 Second Auden Lecture. I was reading last time from poems from the thirties, those love poems, Layers Sleeping Head, My Love, and This Lunar Beauty. The ballad that I read for you as I walked out one also a poem about love also comes from the later thirties. It is collected though in this book called Another Time, a book Auden published in 1940. I'm afraid I've got my order all mixed up here. I wanted to show you just the table of contents of this book because it has a number of masterpieces in it that you are reading. It's also significant that it's organized in the way that it is. The first section is called Humbly, I guess, People and Places, and it includes in it, the poem I'll be discussing shortly, Muse de Beaux-Arts. There's another couple of sections, a section called Lighter Poems. It includes all kinds of song forms, refugee blues, different kinds of blues, and some kind of gothic satirical ballads, Miss G., James Honeyman poems that are antecedents for a song like Maxwell's Silver Hammer. This is the kind of thing Auden was writing. Then there's also something else called occasional poems, and in this box Auden has put Spain 1937, that great political poem from the Civil War. And these poems that I'll be discussing today, in memory of W.B. Yates and in memory of Sigmund Freud. I wanted to call attention to this book first of all because it shows us these poems embedded in the actual context in which they first appeared, but also to point out the way Auden has organized his book. That is to say he has thought of his poems as belonging to specific categories and placed them accordingly. And they have different genres, different forms, suitable to different purposes and occasions. And this is very much the way in which Auden imagines himself as a poet, I think. Auden is someone writing with a kind of technical mastery, with access to a whole repertoire of traditional forms, which are suitable to different purposes and different occasions. This general perspective on his work is related to the topic that I introduced in discussing as I walked out one evening. And that is the whole question of perspective in Auden. You remember I talked about how that poem seems to include, well, at least three different perspectives. That is the quoted song of the lover, who tells his beloved that he will love her until the end of time. Then there's the voice of the clocks, who speak from the point of view of time and correct his claims. And then finally there's a kind of narrative voice that seems to frame the whole thing with that image of the river running on. As in that poem Auden seems to be able to incorporate in his poetry multiple perspectives, each of which comment on or are framed or conditioned by the others, but each of which has its independent truth, you could say. This is a topic that we'll explore more today looking at other poems. I'll show you some photographs. In the 1930s, during the Japanese-Chinese war, prelude to the Second World War, Auden went with his friend Christopher Isherwood to China and created a book together called Journey to a War, which includes Isherwood's poetry. It's quite a remarkable book. It also includes photographs which are presented in an interesting way. We have here two different photographs of boys, boys who are classified here as soldiers and civilians, and then grimly are identified as with legs and without. There's a kind of interest in these photographs and in their presentation of how in the ways in which, in war, who we are is a matter of perspective and point of view. The war gave Auden and Isherwood an opportunity to experience what it is like to be on the ground when planes are overhead bombing you. Here's one photograph of that condition. Here is another illustration of this general point I wanted to make. There are unidentified corpses under blankets there. There are then scattered human remains and debris, and the one photograph is identified as the innocent and the other as the guilty. Well, another poem on this general theme in Auden's work is Musée de Beaux-Arts. It is a poem that Auden wrote after returning from China in December, I believe, 1938, contemplating a return to the United States where he had visited a short time before, contemplating, in fact, expatriation. Also contemplating an imminent war, a world war that would extend the horror that he had witnessed in China. To all of Europe and beyond. Suffering, in other words, was on his mind, and it's the subject, or rather, art's relation to suffering, is the subject of this poem. The poem has as its occasion a visit to the Musée de Beaux-Arts in Brussels, where Auden saw, among other works, this painting, The Fall of Icarus, that is painted by Peter Bruegel. This and other Bruegels are referred to in the course of the poem, which proceeds almost as a kind of imaginary gallery tour or walk, in which Auden, a companion, takes us to different works and contemplates their commentary on the general issue that he is raising here. What is art's relation to suffering? About suffering, they were never wrong, the old masters. How well they understood its human position. You learn with how you position suffering in human life, and he's taking Bruegel as a model. How it takes place while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along as this line of poetry itself seems to. How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting for the birth, now he's contemplating a nativity scene, there must always be children who did not specially want it to happen, skating on a pond at the edge of the wood. They never forgot, the old masters, that even the dreadful martyrdom, and now he's looking at Bruegel's painting The Massacre of the Innocence, that even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course in a corner, some untidy spot where the dogs go on with their doggie life, and the torturer's horse, no more innocent or guilty than those boys, I suppose, scratches its innocent behind on a tree. The old masters know the human position of suffering, its position in human life. Position is important, it's an important word for Auden here. He's concerned with how experience is placed. Sometimes he calls this geography. It is a topos, motif, an idea in his poetry that Elizabeth Bishop will take over quite directly from him and develop and make central to her poetry. The idea is that things have meaning in relation to, in their connection with, but also their separation from each other. Suffering is part, but only a part, not the center of human life, a repertoire of actions and conditions and states of being. That is much larger. In Bruegel, in his Massacre of the Innocence, I won't try to find it now among my slides for you, Auden focuses on the torturer's horse, the animal that is part of the scene, and that motivated by an itch scratches its behind while the dreadful martyrdom runs its course. In this poem, as in other Auden poems, note the prose rhythms. The poem does seem to, at times, walk dully along. Auden, like Moore, is writing in an expository manner, an essayistic manner. This is part of the tone of the poem. Auden is getting into his poetry a kind of neoclassical, eighteenth-century aesthetic, an ability to talk about ideas in poetry in, again, a discursive, expository manner that includes humor. And that, as a matter of fact, is observant. Pain, like the tears that I talked about last time that had dried on Auden's pages. Pain is part of the picture, but it is just a part. It's, in a sense, been put aside. All of this is a function of calling Auden's perspectivism any scene borders on other scenes where other people are positioned looking at the same thing differently or not looking at it at all. And this is one of the themes of the second section of the poem where Auden specifically describes this painting. He says, in Breugel's Icarus, for instance, and this is a poetry in which the poet says, for instance, just as Moore might have said, however, how everything turns away quite leisurely from the disaster. And he's talking about the shepherd who's looking up to the sky. About the plowman who has his back turned to the fall. And where is it? It's hard probably for you to see, but it's hard to find in any case because this dramatic event that is the center of Breugel's pictures, in fact, these bare legs disappearing into the sea as the overreaching sun of Daedalus plunges into the water, not at all in the center of the picture. How everything turns away Auden observes quite leisurely from the disaster. The plowman may have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, but for him it was not an important failure. He's not concerned with flying to or beyond the sun. For him the sun merely shines. It helps him cultivate the land, the sun shone of necessity as it had to, on the white legs disappearing into the green water, the white legs disappearing into the green water. In 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. Well, here Auden wasn't thinking about Hart Crane, but he might have been. It's almost as if this figure has leaped off the back of the boat as Crane did. He is, however, thinking, I suppose, about romanticism in general and its ambitions. Here the sun shines as it had to. What it illuminates are white legs. There's a kind of objectivity in that. There's a kind of naturalism. It shines on green water. It's as if, from a certain perspective, from the perspective of aesthetic form, these elements of the picture are merely elements of a picture, colors, which have meaning as they are placed in a system of relationships and a system of perspectives. Well, there's a great deal more to be said about this painting. I think one idea that is worth emphasizing is the way in which the plowman in Auden's account, as in Bruegel's painting, has prominence, has a greater prominence than the heroic romantic figure plunging into the sea. The plowman is going about his ordinary daily work, and as he turns these furrows, we are reminded, as Auden surely was reminded, of the ancient classical connection between verse, meaning the turning in Latin, from one line to another, and the shaping action of the plow that creates these furrows in the earth, committing the poet, as he identifies with the plowman, to a kind of poetry of craft and of the earth that involves, in a sense, turning away from disaster. Well, this poem was written in Europe. It is a poem that Auden, let me find this picture here, with which Auden, in a sense, turns his back on Europe, and for the moment at least, the imminent World War, he comes to the United States. He emigrates to the United States in January 1939. This personal turning point in a poetic career comes at a moment when the world is about to be split in war. It also comes at a significant moment in literary history when Yates dies, and Auden recognizes this occasion as a moment to celebrate the poet, contemplate the achievement in modern poetry that he represents, Yates, in a sense, provide a kind of epitaph for a poetry now in the past, behind us, that positions Auden in the present. Let's look at the view of Yates and of Yates's poetry that emerges here. The poem extends the questions of Musée de Beaux-Arts by asking not so much what is art's relation to suffering as what is the place of art in society generally, or poetry in particular. Auden begins, he disappeared in the dead of winter. The Brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted, and Snow disfigured the Catholic statues. The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day. Oh, all the instruments agree, the day of his death was a dark, cold day. There's a sense, as Auden elaborates these ideas, that natural science is here mocking the pathetic fallacy, that all nature should mourn when the poet dies and reflect the grief of this event. He's saying Auden is – it was a cold day, and we had instruments to measure it, and that's what it was, in a kind of factual way. He continues, Auden does, Now he, Yates, is scattered among a hundred cities and wholly given over to unfamiliar affections. The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living. Yates is passed on to us. And yet, to whom is he passed on? What difference does he make? Auden doesn't want us to make the mistake of thinking that Yates is too central a figure, that he matters too much. But in the importance and noise of tomorrow, he continues, when the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the bourse, and the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly aware. And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom. A few thousand will think of this day, as one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual. This is an attempt to, in some sense, place poetry realistically in culture. It doesn't matter to the brokers roaring like beasts on the floor of the bourse. It doesn't matter to the poor who have their suffering, to which they are fairly accustomed. It matters, well, perhaps to a few thousand people, not a negligible number, but not a large one either. There's a kind of modesty in Auden's claims for Yates, for poetry. You could contrast Pound at the same time as this poem is broadcasting his ideas on Fascist Radio, or you could think about Stevens at the same time dreaming up a poem he will call Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction. This is a rather different claim for what poetry might do. It returns to a theme of the wasteland. Somehow the world that Auden is describing is one in which we are each imprisoned in the cell of ourselves, recalling the locked chambers of Eliot's poem. In the second section, Auden moves to address Yates directly. Now Yates is, in a sense, claimed for us his difference, the vatic powers of language, the visionary ambition, the occult learning. All of that would distinguish and separate him from us is put aside. And what he shares with us is emphasized, you were silly like us. Silly. Your gift survived it all. It had to survive a lot. It had to survive the parish of rich women who doted on him his own physical decay himself. Auden says, mad Ireland hurt you into poetry. Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still. You did not affect it. You did not affect it because you are a man and only a man. In fact, poetry makes nothing happen. This is one of the most quoted sentences in modern poetry. Poetry makes nothing happen. It is almost always quoted, however, out of context. It is part of a long sentence. It comes first as a qualification on what Yates and the difference Yates has made in the world. Auden's saying in a sense, no, you haven't made a difference. For poetry makes nothing happen. But the poem continues then, the sentence continues. Auden says, colon it survives. Poetry makes nothing happen. It survives where it survives in the valley of its saying, where executives would never want to tamper. It flows south from ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, raw towns that we believe and it survives a way of happening, a mouth. Poetry doesn't make things happen. It has a different kind of action. It survives. It lasts. How does it last? Where does it last? It lasts in the valley of its saying, a kind of imaginary landscape or kind of world that is created through speech here. The valley of its saying, perhaps a rich place to live, but also a space that evokes a kind of absence or hollow or kind of opening, perhaps, or a gap. As Auden develops this idea, the poetry becomes what he calls a way of happening, a mouth, and then that valley is re-figured as a mouth, an open mouth I'm sure, a mouth open where words are coming out, where more words will follow and flow like a kind of river. Poetry, in that sense, doesn't make anything happen. It is rather a way of happening. That is a kind of method or model, a path or discipline, a way, not a deed, but something more like the symbol of a deed, or the figure of a kind of potential action, a nothing that is somehow something too. Again, I think an image implying an open mouth, that is the mouth of a river, the mouth of a poet, through which language flows. Then the poem moves into, I think, a kind of illustration of the kind of action that poetry engages in. That comes with the movement into these ceremonial in Iambic tetrameter, essentially. Is that what it is? Well, it's definitely a tetrameter. The Rai mentors, the prose rhythms of the poem up to now give way to a kind of ceremonial lyric language. Here poetry is identified with praise and with prayer. The poem gives us a kind of performative language of human ceremony that honors Yates, that lays him to rest, yet also absorbs and affirms the power of poetry that was in him. First, receive an honored guest. William Yates is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie empty of its poetry. Auden goes on to describe the way that time will honor poetry and will honor Yates, that time will even, he says, forgive Yates for the right-wing politics that Yates's later career is marked by, and that Auden separates himself from and needs to come to terms with in this poem. He says, time with this strange excuse, pardon Kipling in his views, and will pardon Paul Claudel, Kipling for his imperial jingoism, Claudel for his proto-fascist ideas, pardons Yates also for writing well. Auden, looking back on this poem, would ask himself, how could I possibly presume to judge Yates and forgive him morally for his politics and struck these condescending lines from his poem, so you won't find them in the collected poems, but you will find the powerful lines that proceed from them. In the nightmare of the dark all the dogs of Europe bark and the living nations wait, each sequestered in its hate, intellectual disgrace stares from every human face, and the seas of pity lie locked frozen in each eye. What does the poet do in this condition? Follow, poet, follow right to the bottom of the night. The poet descends and descends into a night that is a nightmare in which Europe barks, ready to attack itself. With your unconstraining voice still persuade us to rejoice with the farming of a verse, and remember the plowman now as a figure for the poet, make a vineyard of the curse, sing of human unsuccess in a rapture of distress, in the deserts of the heart, let the healing fountains start, in the prison of his days teach the free man how to praise. This is what poetry can offer. It can offer a lesson in how to praise. This is not making something happen politically in the world, perhaps, but it's making something happen in the heart, and perhaps within the eye of each of us who look locked and staring with our pity frozen there. Poetry would be a kind of farming in the desert of the heart that would break open that which is locked there and free feeling. It's a powerful and very traditional claim for what poems can do. In talking about the wasteland, I stressed the ways in which Eliot sought language of public ritual that might join people separated in the cells of themselves. Here, Auden is working through the same ideas and providing a kind of model for how that might work. Let me turn ahead with you to another great poem from this period in memory of Sigmund Freud. Freud is a kind of plowman. He is another model for the poet for Auden, and this poem proposes still other ways to understand poetry's relation to suffering, represented here by Freud's humanistic therapeutic technique. What sort of hero is Freud? Auden calls him an important Jew who died in exile. It's significant that he is called that by Auden at this moment. If you look for the figure in Garanti and Eliot's early poem, you'll see that the figure is not dignified with the capital J. Antisemitism is a crisis in Europe and it's certainly a pervasive current in modern poetry, whether it is actually a theme or motif as it appears in Eliot or Pound or simply a kind of valuable prejudice, as you would find it in Williams's letters. Antisemitism is powerful and here Auden is identifying himself with Freud as a Jew and as a Jew in exile. It seems as though Freud in this way represents a figure for people who are in some sense extracted from the nation and who are international in their perspective, and Auden himself is writing in America from a similar point of view. As in the Yates' elegy Auden is reluctant to single Freud out when, as he says, death is so common and suffering is so common. But Freud's point of view for Auden is powerful and valuable precisely because it emphasizes the common placeness of human suffering. It's ubiquity. He's praised, Freud is, as the poem unfolds, specifically for the ways in which he responds to suffering. How does he do it? Well, around line 28 or so on page 804, Auden says all that he did was to remember, like the old, and be honest, like children. He wasn't clever at all. He was silly like us. He merely told the unhappy present to recite the past like a poetry lesson. Till sooner or later it faltered at the line where long ago the accusations had begun and suddenly knew by then judged how rich life had been and how silly, there's that word again, and was life forgiven and more humble. No wonder the ancient cultures of conceit in his technique of unsettlement. That's what Auden calls Freud's therapeutic technique, the talking cure. It's a technique of unsettlement. The ancient cultures of conceit see in it the fall of the collapse of their lucrative patterns of frustration. If he had succeeded Freud, why the generalized life would become impossible, the monoliths of state be broken and prevented the cooperation of Avengers. Of course they called on God, his Freud's detractors, but he went his way like the poet who follows right to the bottom of the night, down among the lost people like Dante, down to the stinking fos 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. Auden emphasizes Freud's literary dimensions. The talking cure is like a poetry lesson. It puts faith in speech and the powers of true speech to correct and reshape and heal human life. It is a technique of unsettlement that is a threat to princes, all worldly authority, because it questions authority and empowers the individual speaker to take life into his hands. Like Dante or like Pound's Ulysses in Canto I, like the poet in the end of the Eighth's Elegy, in Auden's poem, goes down among the lost people, goes into the stinking fos, which is a powerful word. It's a word that appears in Canto I, where Ulysses, Pound's Ulysses goes to seek Tiresias. Fos, it's an Anglo-Saxon word. It reaches back in that sense in cultural history to understand that our present mystery is one with continuous with that of the past. Yet history is something here that can be intervened in in an individual way through the kind of true speech that Auden celebrates in Freud and that he aspires to in poetry. As the Elegy builds towards its conclusion on page 806, again the night appears, Freud would have us remember most of all to be enthusiastic over the night and its lost people, ourselves, not only for the sense of wonder that it alone has to offer, night, the unconscious, but also because it needs our love, for with sad eyes its delectable creatures look up and beg us dumbly to ask them to follow. That is all the properties here of the unconscious that are at the same time with all those who are lost in society and need to be represented and claimed. They are, like Freud, exiles who long for the future that lies in our power, again a power of speech. They too would rejoice if allowed to serve enlightenment like even to bear our cry of Judas as he did, and all must bear who serve it. Freud here is in exile and he brings insight, but he also brings love. Auden is imagining a kind of general state of homelessness which Freud's technique of unsettlement isn't meant to redress but rather to recognize and accept and help us adjust to and live in. Auden's own technique here is, well, his verse form is a simple syllable count, eleven syllables, eleven syllables, nine syllables, ten. The normative ten syllable line comes last and forth and gives a kind of resolution to each quatrain. This simple pattern again accommodates and promotes a kind of prose speech, a kind of ordinariness that identifies Freud's work and the poet's work with a kind of resolution that accommodates rationality and a rational voice as Auden will describe Freud's as being, and yet also accommodates feeling at the same time, accommodates love. One rational voice is dumb Freud's. He's silent. And over a grave, his grave, the household of impulse mourns one dearly loved because he understood how to love our impulses. Sad is Eros, builder of cities, and weeping anarchic aphrodite. It's eventually a powerful moving conclusion. Eros and aphrodite have lost their champion. I'm going to conclude by commenting very quickly, since we're almost out of time, on one last poem, arguably Auden's Greatest, in Praise of Limestone, a poem written from the perspective of the post-war in the United States, but about a kind of imaginary landscape that combines elements of his childhood landscape in northern England and the Italian landscape where he returned in the post-war period and became increasingly attached to. It is a kind of allegorical space, and it represents a kind of home, I suppose, for the homeless, for we, in constant ones, as he describes us. It is this limestone landscape something to be praised, and it is a poem of praise. It is an image of the world without another transcendental world beyond or behind it. To be in the world, as described in this poem, to be in an entirely earthly realm. Again, you might think of the plowmen turning away from the over-reacher who tried to fly to the sky and turns rather to the earth. It is a landscape like that of Stevens in Sunday Morning. It is a landscape that Auden can only describe as a kind of imaginary place, through counterfactual statements. It is, well, porous. It's rich. It's fertile. It's moderate. It is not a place of extremes. And hermits and caesars, they don't belong here. They are still elsewhere. It's rather a place in which ordinary life and ordinary people might live. The very end of the poem is extremely powerful because it looks towards a kind of redeemed human life, sees it in this landscape, and yet represents it in the landscape. Auden says, insofar as we have to look forward to death as a fact, something he will never let us forget, no doubt we are right. But if sins can be forgiven, if bodies rise from the dead, and you note the conditional in both phrases, these modifications of matter into innocent athletes, the people that he peoples this landscape with, and gesticulating fountains, made solely for pleasure, make a further point. The blessed will not care what angle they are regarded from, having nothing to hide. Dear, and now he speaks to a beloved, I know nothing of either what that is, what it would mean to be blessed or to have nothing to hide. I know nothing of either of those things, but when I try to imagine a faultless love or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur of underground streams. What I see is a limestone landscape, a landscape that is like Auden's version of an earthly paradise, our only image of these ultimate promises. Auden manages somehow here to make us see and feel what the life to come might be like, what it might be like to be blessed, while still acknowledging that we can only live in and speak in the world before us, which is the one that Auden remains throughout his poetry dedicated to. Well, we'll go on to a poet closely identified with Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, on Wednesday.