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Professor Langdon Hammer: W.H.
Auden, Wystan Hugh Auden.
There really is no more dramatic contrast in this
course, I think, than to go from late Stevens to
early Auden. Stevens is born twenty years
before Auden. Auden goes on writing to his
death in 1973, so his career is somewhat later
than Stevens. But again, we're doing
something a little complicated; we're moving from Stevens's
poems of the late 1940s, early 1950s,
now to Auden and his early career,
including poems written in the very late 1920s,
in the 1930s, and we'll get up to the start
of World War Two by the end of class.
So, in one sense, we're going back in time,
back in literary history, and back in cultural history,
moving from the 1950s, from this post-war moment,
in which Stevens is writing his late poems,
to an earlier phase.
At the same time we are also, however, moving forward,
in a sense, in literary history;
moving forward to a poetry that is distinctly and variously a
poetry that comes after modernism,
and to that extent that we could think of as
post-modernist. Well, what do we mean by that?
What do I mean? With Stevens in mind,
there are no giants in Auden.
Everything is life-size.
Poems don't take the place of mountains.
Rather, they, you could say,
take place among them, and mountains figure
interestingly in Auden's poetry in a number of places.
In Auden, there is no new knowledge of reality to be had.
In fact, there's only old wisdom that nobody wants to
face. Modernism turns on a kind of
axis, you could say; modernism as wasteland or as
bridge, a state of cultural decay and crisis or of promise
and celebration – Pound and Eliot on one side,
maybe Crane and Stevens on the other.
Well, Auden is beyond these debates.
They don't matter much to him.
He is, in a sense, beyond the nostalgia of the one
side, and he's also quite self-consciously beyond the
romantic exultation of the other.
Auden is a British poet.
He writes out of a distinctly British tradition,
a tradition in which, well, tradition itself is,
in a sense, taken for granted.
It's something that's there, accessible, part of the poet's
repertoire that needn't be either struggled for or against.
Industrial capitalism – Hart Crane is all excited about this
stuff. It's an old thing in the north
of England, and Auden's early poems take place in a landscape
of now fading and century-old industry.
Early Auden, later Auden:
these are caricatures that are important to the history of
Auden's reception.
There's been a tendency to see his career as coming in two
halves, divided by his immigration to the United States
at the very end of 1938: a British Auden and then an
American Auden. Both Audens,
you could say, have distinct caricatures.
Early Auden. Early Auden:
a poet born in the city of York, the son of a doctor,
interested in natural science and in scientific ways of
knowing; a poet for whom science was not
an enemy but rather a kind of tool, a point of view or
perspective, expressed importantly for early
Auden in the work of Freud; the work of Freud but also the
work of Marx. The early Auden is not an
orthodox Marxist and certainly not a Communist Party member,
but Marxism is important to him.
It's part of a worldview.
It's worked into his sense of the world as seen where social
classes compete and struggle with each other and where the
important choices to be made are moral ones,
moral ones that enter into our political choices.
It's also the case in Auden's early poetry that he tends to
conceive of the world in a kind of "us and them" construction.
There's a sense in the early poems of extreme privacy in the
privacy of address, the way in which the poet
speaks to us, the way in which he conceives
his point of view.
These early poems conceive a kind of, you could say,
coterie audience who are Auden's intellectual,
leftist, largely gay friends at Oxford, where he's writing his
earliest poems. Homosexuality is an important
context for this early Auden and his ways of imagining himself
and talking to us.
Auden comes with a kind of embattled, necessarily secretive
and self-protective investment in intimate relationships.
They're something that has to be fought for.
They are prized and they are something that must be protected
from the intrusions of other hostile or disapproving eyes.
Yes, let's look at an early poem here.
This is in your RIS packet.
"From the Very First Coming Down," it's called.
I'll show you some photos first before getting to the poem.
This is one I like of the Oxford Auden,
a sensitive boy, with the interesting legend
that he has applied to himself here, probably in retrospect.
"The cerebral life would pay," he says.
He was going to make it work to be an intellectual.
This is another one: Auden, the rakish young Auden;
this one also with a kind of legend on top in Auden's hand
where he calls himself "utopian youth,
grown old Italian," as, in fact, this was a certain
kind of trajectory he would live starting as a utopian youth and
then later learning how to relax and have a good time in Italy.
Let's see. I'm afraid I've got my slides
somewhat backward.
This is Auden's Poems, his first book.
I believe it's 1930.
They're written while he's a student at Oxford and it
includes poems that are – this one that I'll discuss in a
moment but it's worth seeing them on the page – they're
laid out without titles again, somewhat as Williams's early
poems are presented.
They are set here almost sort of secretively,
I'd like to say, without that public
introduction of a title and, well, as I'm suggesting,
some degree of self-protection and reticence are important
qualities and in fact themes of this early poetry.
Let's take a look at this poem that I've got up on the screen
right now, which is called "From the Very First Coming Down."
That's the first line of the poem and it's generally known
that way. From the very first
coming down Into a new valley with a frown
[already we're listening to a poet who rhymes]
Because of the sun and a lost way,
You certainly remain [there's a "you" here, there's an "I."
The poem is a kind of letter and, in fact,
a kind of love letter]: to-day
I, crouching behind a sheep-pen [and this is that Northern
landscape that Auden comes from], heard
Travel across a sudden bird, Cry out against the storm,
and found The year's arc a completed round
And love's worn circuit re-begun,
Endless with no dissenting turn.
Shall see, shall pass, as we have seen
The swallow on the tile, Spring's green
Preliminary shiver, passed A solitary truck, the last
Of shunting in the Autumn [and so on].
… Your letter comes,
speaking as you, Speaking of much but not to
come. The letter comes in a sense
from an intimate, a friend, perhaps a lover,
saying much and yet we're given no content to it.
It's veiled in that sense.
It's speaking of much but much that is "not to come," it seems;
its very content and promises, it seems, are withheld.
Then there's this further stanza.
Nor speech is close nor fingers numb,
If love not seldom has received An unjust answer,
was deceived. This early Auden has this
highly compressed syntax that requires you to kind of put the
sentences together and fill in parts that seem to have been
occluded in the poet's compressing of language;
again, an almost veiled form of speech.
Auden says: I, decent with the
seasons, move Different or with a different
love [there's a sense that the love that
animates him is a different love, it sets him apart],
Nor [he doesn't] question overmuch the nod,
The stone smile of this country god
That never was more reticent, Always afraid to say more than
it meant. There's an intimacy that the
poem establishes here with the "you" and with us as readers
that suggests a kind of implied, shared knowledge that the poem
nonetheless does not openly declare and doesn't specify but
rather remains reticent about .
And we're invited into that reticence, as well as the poet's
scruple, expressed here as the wisdom of that country god,
which--it's hard to know exactly how we're supposed to
interpret that, whether that's an actual figure
or a kind of stone in the landscape that the poet is
animating in this way: but in any case,
seeing that figure, that country god as emblematic
of a reticence that scruples not "to say more than it meant."
In other words, well, you could compare this to
Marianne Moore's investment in "restraint," very closely
related in its moral valences.
The idea here is one that's crucial in Auden throughout his
career: that is, the poet wishes to master his
intentions as a speaker.
He does not wish to say more than he means,
and he means to say what he means and to insist on meaning
what he says. This is a long way from--it's
very different from Wallace Stevens's lavish forms of play,
his interest in inexactness or poems that might "resist the
intelligence almost successfully."
Auden wants very much to say what he means and he wants us to
be able to grasp that.
Auden conceives of poetry, and of language generally,
as a sphere of moral action in which truth is always at stake,
where the poet's specific office is to control and use
language in a kind of responsible and honest way.
This is a poet who wants to be honest.
Poets have not always wished this.
You can think about Hart Crane saying, "sleep,
death, desire, hasten, while they are true":
in other words, Crane's willing investment in
what he recognizes as illusion or a kind of temporary truth.
Auden is, rather, morally bound to,
responsible for, what he says.
He's concerned in this sense with the limits of poetry,
with saying only what's meant.
Again, a connection should be drawn to Marianne Moore who
shares something with Auden in this way.
You remember her long poem "Poetry": "I,
too, dislike it: there must be something
important beyond all this fiddle,"
and yet after "reading it… with a perfect contempt for it,
one discovers nonetheless a place for the genuine,"
she says, or something very close to that.
Well, that's the beginning, in Moore's case,
of a very long and extravagant poem which over the course of
her career, as she returned to it and
sought to tell the truth in her poem and to insist on what was
genuine, she eventually cut to only
those lines. Moore was, as a poet,
a rigorous self-reviser who cuts out pieces of her poems and
who cuts out individual poems from her body of work.
So was Auden. Auden, importantly,
revised his own poems, sometimes on multiple
occasions, always as he collected them and returned to
them in later volumes.
There are a couple important examples of this,
including the poem "Spain" on page 791,
a poem that Auden wrote in response to the anti-Fascist
struggle in the Spanish Civil War,
which he participated in.
And it is a poem that complexly and yet nonetheless strongly
comes to affirm the priority of making political commitments
over and above, it appears, individual,
moral discriminations and other forms of individual commitment.
And there are ideas expressed in this poem that became an
anthem in one of Auden's most famous poems of the thirties.
Well, let me give you just a few lines from it,
on page 793.
Stirring us to march, Auden says, "To-morrow,
perhaps the future… / To-morrow the rediscovery of
romantic love…" and so on.
But: To-day [on line 93] the deliberate increase in the
chances of death, [even]
The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary ***;
To-day the expending of powers On the flat ephemeral pamphlet
and the boring meeting. He's calling us to do the work
of revolution and postpone as a goal the rediscovery of romantic
love and other utopian projects.
Auden would come to find the morality of this poem
objectionable and to repudiate the notion that we should ever
accept guilt in "the necessary ***,"
that rather, any *** would be necessary
in order to advance a cause.
And expressing his own self-censure,
he cut the poem out of his work.
If you buy Auden's Collected Poems, edited by his
executor, Edward Mendelson, you will find that this poem is
not in there. There are other examples of
dramatic self-revision.
Let me just point to one more that is famous in the poem
"September 1,1939," again, one of Auden's most celebrated
and circulated poems.
He has in the next-to-last stanza these assertions,
on page 803, "All I have…" This is a poem
occasioned by the beginning of the Second World War.
It positions the poet in a dive in Manhattan,
drinking with others.
He's reflecting on the European catastrophe now underway.
He says: All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie, The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the
State And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
As your note below registers, "Auden later attempted to
revise this line," which struck him as--in fact,
he called it "incurably dishonest," and he revised it
first with what seemed to him a more truthful claim:
"We must love one another and die" because we're going to have
to die, in any case.
And eventually he gave up on it altogether and cut the entire
stanza. These are examples of Auden
applying a kind of stringent moral self-examination to the
language that he uses, and it's a crucial part not
only of the history of his work – in other words,
what he did with it – but what, of course,
he was doing in it; which was attempting to speak
in a truthful way that he could take responsibility for,
and yet which led him repeatedly to forms of rhetoric
that he would mistrust and later abandon.
All of this is consistent with the ways in which Auden
reconceived the modern poet's role.
Auden writes against vatic, romantic inspiration.
He sees the modern poet as a kind of rationalist,
a rationalist especially skilled in the techniques of
poetry and of language use, as expressed specifically in
technical mastery of verse form and genre.
Auden reclaims, following Pound,
Anglo-Saxon alliterative meter.
He writes in popular ballad forms, all kinds of song forms,
and many kinds of rhyme and meter.
He takes over, you could say,
song forms from the British music hall, which is something
like vaudeville. He produces intricate,
stanzaic patterns that we might find in metaphysical poetry.
He produces ornate, syllabic poems,
not unlike Marianne Moore sometimes.
He influentially revives the Provençal forms of the sestina
and the canzone and other troubadour forms.
If your poetry writing teachers have made you write sestinas,
you have Auden to thank for this, as well as much else.
There is, in these various acts of appropriation and reclaiming
of verse forms, a kind of – no nostalgia.
Rather, there's a sense that all these forms are simply
available. They should be part of a poet's
toolkit. And this is also part of what
is, well, Auden's presentation of himself as a kind of expert,
as a poet with expertise: with expertise in language.
And all of this is part of, in his early poetry,
what you would have to call his precocious adultness,
his knowingness which is, again, connected to his will to
tell the truth, to tell the truth unclouded by
sentiment. The early Auden,
the Auden that we see in those photographs, he's remarkably
cool, in all senses.
This is a cool poet.
James Merrill, a poet who was a friend of
Auden's and influenced by him in many ways,
once remarked that all of Auden's poems were written on
paper on which the tears had dried.
And that's an evocative idea.
It's important first of all that yes, those tears have
dried. But it's also important that
there were tears.
And both of these are properties of the poems and they
make Auden a special kind of love poet.
Let's look at the early poem, "This Lunar Beauty," which is
on page 787.
This lunar beauty Has no history
Is complete and early; If beauty later
Bear any feature It had a lover
And is another. This like a dream [this love
that I experienced and write of and out of]
Keeps other time [it's lunar] And daytime is
The loss of this; For time is inches
And the heart's changes Where ghost has haunted
Lost and wanted. But this was never
A ghost's endeavour Nor, finished this,
Was ghost at ease; And till it pass
Love shall not near The sweetness here
Nor sorrow take His endless look.
Contrast this poem to a closely related poem,
Hart Crane's "Voyages," a poem of extravagant rhetoric.
Here, Auden is not writing iambic pentameter,
he's writing--what is the meter here?
Dimeter: there are two beats per line.
You can't have a line that's much shorter and have it be a
line or a meter. It's really,
in a sense, the smallest measure meter can sustain.
There is in the poem a kind of formal reticence,
and what is proclaimed as endless here is not love but
sorrow, or sorrow's look.
And sorrow is personified there in the position of the poet,
looking at the beloved, already in a sense looking back
at him – a lunar beauty.
Let's turn a few pages forward to page 790 and read another of
Auden's love poems, closely related.
Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm; Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from Thoughtful children,
and the grave Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me The entirely beautiful. …
Certainty, fidelity On the stroke of midnight pass
[they always do, they are bound to]
Like vibrations of a bell, And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry: Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell, Shall be paid,
but from this night Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.
[You're going to have to pay for it.
But here it is, and it is now and to be
celebrated.] Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of sweetness show Eye and knocking heart may
bless, Find the mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness see you fed By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass Watched by every human
love. Here again, love is seen in the
secularizing light of certain future betrayal and loss.
To be living here is to be mortal and guilty.
To love is to be sure that you will be faithless,
that is, to love fully; and so to know love and beauty
entirely and in their entirety is to know them in the knowledge
of time, to know precisely that love's passing.
Time here is not so much a kind of emblem of human inconstancy,
but rather of something like natural law, to which everyone
is subject. This is the theme of the very
great poem, written in popular ballad form, with this title in
Auden's Collected Poems: "As I Walked Out One Evening,"
on page 793.
As I walked out one evening, 411 00:36:55,560 --> 00:37:60,000 Walking down Bristol Street, The crowds upon the pavement 412 00:37:60,000 --> 00:37:02,350 Were fields of harvest wheat.
And down by the brimming river I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway [and here is his song]:
"Love has no ending.
"I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet And the river jumps over the
mountain And the salmon sing in the
street. "I'll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.
"The years shall run like rabbits
For in my arms I hold The Flower of the Ages
And the first love of the world."
[Have you ever said that?
Has someone said that to you?] But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime [and they say]:
"O let not Time deceive you, You cannot conquer Time.
"In the buroughs of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is, Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.
"In headaches and in worry Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy To-morrow or to-day.
"Into many a green valley Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances And the diver's brilliant bow.
"O plunge your hands in water Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin And wonder what you've missed.
"The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed, And the crack in the tea-cup
opens A lane to the land of the dead.
"Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer
And Jill goes down on her back.
"O look, look in the mirror, O look in your distress;
Life remains a blessing Although you cannot bless.
"O stand, stand at the window As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart."
It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone; The clocks had ceased their
chiming, And the deep river ran on.
This is a ballad.
Auden's choice of it suggests that the song form is conveying
popular common wisdom, something we all know.
It's expressing truth as a kind of commonplace that is shared,
like the tune itself.
Truth is not an elite knowledge.
It's something that's out there in the street,
and it touches all of us in common.
There are here in the poem two distinct voices in quotation
marks: first the lover's and then the voice of time,
of the clocks. The lover, when he speaks,
well, the poem seems to say or seems to acknowledge he's lying,
even if he doesn't know it or mean to.
And yet the poem still allows him his truth,
his say. What it does really is it
frames his truth with this other, larger truth,
which is time's truth uttered by the clocks.
And the clocks speak from the point of view of disenchantment.
The lover cannot wash his hands.
The poem gives us a kind of image of primary sinfulness;
again, how different from Stevens!
Ordinary life here is haunted by, disrupted by elemental
forces; "the glacier knocks in the
cupboard." The domestic includes tragic
and uncanny dimensions.
They return like repressed parts of the psyche in the poem.
And still there is a kind of consolation in view in that
ambiguous promise or command that you and I will love each
other; our "crooked" hearts will meet.
There's a sense in which people are bound to each other
precisely by the circumstances that the poem describes and by
the crookedness of their hearts.
At the end then the lovers and the clocks are all gone,
both, and the river runs on.
There's that last stanza.
Poetry in Auden speaks on behalf of necessity,
necessity that frames what we do and think;
necessity that determines the circumstances within which we
make our moral choices.
In this way Auden, like Bishop whom we'll read
next week, is a poet constantly drawing our attention to matters
of perspective: how things are seen,
how things are framed, what the context of any given
point of view or utterance or action is.
What is true and what is right from one point of view may not
be from another. And this is part of the
principle by which Auden comes to, in fact, revise and make
decisions about his own work that involve censoring his own
language. The great poem about this
theme, that is, the way in which our knowledge
and action is determined and bounded by the perspectives in
which it is viewed, in which it takes place;
the great poem on this theme is "Musée des Beaux Arts" and is
also a poem that we'll have to wait to talk about until Monday
when we will talk about it in connection with the almost
contemporaneous poem, "In Memory of W.B.