Some we have seen before, like the girl who never came back, or the anxious banker who left one morning with a suitcase. They tell us of things done on the frontier and how to get to the tower when deprived of sleep. Back at our lines it is not safe.
There are no passports, and the area is closed. Work has ceased at the power-house. Leave is canceled, and we are off to the North. For many decades critics spoke of the importance of the work but also of how flummoxed they were upon reading it. The odes are related by a schoolmaster who suffers from a psychological wound.
He looks to his students for salvation. It is concerned with psychic warfare and is undeniably bleak. The poem begins with a young soldier waiting with his fellow troops in the grass for an ambush. Communication between the two sides has been severed; there is no way to restore the peace.
The veteran in the poem who is speaking seems to believe that love is neither possible nor valuable. At the end of the poem a showdown is about to occur. Blind to all warnings, modern man obsessively resists all thoughts of change and plunges ahead to destroy an Enemy who is, in reality, part of himself. The Question and Answer section for W. Of course they called on God, but he went his way down among the lost people like Dante, down to the stinking fosse where the injured lead the ugly life of the rejected, and showed us what evil is, not, as we thought, deeds that must be punished, but our lack of faith, our dishonest mood of denial, the concupiscence of the oppressor.
But he wishes us more than this. To be free is often to be lonely. He would unite the unequal moieties fractured by our own well-meaning sense of justice, would restore to the larger the wit and will the smaller possesses but can only use for arid disputes, would give back to the son the mother's richness of feeling: but he would have us remember most of all to be enthusiastic over the night, not only for the sense of wonder it alone has to offer, but also because it needs our love.
With large sad eyes its delectable creatures look up and beg us dumbly to ask them to follow: they are exiles who long for the future that lives in our power, they too would rejoice if allowed to serve enlightenment like him, even to bear our cry of 'Judas', as he did and all must bear who serve it.
One rational voice is dumb. Over his grave the household of Impulse mourns one dearly loved: sad is Eros, builder of cities, and weeping anarchic Aphrodite. Auden Though warm my welcome everywhere, I shift so frequently, so fast, I cannot now say where I was The evening before last, Unless some singular event Should intervene to save the place, A truly asinine remark, A soul-bewitching face, Or blessed encounter, full of joy, Unscheduled on the Giesen Plan, With, here, an addict of Tolkien, There, a Charles Williams fan.
Since Merit but a dunghill is, I mount the rostrum unafraid: Indeed, 'twere damnable to ask If I am overpaid. Spirit is willing to repeat Without a qualm the same old talk, But Flesh is homesick for our snug Apartment in New York. A sulky fifty-six, he finds A change of mealtime utter hell, Grown far too crotchety to like A luxury hotel. Nor bear with equanimity The radio in students' cars, Muzak at breakfast, or--dear God! Then, worst of all, the anxious thought, Each time my plane begins to sink And the No Smoking sign comes on: What will there be to drink?
Is this a milieu where I must How grahamgreeneish! How infra dig! Snatch from the bottle in my bag An analeptic swig? Another morning comes: I see, Dwindling below me on the plane, The roofs of one more audience I shall not see again.
God bless the lot of them, although I don't remember which was which: God bless the U. Friday's Child audio only Click the icon above to listen to this audio poem. Lake on the Hill Often I walk the dog at night. Once around the block, maybe twice, And sometimes we head up to the reservoir.
If it's snowing, I put a little coat on the dog, Booties if they've salted the street. As regards their own work, a few have profited, but how few. But later in the same work Auden explores a more nuanced position: poetry should not make things happen; it should not be instrumentalized for a political cause and is harmed by acceding to such uses. For that is precisely what socialist realism was: a dogmatic reflection of Soviet cultural policy. Auden might say that, if the artist changes the world, he or she does not do so qua artist.
It is a crisis which concerns all culture, beginning at its economic base and ending in the highest spheres of ideology. Auden went further. Indeed, he was among the first English writers, along with Orwell, to recognize profound similarities between the rhetorical styles of Nazism and Stalinism, signaling deep affinities between the two extremes.
He sought to reclaim for poetry the capacity to consider historical events from multiple perspectives—and therefore as objectively as possible—without endorsing an activist agenda. At first, many had been attracted to anti-liberal dogmas, but the more conscientious drew back as totalitarianism unfurled its true colors in Spain, China, and Poland, making clear the political and humanitarian implications of the domination of society by a single party.
It was both difficult and courageous to act or speak on principle. Auden insisted on a meaningful distinction between poetic language and political discourse. On the one hand, they revisit of the canon of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment liberalism. On the other, the elegies display a continuous, ironic reliance on the anti-liberal themes that Auden wished consciously to disavow, if we take seriously his arguments in The Prolific and the Devourer.
He clearly considers himself superior to Yeats, if not as a poet, then as a man in step with history and untainted by false consciousness. The elegy for Yeats first appeared in The New Republic in March ; later that year it reappeared with significant additions in The London Mercury ; in it was published in the collection Another Time. Before including it in his Collected Poems , he made important alterations.
The most significant change was removing the political stanzas from the concluding section:. The change was controversial. He did not believe that absolution or condemnation could be meted out by political actors or ultimately by human judgment alone. In all likelihood he excised the offending stanzas because he felt they would be misunderstood and might serve to bolster the moral complacency of some readers. And sometimes men and women of reprehensible character or views wrote good or even great poems.
In short, genius was not separable from human fallibility, even if great artists managed in their work if not in their lives to surpass ordinary limitations. Fewer poets today are disciples of Auden than in decades past. His formalism makes him a difficult model for the imitative self-fashioning of young writers wanting to sound contemporary. Civic poetry has typically also involved a rejection of radicalism. It is political, therefore, mainly in the Aristotelian and Arendtian sense of being concerned with the relationship between public and private life in general terms.
Concern, however, does not imply activism but rather a stable sense of citizenship in which private needs are balanced against public affairs. Civic poetry of this sort has characterized societies with varied forms of political organization, but it is not found under totalitarianism. As Arendt observes, totalitarian systems preclude civil society by withdrawing the right to privacy that is the foundation of liberal citizenship.
He has withdrawn from these time-consuming duties voluntarily, and his position permits him both leisure and distance to observe and comment on the social world, to regard it critically but without alienation. It depends, to that degree, on a social order that is benevolent and restrained in its demands.
One should also recognize that this retirement is voluntary, unlike exile. The civic poet retains his rights and therefore a political voice and is seldom driven to speak solely by moral outrage or deprivation. This is, as it were, a lesser form of redress, where art proclaims and serves the cause of social justice. But there is also a greater redress, the opposite necessity of reestablishing art in its role independent of service.
Just as artists cannot be forced to serve the good cause, whatever that cause may be, neither should any of us be forced to serve ends that are collectively designated for us. Art must at times serve no cause but that of its own freedom. Like Auden, if perhaps not quite as extravagantly, he concludes that maybe the best we can hope for is that politicians and activists will leave poetry in peace.
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