"Harrow the houses of the dead; look shining at
New styles of architecture, a change of heart."
and other things in that vein - the poems collected as "The English
Auden". After that, to be sure, it largely goes to pot. Here's
something I wrote on this a while back:
"If I am W. H. Auden, I then return to the poem a decade or so later
and wantonly vandalize it, because my "late" aesthetic considers my
"early" aesthetic a disastrous embarrassment and cannot bear to let
any of its triumphs stand. The later Auden's sense of what made a good
poem good had changed to the point where he could no longer recognise
what was good about his early poems, and so could not make them
better. The alterations he made in this mood were attempts at damage
limitation, the purpose of which was to dilute the venom of a
rhetorical potency he considered anti-human. The result was
mutilation: style cannot be subordinated to the demands of civility.
I do not think that there is any difference in kind between the
question "how can you say that one poem is better than another?" and
the question "how can you say that one version of the same poem is
better than another?". Auden's inability, after a certain point, to
make his early poems better was due to the fact that the investigation
with which he had started, an investigation into what makes good poems
and hence into what makes one poem better than another, had come to an
end. He was investigating something different, namely the problem of
how to fashion a civil discourse that would not promote or provoke
atrocity; and the early poems' wilful embrace of death, their passion
for the real, was not commensurable with the aims and axioms of that
investigation. I speak of axioms advisedly: the poem "The Shield of
Achilles" explicitly opposes the "axioms" of civility (of "any world
where promises were kept / or one could weep because another wept") to
those of atrocity ("that girls are raped, that two boys knife a
third"; that the victims of barbarity will have "died as men before
their bodies died"). The question of whether an investigation oriented
by the axioms of civility could identify good poems is not in my view
satisfactorily resolved by the later Auden."
What I like about early Auden *is* the "anti-human" style, coupled
with the broad (if never especially deep) intellectual curiosity. He
ranges about making connections, chucking out conceits, forming an
idiosyncratic world-picture. Certain things are almost completely
absent from it, of course: women and children, for example. The early
Auden would rather write about industrial machinery. But don't you
think that's interesting?
I think I am probably much the same sort of fraud as Auden was.
Dominic
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