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 their release …
Whatever is here, the poem gives us no feeling of how the “pent-up feelings” will find “their release.” Everything is told, not shown; indeed, many of Auden’s poems are forced to rely on single-word repetition for intensification, since other means of creating intensity (mystery, illogic, disjunction) have been eschewed: “O look, look in the mirror,/ O look in your distress”; “Dance, dance, for the figure is easy,/ the tune is catching and will not stop.”
While I eagerly grant the poetic intelligence and skill of “rhetorical” Auden, I find myself lamenting, as Seamus Heaney did in a brilliant essay called “Sounding Auden,” the passing of “the element of the uncanny.” I like best the poems where “the strange” is mixed in with the poetic will—where Auden opened up some dusty corner of his mind for a second. Take, for example,”The Fall of Rome” (though we could also look at “In Transit” or “In Praise of Limestone”):
The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.
Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.Caesar’s double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.
I adore this poem for several reasons—yes, it is a brilliant indictment of postwar bourgeois solipsism (and another snarl at Eliot’s Modernism), but what makes it is the fabulous inventiveness of its swerves: the way the syntax and strong enjambment shape the music of the poem, tilting it here into the march-measure of bureaucratese, and there back again to the private language of the poet; the way the intonations of earlier days are suggestive of the plagues of the moment, but are never offered as a pure one-to-one correspondence. This is not just allegory, but incantation, and it becomes incantation through the operation of language, the small surprise of “In a lonely field the rain/Lashes an abandoned train.” The poem may crest toward peroration, but those muscle-bound Marines refuse to let matters get too literal, and a delicate, ironic note of empathy is struck over the next two stanzas. The big surprise is that fabulous last stanza, which contains, at last, a lyrical moment that works mysteriously to complicate the social wisdom of the poem. You may be able to paraphrase the fourth stanza, but not the sixth. And, tellingly: This is a poem that an American poet (were he or she talented enough) could write today.
Well, I’ve run out of both room and time. I think Auden is not an “American” poet but an anomaly, someone who broke with the past of English poetry in ways that opened up a crucial path forward; who came to America and was able to influence a generation of writers largely because he wasn’t so American that they had to wrestle overmuch with defining themselves in opposition to him. But I’m eager to know what you two make of this: Do you agree with any of it? And does Auden’s religion play into his choices in ways we ought to discuss?
Best,
Meghan
