The anti-Yeats, Auden creates an intellectual, personality-free world full of honesty, straight-forward diction, and homely wisdom

About Auden

• Born in 1907, he’s a later poet for my time period.
  • The last great Modernist poet
  • First generation, Yeats, Eliot, Pound 1920s
  • Second generation, Auden, Mac Neice?, Spender, Lewis 1930s
• Son of a doctor (diagnostic air)
• Believed less in the power of poetry than other poets
  • “Poetry makes nothing happen.” At best it is “a mouth” (from “In Memory of W B Yeats”)
  • Politically aware, more than most poets (“The Walking Tour,” “Petition”)
  • Instead, poetry is an intellectual enterprise: it is a game of knowledge
• Influences: Freud, Hardy, Hopkins, Frost, and Eliot
  • Notice the lack of Romantics, of Yeats
  • Yeats: formed his poetry in opposition to Yeats, despite his early admiration and emulation of Yeats
    • When Yeats died, poetic vacuum in 1939
    • Best-known poetry written around Yeats’ death; popularity declined since then (hit his peak too soon)
  • Reputation: no canon of recognizable masterpieces
    • Not clearly a lyricist or satirist or any other “ist” (hard to classify, hard to react to)
    • Each poem differs so much in style and in quality
      • His personality has disappeared

Style

• Anti-Romantic
  • Sophisticated, adapted to modern world
  • Honest, direct, straight-forward
  • Witty, colloquial, discursive, ironic, detached
    • Not earnest or emotional
  • More likely to appreciate the Enlightenment values than to depreciate them
  • “Revolted” by “indifferent to truth” and “exaggeration”
  • Thus, he’s a reaction against modernism, but not totally without its influence
• The Anti-Yeats
  • Understatement, not theatrics
  • Disenchantment, not enchantment
  • Avoids precious images, musicality, lyricism, ornate symbolism
  • Prosaic syntax and vocabulary
• Kind of like Frost
  • Mixture of the homely and the abstract
  • Mixture of extraordinary and the ordinary
• Early world vacillates between personal and political, but eventually just writes about larger civic/social themes
  • Wants readers to think, “Oh, I get it. Why didn’t I think of that before?”
• No recognizable personal style
  • He loves using different set structures and forms: elegy, ballad, lyric, nursery rhyme
  • Conventions, not his personality, structure the poem
    • Personae determined by the form itself
  • Each poetic form has its specific uses, he believed
    • Every form allows you to say something new, that you couldn’t have realized without that form

“As I Walked Out One Evening”

• He walks in the London streets, “the crowds upon the pavement / Were fields of harvest wheat,” hears a street singer talking about love that will surpass all and outlast all—and of course he proves this silly person wrong.
• Time makes all pass away.
• “But all the clocks in the city / Began to whirr and chime” (“you cannot deceive time”)
• “In headaches and in worry / Vaguely life leaks away”

“Fish in the Unruffled Lakes”

• Unusually beautiful for Auden
• A rare lyric
• Animals are content and happy, complete, whereas humans with their consciousness are unhappy because of their recognition of time
  • cf Hopkins’ “To a Small Child”
• Turns unexpectedly into a poem about love: shows that at least humans have free will, which love is a part of
• A bittersweet meditation on humanity’s limits and advantages

“Letter to Byron”

“Lullaby”

• A companion piece to “As I Walked Out One Evening” and “Our Hunting Fathers,” this poem laments the imperfections of life and love due to the corrosive influence of time
• We enjoy our time now, but “Every farthing of the cost / Shall be paid” in the future
• But it does have a more hopeful ending: it hopes that the lovers will “Find our mortal world enough” to stay satisfied

“Musee des Beaux Arts”

• “About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters”
  • They see how human suffering goes in in daily life, unnoticed, unmourned
  • Indifference simultaneously occurring with miracles and tragedies
• Allusion to Brueghel’s Icarus painting (the ship sails on and the plougher ploughs on despite the “boy falling out of the sky”)
• Tragedies occur in “some untidy spot / Where the dogs go on with their doggy life”

“In Memory of W B Yeats”

• Elegy
• Three distinct parts: A collection of verses of six lines long, except for two (one is five lines, symbolizing imperfection and loss; one is two lines, for drama at the end); a ten-line sonnet-like phrase; then a ballad that strongly beats on for Yeats’ memory
• Repetition of “What instruments we have agree / The day of his death was a dark cold day.”
  • Measurement can’t tell you how to get over his death; it’s so limited.
• Beautiful lines about death: “The provinces of his body revolted / The squares of his mind were empty / Silence invaded the suburbs.”
• “He became his admirers” = poetic reputation, he loses power over himself through death
• Cf Musee des Beaux Arts: “A few thousand” will remember the day Yeats died “As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.”
• “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.”
• Last part is rousing: “Earth, receive an honoured guest / William Yeats is laid to rest.” Pounding cadence.
  • Uses the cadence of “Under Ben Bulben,” so it’s a tribute
• Yeats’ mission now that he’s dead: keep the “rapture” alive in European arts and “let the healing fountain start” during these dark days when World War II is about to break out (1939)
• Ultimately not about Yeats, but about condition of Europe (typical Auden!)

“In Praise of Limestone”

• Long sentences not inverted for meter or rhyme or line length
• Limestone: statues, fountains, gardens, etc
• “I am the solitude that asks and promises nothing; / That is how I shall set you free. There is no love.”
  • it “Calls into question / All the great powers assume; it disturbs our rights.”
  • Cf Forster’s Passage to India, Mrs. Moore
  • Despite this cynicism, the statues also call you do to more, not to get bogged down in narrow pursuits or forget your body (ie athlete status, statues of Venus)
• “The poet / Admired for his earnest habit of calling / The sun the sun” but the limestone landscape (so cold) and statues made from it “doubt his antimythological myth” (more doubting of the poet)
• Carpe diem: you must take advantage of life, not be stopped by worries about judgment day or idle gossip; don’t lose time or get caught

“Our Hunting Fathers”

• Two types of love: 18th and 19th centuries assumed that love was the crowning moral achievement of man, for it would make man godlike (as long as you are being rational); whereas love actually makes you narrow, egotistical, and slinking around guiltily, for we want to absorb the loved one into ourselves
  • They must only think of us, do everything for us, etc
• Notice the anti-romanticism!
• Love will give you “the liberal appetite and power, / The rightness of a god”

“September 1, 1939”

• A Yeatsian occasional poem (was still influenced by Yeats at this time)
• Narrator: “I sit in one of the dives / On Fifty-Second street”
• Everyone is scared, anxious, and depressed
• We can either find lots of academic reasons for war, or just realize that “Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return,” which is “What all schoolchildren learn”
  • Homely knowledge
• “Blind skyscrapers use / Their full height to proclaim / The strength of Collective Man”
• Our morality is blasted, from the statesman whose policies foment war to the husband who cheats on his wife
• “All I have is a voice / To undo the folded lie” of our separateness (which he calls “a romantic lie”), for “we must love one another or die.”
  • Later, Auden rejects this poem for its dishonesty.

“Their Lonely Betters”

• Language is for humans, not for animals
• Responsibility makes you have to have words
  • “Words are for those with promises to keep”
  • A grave, practical reason for language