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A practical mind guided Wystan’s poetic talents
WH Auden was a supreme technical poet but that didn’t serve him well,
writes John Calder
Another Time by WH Auden.
Reprinted edition. £9.99. Faber. order this book
W H Auden is without question the major English poet of his period, the 1930s and after, although his exact contemporary Louis MacNeice, who matured later, ran him close and the younger Dylan Thomas in the post-war years achieved a larger and more popular public.
But this reprint of a significant volume, which came out as World War II was just beginning, is an invitation to think about the role poetry plays in contemporary society, now and during the last century.
Two things mattered in Victorian times, class and intellect. There was an overlap, but not a large one. If you belonged to the upper class and even the upper middle class, life was comfortable and was contained within absolute certainties, at least in Victorian Britain.
The intellectual elite relied on education and in the two English Universities, and the Scottish and Irish ones, they lived a separate existence, immured in the classics and the rise of science, then freeing itself at last from religious dogma.
Virginia Woolf considered the intellectual class in which she grew up to be at least equal to the aristocracy. And poetry, even more than other literary forms, was an essential part of the life style of both these dominant groups, part of everyday life and discussion: poetry mattered.
It was World War I’s aftermath which changed all that, and in particular the advent of TS Eliot. That section of the lower middle classes and the working class that had been keen on self-education and learning about culture became confused and dropped out, even as those above them were having difficulty in coming to terms with modern art and all the new ‘isms’ which had been prevalent from about 1906 onward.
Eliot’s Waste Land was the watershed of the non-acceptance of poetry as an acceptable and often popular art form. It brought a long tradition to an end as far as the general public was concerned.
Then came the 1930s’ poets and pre-eminently Auden. They knew their own TS Eliot, had been impressed, but not overawed. Auden, with a very practical mind to guide his talent, knew there was no going back to the Georgian tradition, but that there was a parallel way forward, that of combining vernacular with thought, free verse with everyday sentiment, private revelation with craftsmanship.
As a poet he was a technician, aided in this by the political flavour of the time. The mass slaughter of World War I was well-remembered and he had no desire to sacrifice himself for some ideology however worthy.
Also, when war broke out, he had fallen in love with an American, Chester Kallman. He did the sensible thing and emigrated to New York, and, unlike his pacifist friend, Benjamin Britten, never suffered for it. All his life Auden found a practical answer to the problems that life presented to him.
Another Time not only contains many of Auden’s best-known poems, but it gives a wide spectrum of styles, too polished to be called experiments, original in their use of everyday speech but never descending to doggerel or bathos, as in some of his other work where too much alcohol was probably responsible.
There are many tributes to others, sometimes poetic obituaries, the one to WB Yeats being particularly poignant although he did not like Yeats.
There are many memorable lines, a great variety of rhythms, some comments on world affairs but never with the directness of MacNeice, whose poems give the reader direct access to his thought, whereas Auden subjects nearly everything to both technical and self-serving censorship.
The private man is only released when he talks of love and there he is careful to avoid eroticism unlike his work of a decade earlier or later poems in unofficial printings. The reason is probably an awareness that America is a dangerous publishing country, censorship and prosecution recurring at frequent intervals.
This year is Auden’s centenary, following Samuel Beckett’s by a year. What they have in common are deeply-lined faces, but whereas Beckett’s exhuded wisdom and a certain saintliness, Auden’s make one think of Wilde’s Dorian Gray, whose sins became etched on his face at death.
My personal feeling is that there was much of Dorian Gray in Auden, that his determination to be anti-romantic, a technical poet, always self-critical except when occasionally his guard was down, and tending to run away from anything that did not suit his life or tastes, was detrimental to his final achievement.
Even lesser poets like Spender and certainly Dylan Thomas could be more moving. But he was known to be kind, helpful to others and a genuine lover of all the arts, especially music, where he held some very individualistic opinions.
He tends to be admired more than loved, perhaps because emotion is so much suppressed and because his natural elitism, unlike MacNeice’s with its transparent honesty and directness, is so undemocratic.
The most romantic poets like Burns, Shelley and Tennyson have survived where the more technical names have faded, such as Pope, Byron and Hardy, at least in my opinion.
It may be that only a handful of the more lyrical early works will survive if any poetry is read at all.
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