England and the role it offered, and to leave, he thought, forever.
When he arrived in America to stay, early in 1939, he set |
to work on what was virtually a new career, recapitulating his earlier one in a drastically different manner. He began to \
explore once again the same thematic and formal territory he had covered in his English years, but with a maturer vision,
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and no longer distracted by the claims of a public. Whether or not by conscious intention, each of the longer poems he wrote during his first years in America served, in effect, as a replacement for a long poem he had written earlier in England. Thus in 1928 he had written a Christmas charade, "Paid j on Both Sides"; now, in 1941-42, he wrote a Christmas oratorio, "For the Time Being." In place of his 1936 verse-epistle i to a dead poet, "Letter to Lord Byron," he wrote in 1940 a ( verse-epistle to a living friend, "New Year Letter." In 1931 he had invented a form for The Orators, a three-part structure, framed by a prologue and epilogue, with the first part j spoken by a series of voices, the second by a single voice, and the third again by multiple voices; in 1943-44 he used the same form, with the central sequence inverted, for "The Sea and the Mirror." When he published the first of his collected . editions in 1945, the later poems were all present and complete, while the earlier ones had been either dismembered into their component parts or dropped entirely. Similarly, the inconclusive ending of his 1938 sonnet sequence "In Time of War"—"Wandering lost upon the mountains of our choice"—
was resolved at the close of his 1940 sonnet sequence, "The Quest," in the recovered peace of "The Garden." Even the way he made his living in America repeated a pattern he had followed in the thirties: in England he had taught at various schools until 1935 when he left to work as a free-lance writer; in America he taught at various colleges and universities until 1945, then once again took up his free lance.
His shorter poems emerged from the same process of remaking that gave form to the longer ones. Shortly after he reached New York he began to write in a compressed introspective style that corresponded to the gnomic privacy of his earliest poems but transformed the old aggressiveness into self-reproach. Auden's poems passed judgement on his earlier self and work with a severity that disconcerted his admirers (who complained only of his departure from England, which he seemed to think was the best thing he had done). But the change in his life was as deep and extensive as the change in his work. The restrained and chastened intensity- of his first American poems was a sign of his newly discovered commitment to the Anglican faith he once thought he had outgrown in adolescence. In his first year in America he began attending church; he returned to communion late in 1940. The equivocal political commitments of a few years earlier proved to have been rehearsals for a religious commitment that was permanent and undivided, even if its later expression became considerably more relaxed. The last of his longer poems, "The Age of Anxiety" (1944-46), celebrates the personal triumph of his faith, against all odds. There was a corresponding change in the commitments of his love poems. In the thirties he had written of the transience of eros: "Lay your sleeping head, my love," this century's most famous love lyric, praises a faithless and unequal relationship, its inequality signaled by the very act of the conscious lover's address to his unconscious partner. In the forties Auden wrote of a love that was spousal and permanent, whose responsibility endured—as one title put it, in a phrase from the marriage service—"In Sickness and in Health."
The shift from private to public concerns that occurred in Auden's work in the early thirties occurred again in the mid- forties, although now he was without ambition for social influence and lived in a country where poets traditionally had none. His departure from England proved not to have been a rejection of all public roles, as he thought at the time, but a rejection of the wrong ones. He now became an interpreter of his society, not its scourge or prophet. Once again, as in England, he began collaborating on works for the stage. From the late forties onwards he wrote moral parables in the form of opera libretti, as in the thirties he had written political propaganda in the form of musical plays. His greatest works in the late forties and fifties were his extended meditations on the city, its historical origins and present complexities. An initial exploration of the subject, "Memorial for the City," a poem prompted in part by his experience of Germany in 1945, led to the extraordinary sequence of "Horae Canonicae," where the events of a single day, among various urban roles and personalities, are set within a framework encompassing vast reaches of time. The sequence's passage from dawn to dusk corresponds to passages from birth to death, from the rise to the fall of a city, and from the creation to the second coming. Parallel with these urban poems are a group set in rural landscapes: "In Praise of Limestone" establishes the theme, and the sequence of "Bucolics" extends and develops it.
In the late fifties and sixties Auden turned to the more local significance of a single dwelling place. In 1957, he bought a farmhouse in Austria as a summer home (the first home he had ever owned) and began the poems that grew into the sequence "Thanksgiving for a Habitat." While narrowing his focus to his private hearth he retained his sense of historical and social extension; each room of the house, like each landscape in "Bucolics," has its moral and political analogues, and more often than not, is the occasion for a meditation on history.
In his final years his subjects narrowed still further, and he returned to a transformed version of the privacy of his first poems. He left America to return to England. A nostalgic note, absent since his earliest poems, began to enter his work once more. Still, as he had denied his earlier nostalgic longings by recalling the evidence of history ("The pillar dug from the desert recorded only / The sack of a city"), now he emphasized the imaginary quality of the past whose image he evoked by writing about it in the language of folk tales. He wrote again ofa doomed landscape: not an external one, but the microcosmos of his own aging body. He directed his meditations on history to thanksgiving rather than analysis: if his last poems concern his doomed flesh they also celebrate the family and the age from which it sprang. He made explicit his gratitude to his literary sources. At the end, in "Archaeology," his last completed poem, he delved into an unknowably remote past, yet —as he prepared for his own exit from the world of time into an unknowable future—he concluded with an affirmation. History, he wrote, is made "by the criminal in us: / goodness is timeless."
In preparing the text of a selection of Auden's work, an editor must make his own decision between the claims of errant history and those of timeless goodness. Auden applied a moral standard to his earlier poems—and, some critics have charged, tried to rewrite his own history in the process—when he revised or discarded some of his most famous work, either in an effort to make it conform to his later standards of precision and clarity, or, more notoriously, to rid it of statements he had come to regard as hateful and false. All the collected and selected editions he prepared, and that are currently available on either side of the Atlantic, reflect his later judgements. Yet the claims of history, and of readers who want the discarded poems, are strong, and the present selection acknowledges them by reprinting the texts of the early editions and by including poems Auden rejected. A historical edition of this kind, reflecting the author's work as it first appeared in public rather than his final vision of it, should not be taken as implying that Auden's revisions or rejections were in any
way misguided; they were logical and consistent, and in almost every instance produced versions that were more coherent and complex than the originals. Probably the best way to get to know Auden's work is to read the early versions first for their greater immediate impact, and the revised ver- I