Life and Works of WH Auden
Examines the life of one of the greatest poets of the 20th century; his diverse range of works, the poetic and the literary techniques he employs in his work.
The stimulus for a poet’s work is provided by their place in society, in the environment and in the scheme of contemporary literature. The poet may experience beauty, be compelled to challenge an injustice or reflect on personal experiences. As they live their life and become increasingly exposed to these stimuli, they respond by writing poetry. In the case of W.H. Auden, an astonishingly diverse array of works is representative of an extensive range of experiences and ideological shifts in the poet’s life. Critics divide Auden’s literary life into four phases. In the first, his poetry was shaped by the influence of his father; in the second, by the landscapes in which he lived; in the third, by his traveling the world and serving in a war; and in the forth, by the United States, his new home. Together, these forces shaped the works of one of the greatest poets of the century.
Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, England in February 1907 into an upper class family. Eldest of three sons, Auden's father was a physician and his mother a former nurse. Auden enjoyed a warm relationship with his father, and the medical and scientific influence became a motif of his early poetic work, which is filled with recurrent images of disease, healing and the bodily functions.
His family moved to Birmingham just one year after his birth, and it was there that his early interest in geology and landscapes began to develop. He became fascinated with urban and industrial landscapes and created a private imaginary world composed of man-made limestone landscapes and deserted mines. These images appear in one of Auden's later poems, 'In Praise of Limestone'.
‘… but when I try to image a faultless love
Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur
Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.’
At the age of fifteen, Auden discovered his poetic vocation. He remains one of the few poets of the 20th century whose contemporary society recognized him as a master from the very beginning. Having had a stable and loving childhood, Auden's earliest works included an abundance of images of warmth, family and food. In 'Profile', Auden asks
‘A childhood full of love
and good things to eat:
why should he not hate change?’
Auden directly established the significant link between tangible nourishment and intellectual sustenance in The Dyer's Hand:
‘A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets, some gourmands, and a good many take their images precooked out of a can and swallow them down, absent-mindedly and with little relish.’
In 1925, Auden became an undergraduate at Christ Church College of Oxford University. He started studying natural science; briefly attempted his luck at politics, economics and philosophy; but settled on English. At Oxford, Auden met several other poets who supported him in his early years including Day Lewis, who would become Poet Laureate. At the same time, Auden became familiar with the works of Robert Frost and would remain a lifelong admirer of the American poet.
After Auden's college graduation in 1928, he spent a year abroad in Berlin. This came at a time of his life when Auden was becoming increasingly concerned about his homosexuality. Homosexuality was condemned by the standards of his religious upbringing and was a activity was a criminal offence in England. Furthermore, Freud, who Auden read regularly during his college career, suggested that it was indicative of immaturity. In Berlin, Auden was exposed to lifestyle much freeer than that of England and decided to acknowledge his sexual orientation and live by its restrictions and demands.
His year abroad was complimented by a variety of other new experiences which had marked influences on the poet's works. He traveled extensively, spending several months in Japan and China, and he served briefly in the Spanish Civil War as an ambulance driver. By the mid 1930s, Auden had witnessed the First World War and numerous other conflicts over ideology. In the Spanish Civil War, he observed first hand the death and destruction that such conflicts could bring, and was appalled at the thought that an entire nation could become indoctrinated with the victor's ideologies. His poem 'In Time of War' shows a detachment from the events of the war, suggesting that Auden considered war objectively and deliberated on its consequences:
‘Austria died and China was forsaken,
Shanghai in flames and Tereul retaken.’
These experiences were paramount in Auden's development of a personal brand of Marxism. In his early years, he was always very open to political, scientific and psychological influences, and Marxism perpetuated his work so strongly that Marx himself appears at the end of a dramatic piece, The Dance of Death. In addition to promoting socialism, Auden had some more general political opinions. He held that it was the duty of the citizens of a nation to continually question the social and political climate in which they found themselves. Unquestionably, this skepticism was as a result of Auden's experiences with both the First World War and the Spanish Civil War. In 'The Garrison', Auden writes
‘Whoever rules, our duty to the City
is loyal opposition.’
Additionally, Auden realised the place of evil and wickedness and the potential for human wrongdoing. His opinions on this topic are most clearly expressed in a famous quotation from the poem 'Herman Melville':
‘Evil is unspectacular and always human,
And shares our bed and eats at our own table.’
Freudianism gradually replaced Marxism as Auden gave attention to the individual mind rather than the social organism. He looked to the study of psychology and the new art of psychoanalysis to explain his own behaviour and the actions of those around him. One of the early such observations he made was:
‘Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow.’
Two poems are particularly representative of this change in the focus of Auden's work – 'Herman Melville' and 'An Elegy to Freud'. In the latter, Auden remarks
‘Such was this doctor: still at eighty he wished
to think of our life from whose unruliness
so many plausible young futures
with threats or flattery ask obedience,’
In 1935, Auden married Erika Mann, a lesbian actress and journalist, in order to secure her a British passport and enable her to leave Nazi Germany. They never lived together as husband and wife, but Auden dedicated his next book of poetry to her.
In 1939, Auden emigrated to the United States and settled in New York. Many in England viewed his departure as a cowardly flight from danger on the eve of a World War, but Auden had wished to distance himself from the vindictive literary world of London. It is generally accepted that a few years after his arrival in the United States, his poetry notably deteriorated. His work became self-obsessed and had little of the social, political, philosophical and psychological significance of his earlier works. Critics argue that Auden gradually became a sage and not a prophet .
‘These poems are essentially about themselves, rather than some larger and more significant subject’
This creative cosiness complimented the development of a proud and selfish streak in Auden's personality. Defending the autobiographical nature of many of his later works, he wrote
‘It is genuine in age to be
happily selfish’
He spent much of his time in the last few years of his life evaluating the role and function of poetry, and concluded that it did have a role in influencing social trends and ideals. Hypocritically, however, his later poems made little effort to comment on contemporary issues. Auden suggested that
‘Poetry is not concerned with telling people what to do, but with extending our knowledge of good and evil… leading us to the point where it is possible for us to make a rational and moral choice.’
He discovered that poetry was an art unlike any other, an art which must either be ignored or appreciated. In this excerpt from 'The Cave of Making', Auden implies that if poetry is read, its influence on society can be profound, but that it is far too often ‘unpopular’ and ‘ignored’.
‘After all, it's rather a privilege
amid the affluent traffic
to serve this unpopular art which cannot be turned into
background noise for study
or hung as a status trophy by rising executives,
cannot be 'done' like Venice
or abridged like Tolstoy, but stubbornly still insists upon
being read or ignored…’
The variety of Auden's work, both in terms of form and function, reflects the variety of experience and ideology that the poet went through during his turbulent sixty-six years. He contributed to several novels, wrote two dramatic pieces, an opera libretti, and composed hundreds of poems of varying lengths. His poetry does not take on a single form and he does not seem to prefer writing in any particular form or with any particular structure – the diversity of his work is astonishing. 'Roman Wall Blues' is made up of seven heroic couplets, a feature of the Neoclassic Period:
‘Over the heather the wet wind blows,
I've lice in my tunic and a cold in my nose.’
His studies at Oxford introduced him to the fundamentals of poetic technique. He experimented early with stress and alliterative meters and used them effectively in his first compositions. An elegiac tone dominates many of Auden's poems, particularly the Elegies to Yeats and Freud, but also poems like 'The Unknown Citizen':
‘He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint.
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint’
The same poem is written in a very colloquial tone, which compliments its satirical subject matter. 'The Unknown Citizen' also makes use of enjamberment, a technique which Auden frequently employs in the interests of continuity. The excerpt has a rhyme scheme of ABAB, and while there is no dominant scheme in Auden's work in general, most of his poems make use of rhyme. Another of Auden's famous works, 'The Shield of Achilles', has a unique structure of stanzas and rhyme which effectively divides the poem into two distinct sections.
In many of his poems, Auden establishes an appropriate tone without intruding as a speaker using the 'I'. In 'The Unknown Citizen', the point of view of a concerned, professional observer with a sense of social conscience is established. The tone of much of Auden's work is brisk and cool, and from an informed third-person perspective, but this is not always the case. 'O What is that Sound' is another example of the use of a unique narrative tone – the narrator is talking to a loved one in caring manner, but with an air of apathy to the events happening around him. He has complete faith in the actions of the soldiers, who he will not admit are attacking his town. In the final stanza, the narrator's faith is betrayed and the reader is presented with a startling image:
‘O it's broken the lock and splintered the door,
O it's the gate where they're turning, turning;
Their boots are heavy on the floor
And their eyes are burning.’
The subject matter of Auden's poetry is equally as broad and difficult to classify. The poet's ideological shifts have been identified, and examples of the content written in each phase of his life have been cited. In general, the poetry Auden wrote early and late in his life is personal; the poetry written during the remainder of his life has greater political and social significance. Auden's social commentary is not limited to politics – he explored Freudianism in 'An Elegy to Freud' and the inadequacies of British government in 'The Unknown Citizen'. Auden deals with war in both 'The Shield of Achilles' and 'September 1, 1938', the latter written on the eve of the Second World War.
In most of Auden's work, powerful imagery is used as a technique to compliment the subject matter. 'The Shield of Achilles' is a prime example. Images of an imagined utopia are juxtaposed with images of the shocking reality of war and human cruelty:
‘Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.’
The sense of smell is prevalent in many of Auden's other poems, and is used effectively as an alternative method of establishing setting and mood. 'The Sabbath' opens with the use of smell to establish setting and facts about the characters' motives:
‘Walking on the Seventh Day of Creation,
They cautiously sniffed the air:
The most fastidious nostril among them admitted
That fellow was no longer there.’
As one of the more contemporary classic poets, the reading perspective of Auden’s works has not changed dramatically since their conception. There have, however, been some shifts in the hegemony of Western society which makes reading them in the 21st century a unique experience. Most importantly, post World War I tension and disillusionment has dissipated and a majority of world conflicts in the last few decades have been localized to developing nations. Western society is detached from these conflicts and does not fear the potentially disastrous warfare as it did in the 1930s. These changes make reading poems like ‘The Garrison’ and ‘O What is that Sound’ less shocking and startling than before.
Freudianism and Marxism, relatively new ideologies in Auden’s time, are stale topics in our contemporary society. Poems like ‘An Elegy to Freud’ put across ideas to which a 21st century reader has already been exposed, breeding an apathetic response towards topics that were particularly significant in Auden’s time. At the same time, the rise of a culture of materialism has meant that a contemporary reader may offer different interpretations of his works.
Regardless of the way we approach his writing, Auden’s perspective on the human condition will forever be unique and inspiring. His skepticism of contemporary society, his openness to new ideas and a broad range of life experiences fostered Auden’s greatest poetry, but it is for his remarkable ability as a master of language and technique that he will be most remembered. The broad range of forms and techniques Auden employs will never cease in their inspiring ability to articulate the meaning of his works to new generations of readers.
