W. H. Auden

 Wystan Hugh Auden

WH Auden, an Anglo American Poet well known for his political affiliation with Karl Marx. He maintained life-long close friendship and literary collaboration with Christopher Isherwood, notable American novelist.Other writers closely associated with Auden are Stephen Spender, Cecil Day-Lewis and Louis MacNeice, They were regarded as the foremost writers of the 1930s, Known as ‘Pink Poets’ or ‘MacSpaunday’ Poets (name was invented by Roy Campbell).

 

The poem by Stephen Spender, "The Pylons, earned the group the nick-name ‘The Pylon Poets’. Their verses included everyday subjects such as trams, ships and trains, as well as electricity pylons, in contrast to the picturesque landscapes of the Georgian Poets, emphasising that the poetic past was dead and buried.

 

Under his father's influence Auden had intended to become an engineer, but at Oxford University he started to write, and changed his course of study to English. His first poems were printed by Stephen Spender on a hand press in 1928, and were imitative of W. B. Yeats who was regarded as the greatest poet of the time.

 

Auden is credited with bringing naturalness to the language of poetry, though he did include some Classical references and obscure vocabulary in his writing. His themes turned on social and political issues, avoiding what he considered to be the comfy verses of the popular bourgeois writers. Indeed, he came to regard his own early poems as Marxist and altered or cut them in later editions of his works, considering them as more polemical than poetic.

"Comrades who when the sirens roar

From office shop and factory pour

Neath evening sky

By cops directed to the fug

Of talkie-houses for a drug

Or down canals to find a hug

Until you die:" [From 'A Communist to Others, 1933]

 

At Gresham's School in Norfolk, which he attended from 1920 to 1925 before going to Oxford, he had come across the verse of George Crabbe (1754-1832) which described the harsh reality of village life, as opposed to the traditional Romantic view of countryside. Auden was influenced by the grittiness of  Crabbe, the directness of William Blake, the urban poems of working class London written by W. E. Henley, and the strangely individualistic poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. He was also influenced by the War Poets who had  brought war and death to poetry in an anti-heroic manner.

 

He visited lceland, Spain and China in the later 1930s, and wrote accounts of his travels as well as poems. His interest in Marxism was waning and after the Spanish Civil War he turned increasingly towards Christianity.

 

In 1939, just before the outbreak ft the Second World War, he and  Isherwood moved to America, where Auden subsequently took US citizenship. He often recounted one of the immigration Officer 's questions on his arrival in New York: "Can you write?

 

Auden and Isherwood were condemned by British writers such as Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell for their blatant homosexuality, Waugh referring to them as ‘Parsnip and Pimpernell’ in Put Out More Flags (1942). Although in 1935 Auden married Erika Mann, daughter of the German writer Thomas Mann, it was a marriage of convenience which allowed her to obtain a British passport and escape from Nazi Germany. Chester Kallman (1921-75) became Auden's male partner in the United States. 

 

In New York, Auden heard the final demand of Britain to Germany, following the invasion of Poland, response to which he wrote the poem ‘September 1, 1939’.

“I and the public know

What all schoolchildren learn,

Those to whom evil is done

Do evil in return.”

 

The poem was also remembered after 11 September 2001.

 

"Into this neutral air

where blind skyscrapers use

their full height to proclaim

The strength of Collective Man,

Each language pours its vain

Competitive excuse:

But who can live for long

 in an euphoric dream

Out of the mirror they stare,

Imperialism’s face

And the international wrong"

 

The words 'Out of the mirror’ are echoed in "The Sea and the Mirror: A Verse Commentary on Shakespeare’s The Tempest” Written in September 1943, in which Auden gives dramatic monologues to Shakespeare's characters. When Alonso speaks to Ferdinand of how he will ascend the throne of Naples majestically, he ends With a caution more ancient than Christian: beware good fortune, for the Gods visit Hubris with Nemesis.

 

He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1948.

 

Seamus Heaney has commented on a ‘Falling off’ of style, but Dylan Thomas wrote “I think he is a wide and deep poet and that his first narrow angles of pedantry and careful obscurity are worn almost all away’ Together with Kallman, in 1951, Auden wrote a libretto for  Stravinsky's Rake's Progress, based on the series of drawings by Hogarth.

 

Auden was concerned with the question of  whether or not poetry had a use, and believed that poetry can be a form of defence against delusion. He criticised the views of W. B. Yeats in 'In Memory of W. B. Yeats, declaring that poetry makes nothing happen, but the implication is that poetry should have an effect on readers and society in the hands of a powerful poet. Moreover, Auden was convinced that his poetry had a readership in the sense of an audience that was waiting for him to write.

 

In Music Is International he wrote that poetry, like music, is:

“not to be confused

With anything really important

Like feeding strays or looking pleased

when caught

By a bore or a hideola,”

 

Music without words is beyond language and so international. Language is little more than mere sound when the meaning is incomprehensible, a point demonstrated by his invented word ‘hideola' which is hideous-old-man  cropped to a feminine Spanish ending. 

 

Auden himself disowned some of his own poems later in life. Writing in the introduction to Poetry of the Thirties, Robin Skelton says:

 

“W. H. Auden has been monumentally generous in allowing me to use early texts of five poems of which he now disapproves. These poems are 'Sir, No Man's Enemy', 'A Communist to Others', To a Writer on his Birthday, 'Spain', and 'September 1, 1939.' I have agreed to make it absolutely clear that 'Mr W. H Auden considers these five poems to be trash which he is ashamed to have written.”

 

Critical arguments differ over whether Auden was a good poet, or even a great poet. Certainly he had influence. Certainly he was much read and admired by his contemporaries.