ultimate defeat. Auden later renounced this view—which .
in any case he held less as a personal belief than as a scaffold- (
ing on which to build his poetry—and disowned the poems that expressed it. He came to understand history as the realm of conscious ethical choices, made personally and deliberately, and, if at all possible, in full awareness of their consequences. Whichever of these views Auden's political poems assumed, the poems consistently used the same basic technique. From the exhortatory "Spain" to the meditative "Vespers," Auden dramatized the unresolvable tension between personal wishes or fantasies (apocalytic fantasies in his early years, arcadian ones afterwards) and the claims and obligations of the social realm (which he designated "history" in the early poems, "the city" in the later ones). This drama of public responsibility and private desire is part of a tradition that extends
back to Virgil and beyond, but by the early part of this century it had disappeared from English poetry. Auden revived it with the same confidence and exuberance he had brought to his revival of traditional poetic forms.
In short, the surest way to misunderstand Auden is to read him as the modernists' heir. Except in his very earliest and latest poems, there is virtually nothing modernist about him, From the viewpoint of literary history, this is the most important aspect of his work. Most critics of twentieth-century poetry, however, still judge poems by their conformity to modernist norms; consequently, a myth has grown up around Auden to the effect that he fell into a decline almost as soon as he began writing. Critics who give credence to this myth mean, in fact, that Auden stopped writing the sort of poems they know how to read: poems written in a subjective voice, in tones of imaginative superiority and regretful isolation. Auden's poems speak instead in a voice almost unknown to English poetry since the end of the eighteenth century: the voice of a citizen who knows the obligations of his citizenship.
Like Brecht in Germany, whose career offers the closest parallels with his own, Auden began with a brashly threatening manner that grew into an ironic didactic one. Both Auden and Brecht started out as amoral romantic anarchists; and both, around the age of thirty, adopted a chastening public orthodoxy—Christianity in Auden's case, Communism in Brecht's, Both came to prefer mixed styles and miscellaneous influences to the purity of the lyric or the intensity of the visionary tradition, Both collaborated with other writers (once even with each other) as no poet had done since the start of the romantic era. Unlike the modernists, both adopted popular forms without the disclaimer of an ironic tone. Each exploited the didactic powers of literature, but rejected the reigning modernist assumptions that granted primacy to the creative imagination or asserted the writing of poetry to be the central human act. Neither was afraid to be vulgar, and neither would entrust serious issues to the inflation of the grand style. Modernism was a movement populated by exiles, at home only in their art. Auden and Brecht were exiles who returned.
The poem that opens this selection (dating from 1927, when Auden was twenty) is the first that Auden wrote in the voice . he came to recognize as his own. For about five years after- f
wards, his voice retained something of the modernist accent he had learned from Eliot, and his poems used the free verse he had learned at the same school. These first poems often have the air of gnomic fragments; they seem to be elements of some hidden private myth whose individual details never quite resolve themselves into a unified narrative. The same qualities of division and irresolution that mark the poems (
also mark the world they describe, a world where doomed heroes look down in isolation on an equally doomed society. There is division also between the poems and their readers; the poems not only refuse to yield up any cohesive meanings, but adopt a recurrent tone of foreboding and threat: "It is time for the destruction of error," "It is later than you think." Auden's early readers missed the point when they inferred from the poems' elusive privacy the existence of a coterie who shared the meanings and got the jokes; Auden's friends were as much in the dark as everyone else. The elusiveness and indecipherability of the early poems are part of their meaning: j
they enact the isolation they describe.
The turn away from this early style, and from the manner and subjects of modernism, can be dated precisely. Auden prepared for it in the late spring of 1933, in a series of poems that expressed first the hope of a release from isolation and '
from the delusive wish for an innocent place elsewhere, and, finally, asked for the will and strength to "rebuild our cities, |
not dream of islands." Then, in June 1933, Auden experienced what he later called a "Vision of Agape." He was sitting on a lawn with three colleagues from the school where he was teaching, when, he wrote, "quite suddenly and unexpectedly, something happened. I felt myself invaded by a power which, though I consented to it, was irresistible and certainly not mine. For the first time in my life I knew exactly—because, thanks to the power, I was doing it—what it meant to love
one's neighbor as oneself." Before this, his poems had only been able to celebrate moments of impersonal erotic intensity, which he called "love." Now, in the poem "Out on the lawn I lie in bed," prompted by his vision, he had praise for everything around him. He described as "lucky" ("luck" in Auden's vocabulary has almost the force of religious "grace") "this point in time and space"—that is, the immediate moment and his "chosen ... working-place" where he had both friends and responsibilities. His earlier forebodings are transformed into a hymn of renewal; the mutual affections of his friends will have effects beyond the privacy of their English garden and will share in the strength that can rebuild the ruined city.
This jubilant tone could not last, but Auden's sense of public responsibility did. He now began to address his audience, rather than withdraw from it or threaten it; and his audience, amid the discontents of the thirties, was eager to listen. No English poet since Byron achieved fame so quickly. In plays that borrowed their techniques from the music-hall and the cabaret, in poems written in stirring rhythms with memorable rhymes, he hoped to "make action urgent and its nature clear." This proved to be less simple than he imagined. The urgency was vivid enough in his political poems, but the exact nature of the actions urged was never as clear as he might have wished. Readers felt free to find their own actions and attitudes endorsed in these poems, and Auden, recognizing this, began to face his own increasing scruples over his easy relations with his audience. He began to use "vague" as a strong moral pejorative; and the word seemed to apply to many of his own public statements, whose resonance and rhetorical force tended to overwhelm any objections that readers, or Auden's conscience, might raise against their content or their imprecision. In his most politically active years, in the mid-thirties, Auden constantly maintained an inward debate that led him to answer a public exhortation like "Spain" with the hermetic mysteries of a poem like "Orpheus," written at about the same moment. His love poems insisted on the fragility and transience of personal relations,
while at the same time his public poems proclaimed a hope for universal harmony. Auden was never altogether happy in his role as poetic prophet to the English Left, and he was often most divided when he appeared most committed. As early as 1936 he sensed that if he were ever to escape the temptations to fame and to the power to shape opinion that led him to
accept his role, he would have to leave England, His work in j
the later thirties records a series of exploratory voyages from England to Spain, Iceland, China, across Europe, finally to America, where, in 1938, he made his decision to leave both j