Today in history, February 21, 1907

W.H. Auden was born in York, England.

Two pieces of advice for writers from Mr. Auden:

To keep his errors down to a minimum, the internal Censor to whom a poet submits his work in progress should be a Censorate. It should include, for instance, a sensitive only child, a practical housewife, a logician, a monk, an irreverent buffoon and even, perhaps, hated by all the others and returning their dislike, a brutal foul-mouthed drill sergeant who considers all poetry rubbish.

Then there is:

Never write from your head; write from your cock.

While that second piece may not, in an anatomical way, apply to me, I still take it as very good advice.

There are only two other poets I can think of who take up as much brain-space for me as Auden, in terms of reference-points, who help me figure out how to say things, and those are Yeats and Shakespeare. I’ll be in some situation and suddenly I’ll remember Auden’s words “let the healing fountains start …” (which is from his poem, coincidentally, on Yeats) Or I’ll be troubled and remind myself that I need to try to love my crooked neighbor with my crooked heart. I know I’m crooked. We all are. But we must love anyway. Or try to. I find Auden himself to be a “healing fountain”. There is something transcendent about his work for me. It lifts me up into my better self, a place where it is possible to be good, and loving, and forgiving.

Auden wasn’t an idiotic optimist, however, and he did a lot of revising of his work over the years – he was a compulsive reviser – so a lot of his stuff has multiple dates on it. It wasn’t just language he revised, it was thought and philosophy. If he outgrew a certain view, he would go back and tinker with the poems that expressed said view. One of the most fascinating examples of his revisions shows that he was willing to go back and revise something, a philosophical statement, that he no longer felt was true. He couldn’t let it stand. In his chilling poem “September 1, 1939”, written about Germany’s invasion of Poland, there is a line “We must love one another or die”. An extraordinary sentiment, especially at that brutal terrifying time.

September 1, 2939
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
‘I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,’
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

The poem was published, and Auden immediately saw all sorts of problems with it, having to do with its rhetoric and tone, but it all encapsulated for him in that line. He said he read its published version and:

…said to myself: ‘That’s a damned lie! We must die anyway.’ So, in the next edition, I altered it to ‘We must love one another and die.’ This didn’t seem to do either, so I cut the stanza. Still no good. The whole poem, I realized, was infected with an incurable dishonesty—and must be scrapped.

He didn’t include it in his own canon (more on that line below), he was that ruthless in his own work. The work felt dishonest to him. He didn’t like how it was being used. And that one chilling substitution – of “or” to “and” – didn’t help. You can see the entire tenor of the times in his revision, can’t you? You could write an entire book on the difference between the two statements, and how “and” changes everything. Regardless, the poem survived – and it is included in his Collected Work, and over the space of time it has regained currency, especially in times of war and fear and hatred. It speaks to those universal experiences.

Then, of course, he has written two lines which – as difficult as they are – are words I actually try to live by. “If equal affection cannot be / Let the more loving one be me.” This is a phrase that comes up in my head, what, once, twice a day? It is complicated now, by my insistence on reciprocity, and I wonder if I have lived by his words too much? But that’s the thing with such words: you kind of can’t do them half way. You can’t say, “Oh, wow, what a nice sentiment” and then not try to live by them. At least I haven’t been able to. They sound a gong in the depths of me … that this is the way it SHOULD be. That this is how I SHOULD try to live. I stand by that. I rarely throw out the baby with the bathwater. I try to integrate, and much of Auden’s work – with its complex messaging (his religion, his sexuality, his politics – and how those things grew and morphed) – is all about integration. It is why it is so precious to me, why he comes up for me again and again. I feel like he is MINE. In terms of that poem “The More Loving One” (which I would recite to myself, in bed, in the weeks following September 11th, along with the Hail Mary – my two talismans against fear, and the choking smoke billowing up from lower Manhattan) I have a hard time picking a favorite anything – but if I had to choose to re-read only one poem for the rest of my life, it would be “The More Loving One”.

The More Loving One
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

I can honestly say that that poem has helped me in living my life. Even when (or especially when) I take issue with this or that line. It is the “taking issue with” that makes it a great poem. Find the “total dark sublime”, Auden? Are you out of your mind? NO. I REFUSE. But then comes the great and painful last line of admission: “Though this might take me a little time.” If it weren’t for that last line, Auden would be just another sentimental optimist. Make lemonade out of lemons! some do-gooder nonentity shouts at someone who has just experienced a catastrophe. My response to that is usually, “Sure – I’ll do my best – but can you GIVE ME A MINUTE? Can you just admit that this won’t happen IMMEDIATELY?” Auden knows this. That last line admits the pain and beauty of human experience, even in tragedy. It is a miracle. That we can keep going on, even though there are no more stars left in the sky. It is awful. It is what we do. We have no choice. But don’t ask me to call it “sublime” immediately. Give me “a little time”, thanks.

I need to leave Shakespeare out of this discussion (although probably Auden would want him included because there are many lines of Shakespeare as well that have actually been “candle beams” in the darkness, so shining a good deed in a naughty world and all that. But “The More Loving One” stands, for me, as one of the most profound poems of all time. And he doesn’t use what Hemingway calls the “ten dollar words”. It’s a poem of simple language, very few metaphors, a clear and open expression of what is, actually, a philosophy. Here is a story from my life that circles around the poem. That night was a crucible, a tesseract. I was not the same afterwards. I was inside Auden’s poem, and it came from the most ordinary of occurrences, a failed love affair. Now, with the distance of time, I can say he is the only man (thus far) I have ever loved. That night, the whirlwind I was in, was necessary. It was awful, but necessary. A night of “total dark”. No “sublimity” whatsoever.

What can I say. Auden is in my brain. When I find myself in times of trouble Mother Mary comes to me, and so does Auden.

If I look back, I believe that I first encountered Auden (at least, my first MEMORY of it) was in my “Humanities” class, senior year in high school. Or it might have been my junior year? It was a great class, I got a lot out of it, and I remember we analyzed an Auden poem (“Musée des Beaux Arts”), alongside the Breughel painting it was based on – The Fall of Icarus.

Musée des Beaux Arts
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

See the little up-ended legs in the water over to the right? I remember, in my vaguely OCD way at the time, loving making that connection – reading the poem, looking at the painting, going back to the poem – trying to see every single thing that this Auden chap saw in the poem. Of course there’s way more to the poem than that (the first line that spills over into the second line? Perfection) – and its observations about the meaningless of human suffering, and our indifference to one another (something that Auden comes back to again and again in his poems.)

It was later, when I was an adult, that I went back to Auden’s work to re-discover it, on my own terms.

The wonderful Clive James said about Auden (and this is really interesting):

The need to find an expression for his homosexuality was the first technical obstacle to check the torrential course of Auden’s unprecedented facility. A born master of directness was obliged straightaway to find a language for indirection, thus becoming immediately involved with the drama that was to continue for the rest of his life – a drama in which the living presence of technique is the antagonist.

There is sometimes an almost unbearable tension in Auden’s best poems. It seems to be that he is expressing everything, but you ache to hear more, you wonder what else this amazing voice has to say. Like most great artists, what he withholds is almost just as interesting as what he reveals.

Michael Schmidt wrote, “He overshadows the poets of his generation.” In the same way that Shakespeare overshadows the other playwrights and poets of his current day. You have to kind of get Auden out of the way to see what else was going on in the literary world And there was a lot going on!!

Auden straddles the 20th century as a sort of bridge. He read The Waste Land and suddenly realized what he wanted to do, what poetry COULD do. It helped him enormously, it gave him courage to let go of old-fashioned forms. Yet at the same time, his great and well-known love for Thomas Hardy suggests that he was also a traditionalist. He went back, back to the 19th century, for his inspiration as well (although I am probably generalizing).

He understands terror and despair. He lived in “interesting times”, and was responsive to them in his work. Many poets were undone by WWI and WWII. The horror took away their voices. Auden was just the opposite.

Edward Mendelson, who edited the selected works of Auden writes:

“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.”

A Summer Night
A Summer Night

Out on the lawn I lie in bed,
Vega conspicuous overhead
In the windless nights of June,
As congregated leaves complete
Their day’s activity; my feet
Point to the rising moon.

Lucky, this point in time and space
Is chosen as my working-place,
Where the sexy airs of summer,
The bathing hours and the bare arms,
The leisured drives through a land of farms
Are good to a newcomer.

Equal with colleagues in a ring
I sit on each calm evening
Enchanted as the flowers
The opening light draws out of hiding
With all its gradual dove-like pleading,
Its logic and its powers:

That later we, though parted then,
May still recall these evenings when
Fear gave his watch no look;
The lion griefs loped from the shade
And on our knees their muzzles laid,
And Death put down his book.

Now north and south and east and west
Those I love lie down to rest;
The moon looks on them all,
The healers and the brilliant talkers,
The eccentrics and the silent walkers,
The dumpy and the tall.

She climbs the European sky,
Churches and power stations lie
Alike among earth’s fixtures:
Into the galleries she peers
And blankly as a butcher stares
Upon the marvelous pictures.

To gravity attentive, she
Can notice nothing here, though we
Whom hunger does not move,
From gardens where we feel secure
Look up and with a sigh endure
The tyrannies of love:

And, gentle, do not care to know,
Where Poland draws her eastern bow,
What violence is done,
Nor ask what doubtful act allows
Our freedom in this English house,
Our picnics in the sun.

Soon, soon, through the dykes of our content
The crumpling flood will force a rent
And, taller than a tree,
Hold sudden death before our eyes
Whose river dreams long hid the size
And vigours of the sea.

But when the waters make retreat
And through the black mud first the wheat
In shy green stalks appears,
When stranded monsters gasping lie,
And sounds of riveting terrify
Their whorled unsubtle ears,

May these delights we dread to lose,
This privacy, need no excuse
But to that strength belong,
As through a child’s rash happy cries
The drowned parental voices rise
In unlamenting song.

After discharges of alarm
All unpredicted let them calm
The pulse of nervous nations,
Forgive the murderer in the glass,
Tough in their patience to surpass
The tigress her swift motions.

I think of this poem as the “vision of agape” poem, even though that is not its title. There are too many good lines to even count. “Lion griefs”? I don’t even know what that MEANS, but I certainly like to think about it, and picture it, and I wish I could write like that. “When stranded monsters gasping lie …” Marvelous, scary. Whatever he might think of Yeats, Yeats’ “slouching beast” is in that line. This poem was the first moment Auden felt he really “broke through” in his work, and you can feel the difference in his poems forever afterwards. Before “vision of agape” he was one type of poet, after “vision of agape” he was another. He had been able to see the universal.

My mother saw Auden read at her college, (or maybe it was at the nearby Yale?) when she was a student. His readings were always packed, the most prized ticket in town. 20 years before that, he gave a famous series of lectures on Shakespeare at the New School for Social Research (where I went to grad school), and created a frenzy. These were not tape recorded (if memory serves), but a guy who was there took copious notes, basically writing down, in shorthand, everything Auden said. Those notes were compiled into a book, which I will forever be grateful for. Anyone interested in Shakespeare really MUST read Auden’s lectures – they dig deep into the language of the plays, and the dramaturgy, not to mention plot-points and analysis – and is indispensable reading.

Here is a fascinating excerpt from W.H. Auden’s lecture on Hamlet, February 12, 1947, at the New School for Social Research in NYC – I read this, and it just sends reverberations ricocheting through my head. He gets at something essential here, I believe, that indefinable “IT” which lies at the heart of Hamlet. You can see why people spend their entire lives and careers studying only that one play. If you read it aloud, start to finish, no cuts, it is almost four hours long. It is Shakespeare’s longest play. But what, ultimately, is it saying? It cannot be pinned down, it shifts – depending on how YOU look at it (similar to the particle/wave thing in quantum physics). If you want to see it one way, then it IS that way. If you want to see it another way, then lo and behold, the play cooperates. A shape-shifter. Anyway, here’s Auden:

If a work is quite perfect, it arouses less controversy and there is less to say about it. Curiously, everyone tries to identify with Hamlet, even actresses – and in fact Sarah Bernhardt did play Hamlet, and I am glad to say she broke her leg doing it. One says that one is like a character, but one does not say, “This is me.” One says, “I am more like Claudius, perhaps, than I am like Laertes,” o “I would rather be Benedick than Orsino.” But when a reader or spectator is inclined to say, “This is me,” it becomes slightly suspicious. It is suspicious when all sorts of actors say, “This is a part I would like to do,” not “This is a part I have a talent to do.” I would question whether anyone has succeeded in playing Hamlet without appearing ridiculous. Hamlet is a tragedy where there is a part left open, as a part is left open for an improvisational actor in farce. But here the part is left open for a tragedian.

Shakespeare took a great deal of time over this play. With a writer of Shakespeare’s certainty of execution, a delay of this kind is a sign of some dissatisfaction. He has not got the thing he wants. T.S. Eliot has called the play “an artistic failure”. Hamlet, the one inactive character, is not well integrated into the play and not adequately motivated, though the active characters are excellent. Polonious is a pseudo-practical dispenser of advice, who is a kind of voyeur where the sex life of his children is concerned. Laertes likes to be a dashing man-of-the-world who visits all houses – but don’t you touch my sister! And he is jealous of Hamlet’s intellect. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are yes men. Gertrude is portrayed as a woman who likes to be loved, who likes to have romance in her life. And Horatio is not too bright, though he has read a lot and can repeat it.

The plays of the period in which Shakespeare wrote Hamlet have great richness, but one is not sure that at this point he even wants to be a dramatist. Hamlet offers strong evidence of this indecision, becaue it indicates what Shakespeare might have done if he had had an absolutely free hand: he might well have confined himself to dramatic monologues. The soliloquies in Hamlet as well as other plays of this period are detachable both from the character and the plays. In earlier as well as later works they are more integrated. The “To be or not to be” soliloquy in Hamlet (III.i.56-90) is a clear example of a speech that can be separated from both the character and the play, as are the speeches of Ulysses on time in Troilus and Cressida (III.iii.145-80), the King on honor in All’s Well That Ends Well (II.iii.124-48), and the Duke on death in Measure for Measure (III.i.5-41).

Shakespeare, at this time, is interested in various technical problems. The first is the relation between prose and verse in the plays. In the early plays, the low or comic characters – Shylock as well as Launcelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice, for example – speak prose. An intellectual character like Falstaff speaks prose, in contrast to a passionate character like Hotspur, who speaks verse. In As You Like It, contrary to tradition, both the hero and heroine speak prose. In Twelfth Night, Viola speaks verse at court and prose to herself, and the characters in the play who are false or have no sense of humor speak verse. Those who are wiser and have some self-knowledge speak prose. In the tragedies Shakespeare develops an extremely fertile prose style for the tragic characters. Hamlet speaks both verse and prose. He speaks verse to himself, in his soliloquies, and in speeches of violent passion to others, as in the scene with his mother. He otherwise usually speaks prose to other people. There is a highly developed relation to prose and poetry in all the plays of this period. In the last plays Shakespeare exploits verse more exclusively, and tends to use prose when he is bored, or when he needs to fill in the gaps. In Antony and Cleopatra, the boring characters use prose, the rounded characters, verse.

Shakespeare is also developing a more flexible verse. He started off with the end-stopped Marlovian and lyric lines that were suitable to high passion. In Hamlet he experiments with the caesura, the stop in the middle of the line, to develop a middle voice, a voice neither passionate nor prosaic. Hamlet also shows a development in Shakespeare’s use of the double adjective. From such a phrase as “sweet and honey’d sentences” in Henry V (I.i.50), which is tautological, he moves to pairs of adjectives in Hamlet that combine the abstract and the concrete: Laertes’ “And keep you in the rear of your affection / Out of the shot and danger of desire” (I.iii.34-35), for example, Horatio’s “These are but wild and whirling words, my lord” (I.v.133), and Hamlet’s “Led by a delicate and tender prince” (IV.iv.48). George Ryland’s book, Words and Poetry, is very good on Shakespeare’s language and style.

In this period, also, Shakespeare appears to be tired of writing comedy, which he could do almost too well – he was probably bored because of his facility in the genre. Comedy is limited in the violence of language and emotion it can present, although Shakespeare can include a remarkable amount of both in his comedies. But though he wants to get away from comedy, he doesn’t want to go back to the crude rhetoric of King John and Richard III or to the lyric and romantic rhetoric of Romeo and Juliet and Richard II. He doesn’t want a childish character, who doesn’t know what is going on, like Romeo and Richard II, nor a crude character like Brutus, who is a puppet in a plot of historical significance, where the incidents are more important than the characters. Finally, he doesn’t want a character of fat humour that the situation must be constructed to reveal. And having done Falstaff, he doesn’t want to go back to the crude character.

Shakespeare’s very success as a dramatic poet may have led him to a kind of dissatisfaction with his life that is reflected in Hamlet. A dramatic poet is the kind of person who can imagine what anyone can feel, and he begins to wonder, “What am I?” “What do I feel?” “Can I feel?” Artists are inclined to suffer not from too much emotion but rather from too little. This business of being a mirror – you begin to question the reality of the mirror itself.

Shakespeare develops Hamlet from a number of earlier characters who are in differing ways proto-Hamlets. Richard II is a child, full of self-pity, who acts theatrically but who is not, like Hamlet, conscious of acting. Falstaff is like Hamlet, an intellectual character and the work of an artist who is becoming aware of his full powers, but he is not conscious of himself in the way Hamlet is. When Falstaff does become conscious of himself, he dies, almost suicidally. Brutus anticipates Hamlet by being, in a sense, his opposite. Hamlet is destroyed by his imagination. Brutus is destroyed by repressing his imagination, like the Stoic he is. He tries to exclude possibility. The nearest to Hamlet is Jaques, who remains unexplained and can take no part in the action.

I don’t know about you, but I want to keep reading such thoughts forever. The whole book is like that. Because they are lectures, transcripts, basically – there’s an off-the-cuff conversational tone to the language, which brings Auden to life in a new way for me.

Here are some quotes by and about W.H. Auden. There are many poets that I admire. There are also many poets I don’t so much like, but one or two of their poems strike a chord. But there are very few poets I actually love. Auden is one of them.

“The subject of his poetry is the struggle, but the struggle seen, as it were, by someone who whilst living in one camp, sympathises with the other; a struggle in fact which while existing externally is also taking place within the mind of the poet himself, who remains a bourgeois.” – Edgell Rickword, “Auden and Politics”

“I think of Mr. Auden’s poetry as a hygiene, a knowledge and practice, based on a brilliantly prejudiced analysis of contemporary disorders, relating to the preservation and promotion of health, a sanitary science and a flusher of melancholia. I sometimes think of his poetry as a great war, admire intensely the mature, religious, and logical fighter, and deprecate the boy bushranger.” — Dylan Thomas

“One Sunday afternoon in March 1922, a friend suggested that I should [write poetry]: the thought had never occurred to me.” — WH Auden

“For more than a year I read no one else.” — WH Auden – on Thomas Hardy

“Another celebrated Auden line — ‘We must love one another or die’ — was annexed without his permission and used in Lyndon Johnson’s notorious attack ad on Barry Goldwater in 1964, showing a little girl counting petals as she mutates into a thermonuclear countdown. The hideous scene closes with Auden’s words. He was so furious at this that he removed the poem from his canon. He was prone to excise things that had been exploited or distorted, which is why ‘1 September 1939’ — the poem from which the line is taken — can still be hard to get hold of. The same is alas true of ‘Spain 1937’ and of his verse obituary for W.B. Yeats in 1939 — three utterly magnificent works in the space of three years.” — Christopher Hitchens, “The Essential Auden”, Los Angeles Times

“[Thomas Hardy had a] hawk’s vision, [a] way of looking at life from a very great height…” — WH Auden

Spain
Yesterday all the past. The language of size
Spreading to China along the trade-routes; the diffusion
Of the counting-frame and the cromlech;
Yesterday the shadow-reckoning in the sunny climates.

Yesterday the assessment of insurance by cards,
The divination of water; yesterday the invention
Of cartwheels and clocks, the taming of
Horses. Yesterday the bustling world of the navigators.

Yesterday the abolition of fairies and giants,
the fortress like a motionless eagle eyeing the valley,
the chapel built in the forest;
Yesterday the carving of angels and alarming gargoyles;

The trial of heretics among the columns of stone;
Yesterday the theological feuds in the taverns
And the miraculous cure at the fountain;
Yesterday the Sabbath of witches; but to-day the struggle

Yesterday the installation of dynamos and turbines,
The construction of railways in the colonial desert;
Yesterday the classic lecture
On the origin of Mankind. But to-day the struggle.

Yesterday the belief in the absolute value of Greek,
The fall of the curtain upon the death of a hero;
Yesterday the prayer to the sunset
And the adoration of madmen. but to-day the struggle.

As the poet whispers, startled among the pines,
Or where the loose waterfall sings compact, or upright
On the crag by the leaning tower:
“O my vision. O send me the luck of the sailor.”

And the investigator peers through his instruments
At the inhuman provinces, the virile bacillus
Or enormous Jupiter finished:
“But the lives of my friends. I inquire. I inquire.”

And the poor in their fireless lodgings, dropping the sheets
Of the evening paper: “Our day is our loss. O show us
History the operator, the
Organiser. Time the refreshing river.”

And the nations combine each cry, invoking the life
That shapes the individual belly and orders
The private nocturnal terror:
“Did you not found the city state of the sponge,

“Raise the vast military empires of the shark
And the tiger, establish the robin’s plucky canton?
Intervene. O descend as a dove or
A furious papa or a mild engineer, but descend.”

And the life, if it answers at all, replied from the heart
And the eyes and the lungs, from the shops and squares of the city
“O no, I am not the mover;
Not to-day; not to you. To you, I’m the

“Yes-man, the bar-companion, the easily-duped;
I am whatever you do. I am your vow to be
Good, your humorous story.
I am your business voice. I am your marriage.

“What’s your proposal? To build the just city? I will.
I agree. Or is it the suicide pact, the romantic
Death? Very well, I accept, for
I am your choice, your decision. Yes, I am Spain.”

Many have heard it on remote peninsulas,
On sleepy plains, in the aberrant fishermen’s islands
Or the corrupt heart of the city.
Have heard and migrated like gulls or the seeds of a flower.

They clung like burrs to the long expresses that lurch
Through the unjust lands, through the night, through the alpine tunnel;
They floated over the oceans;
They walked the passes. All presented their lives.

On that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot
Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe;
On that tableland scored by rivers,
Our thoughts have bodies; the menacing shapes of our fever

Are precise and alive. For the fears which made us respond
To the medicine ad, and the brochure of winter cruises
Have become invading battalions;
And our faces, the institute-face, the chain-store, the ruin

Are projecting their greed as the firing squad and the bomb.
Madrid is the heart. Our moments of tenderness blossom
As the ambulance and the sandbag;
Our hours of friendship into a people’s army.

To-morrow, perhaps the future. The research on fatigue
And the movements of packers; the gradual exploring of all the
Octaves of radiation;
To-morrow the enlarging of consciousness by diet and breathing.

To-morrow the rediscovery of romantic love,
the photographing of ravens; all the fun under
Liberty’s masterful shadow;
To-morrow the hour of the pageant-master and the musician,

The beautiful roar of the chorus under the dome;
To-morrow the exchanging of tips on the breeding of terriers,
The eager election of chairmen
By the sudden forest of hands. But to-day the struggle.

To-morrow for the young the poets exploding like bombs,
The walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion;
To-morrow the bicycle races
Through the suburbs on summer evenings. But to-day the struggle.

To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death,
The consious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;
To-day the expending of powers
On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.

To-day the makeshift consolations: the shared cigarette,
The cards in the candlelit barn, and the scraping concert,
The masculine jokes; to-day the
Fumbled and unsatisfactory embrace before hurting.

The stars are dead. The animals will not look.
We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and
History to the defeated
May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon.

Fascinating excerpt from Christopher Hitchens’s book Why Orwell Matters, about the “feud” between Orwell and Auden, which came about because of the poem above:

I first struck across [Orwell’s] writing at about the same period that I encountered the poetry of W.H. Auden, and it has subsequenty grieved me that the quarrel between the two men makes it impossible to esteem them as allies, or as co-authors of equivalent moral clarity. This is Orwell’s fault: his attack on Auden is one of the few thuggish episodes in his prose, and is also related to his unexamined and philistine prejudice against homosexuality. But this depressing episode has its redeeming sequel, as I shall try to show. In May 1937 – the very worst month in the battle between the Spanish Republic and the deadly metastasis of Stalin’s regime within Spanish institutions – Auden published a long and beautiful poem entitled, simplly, ‘Spain’. The publication was not without its propaganda dimension; the poem first appeared as a shilling pamphlet with proceeds going to a Popular Front-organization ‘medical aid’ charity. However, in form and content the verses summon the idea of Spain itself (‘that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot / Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe’)’ the place it then held in the hearts and minds of thinking people (‘Our thoughts have bodies; the menacing shapes of our fever / Are precise and alive’); and finally the agony experienced by those non-violent intellectuals who had decided to abandon neutrality and suppressing misgiving, endorse the use of force in self-defence:

To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death,
The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;
To-day the expending of powers
On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.

It is hard to imagine it being put better: the fascist poets had exulted in violence and cruelty and domineering rhetoric, celebrating death and denigrating the intellect, while their opponents gathered resolve reluctantly yet with mounting determination. This was not at all Orwell’s reading of the poem. In two articles, one of them written for The Adelphi in 1938 and another more celebrated under the title ‘Inside the Whale’, he took venomous aim at the above stanza in particular. It was, he sneered:

a sort of tabloid picture of a day in the life of a ‘good party man’. In the morning a couple of political murders, a ten-minutes’ interlude to stifle ‘bourgeois’ remorse, and then a hurried luncheon and a busy afternoon and evening chalking walls and distributing leaflets. All very edifying. But notice the phrase ‘necessary murder’. It could only be written by a person to whom murder is at most a word. Personally I would not speak so lightly of murder … The Hitlers and Stalins find murder necessary, but … they don’t speak of it as murder; it is ‘liquidation’, ‘elimination’ or some other soothing phrase. Mr. Auden’s brand of amoralism is only possible if you are the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled.

The laden sarcasm here is as gross as the cheapness of the argument. Who can possibly have thought that terms (not phrases) like ‘liquidation’ or ‘elimination’ were ‘soothing’? By giving the word ‘murder’ its rightful name, Auden was precisely declining to use the sort of euphemism that Orwell elsewhere found so despicable. His ‘brand of amoralism’ consisted in a sincere attempt to overcome essentially pacifist scruples, and to be candid about the consequences.

We do not know for certain how much Orwell’s excoriation weighed with Auden, but in 1939 he revised ‘Spain’ to delete all allusions to such moral dilemmas, and by the 1950s he had made sure that the poem, together with some others of the period, could not be anthologized under his name. This is in several ways a great pity: it suggests the mentality of an auto-da-fe and it also tears from its proper context a haunting phrase which still resounds in literary memory. The phrase is ‘History to the defeated’, and it occurs at the close of the poem, where Auden says: ‘We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and / History to the defeated / May say alas but cannot help or pardon.’ He developed a special horror for this formulation, writing later that: ‘To say this is to equate goodness with success. It would have been bad enough if I had ever held this wicked doctrine, but that I should have stated it simply because it sounded to me rhetorically effective is quite inexcusable.’ Perhaps he was being too harsh on himself; few if any readers have interpreted the lines as a ruthless Hegelian equation of history (or ‘History’) with victory. Rather, the lines acquire their power from a somewhat remorseful recognition of necessity.

Or so Orwell may have come to believe. In concluding a review of a book by General Wavell in the critical month of December 1940, he wrote, of the preceding First World War:

The thick-necked cavalry generals remained at the top, but the lower-middle classes and the colonies came to the rescue. The thing is happening again, and probably on a much larger scale, but it is happening with desperate slowness and

History to the defeated
May say Alas! But cannot alter or pardon.

He quoted from memory as he often did, but seemed to approve the sentiment as rousing people to see that here was a way which could not be lost… Even when writing ‘Inside the Whale’ several years earlier, he had apologized to Auden for having described him previously as ‘ “a sort of gutless Kipling”. As criticism this was quite unworthy, indeed it was merely a spiteful remark … ‘ And, in preparing to take aim at ‘Spain’, he had taken care to observe that ‘this poem is one of the few decent things that have been written about the Spanish war.’ “

“He was very lazy. He hated polishing and making corrections. If I didn’t like a poem, he threw it away and wrote another. If I liked one line, he would keep it and work it into a new poem. In this way whole poems were constructed which were simply anthologies of my favourite lines, entirely regardless of grammar or sense. This is the simple explanation of much of Auden’s celebrated obscurity.” — friend Christopher Isherwood

“The poet who writes “free” verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself. In a few exceptional cases, this manly independence produces something original and impressive, but more often the result is squalor – dirty sheets on the unmade bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor.” – W.H. Auden

“Auden: great poet or great representative poet? A poet or a ‘classic of our prose’? He overhsadows the poets of his generation. He is Chaucer to the Gower of Betjeman and the Langland of MacNeice.” — Michael Schmidt

“In the [unpublished] poem, he [Auden] saw the blood trail which had dripped from Grendel after his arm and shoulder had been ripped off by Beowulf. The blood shone, was phosphorescen on the grass … It was as if Auden … had given imaginative place and ‘reality’ to something exploited for the Examination Schools, yet rooted in English origins.” — Geoffrey Grigson on what he called Auden’s “Englishness”

“A pet has to woo, not only his own Muse but also Dame Philology, and, for the beginner, the latter is more important. As a rule, the sign that a beginner has a genuine original talent is that he is more interested in playing with words than in saying something original; his attitude is that of the old lady, quoted by E.M. Forster – ‘How can I know what I think till I see what I say?’ It is only later, when he has wooed and won Dame Philology, that he can give his entire devotion to his Muse.” — W.H. Auden

“Long before the parable poetry of postwar Europe, Auden arrived at a mode that was stricken with premonitions of an awful thing and was adequate to give expression to those premonitions by strictly poetic means. But this unified sensibility fissured when Auden was inevitably driven to extend himself beyond the transmission of intuited knowledge, beyond poetic indirection and implication, and began spelling out those intuitions in a more explicit, analytic and morally ratified rhetoric. In writing a poem like ‘Spain’, no matter how breathtaking its condensation of vistas or how decent its purpose, or a poem like ‘A Summer Night,’ no matter how Mozartian its verbal equivalent of agape, Auden broke with his solitude and his oddity. His responsibility towards the human family became intensely and commendably strong and the magnificently sane, meditative, judicial poems of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s were the result. We might say that this bonus, which includes such an early masterpiece as ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ and such a later one as ‘In Praise of Limestone,’ represents an answer to the question posed in ‘Orpheus’. That answer inclines to say that ‘song’ hopes most of all for ‘the knowledge of life’ and inclines away from the ‘bewildered’ quotient in the proferred alternative ‘to be bewildered and happy’. To put it another way. Auden finally preferred life to be concentrated into something ‘rich’ rather than something ‘strange’, a preference which is understandable if we consider poetry’s constant impulse to be all Prospero, harnessed to the rational project of settling mankind into a cosmic security. Yet the doom and omen which characterized the ‘strange’ poetry of the early 1950s, its bewildered and unsettling visions, brought native English poetry as near as it has ever been to the imaginative verge of the dreadful and offered an example of how insular experience and the universal shock suffered by mankind in the twentieth century could be sounded forth in the English language.” — Seamus Heaney, “Sounding Auden”