If the poet's meaning was often elusive, then this was purposeful and satisfactory because symbolism loses its frisson the minute the symbols are explained away.Īuden was an internationalist who nevertheless had an abiding regard for the Anglo-Saxon idiom and well knew the linguistic history of it he was said to have whiled away his university days in the library absorbing pre- Beowulf roots and etymologies. Near them, on the sand, / Half sunk, a shattered visage lies." Even Edward Mendelssohn, Auden's executor and flame-tender, didn't know quite what to make of the obscure re-imaging of this scene of classical decay. I wish I had the specific line to hand, but there's something about a broken pillar or column lying in the sand in one of Auden's early poems that always reminds me of "Ozymandias": "'Two vast and trunkless legs of stone / Stand in the desert. His romantic verses were conscious emulations of Hardy and Wordsworth and also, I think, Shelley. What was that ethos? A deep, semi-mystical engagement with modernity and radical politics, but fed through a pastoral processor. If the careers of many well-known conservative critics today are really second act repudiations of everything those critics once got up to in the sixties, then it can equally be said that Late Auden was a systematic undoing of the Macspaunday ethos. Poetry, to be credible in a new world, had to be ethical in a new way: scrupulous about its claims, its concepts, even its language.Īuden was the keystone of that triumphal arch on the quadrangles of Oxford in the 30's, a group of poets collectively and derisively known as "Macspaunday," encompassing Louis MacNeice, Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis. Auden was one of the first great writers to recognize that, after World War II, the modernist vision - with its abstractions and myths, its glamorizing of danger and sacrifice - was no longer sustainable. Rather, Auden's breaking of his own style now looks like one of the key moral gestures of 20th-century English literature. But it is now clear that he was not, like Wordsworth, a poet who wrote himself out early but still kept on publishing. The later Auden will never be as mesmerizing as the early Auden. It is still tempting, reading Auden's work chronologically, to regret some of the changes that came in the train of his emigration, and to wonder what poems he might have written if he had stayed in England during World War II. If the Auden centenary sees any major change in the poet's reputation, it is that such a dismissal of the later, American Auden now looks definitely mistaken. Adam Kirsch makes a vigorous case for esteeming Auden's spirit-of-the-age poetry (I once heard someone describe this as "zeitfeisty") as much as his later disillusionment with it: Still, being "Clio's clerk" might not make for bang-up political economy, but it has its uses in literature. Nabokov had no time for History - much less the uncapitalized variety, when filtered through the wrong alembic of fiction - and we all know what he thought about his motherland after 1917. One smiles to see the sage of Montreaux at his grumpy, anti-Hegelian best. Everything is fluid, everything depends on chance, and all in vain were the efforts of that crabbed bourgeois in Victorian checkered trousers, author of Das Kapital, the fruit of insomnia and migraine." - Nabokov, The Eye Luckily no such laws exist: A toothache will cost a battle, a drizzle cancel an insurrection. Some mean-spirited little man decides that the whole course of humanity can be explained in terms of insidiously revolving signs of the zodiac or as the struggle between an empty and a stuffed belly he hires a punctilious Philistine to act as Clio's clerk, and begins a wholesale trade in epochs and masses and then woe to the private individuum with his two poor u's, hallooing hopelessly amid the dense growth of economic causes.
"It is silly to seek a basic law, even sillier to find it.
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