Auden and W. B. Yeats
Callan, Edward T.
I I II I lll II AUDEN AND W. B. YEATS EDWARD T. CALLAN Did those friends of W. H. Auden who arranged for his memorial in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey think of him as the poet of only...
...The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day...
...In Elegy /or Young Lovers (1960), he created the character Gregor Mittenhofer to embody, in caricature, the nineteenth century notion of the Bard, It was Yeats who provided the chief model for Mittenhofer, as Lady Gregory provided the model for Mittenhofer's devoted admirer and unpaid secretary, the aristocratic Carolina, Grafin von Kirchstetten...
...In the prose companion piece the Prosecutor also dwells on aspects of the parish of rich women...
...It generates an impulse to get up on a stage, or on a box, or on a boiler...
...He remarked on Hardy's subsequent good influence on Day Lewis, and added: "I wish I could say the same about Yeats's influence on me...
...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...
...Wagner, Whitman and Tennyson represent this nineteenth century notion of the Bard in varying degrees...
...He would probably agree that Austin Clarke's observation on the plight of Irish poets shadowed by Yeats, the great oak-tree, could equally well apply to all poets writing in English...
...They first thought of a character obsessed with Commonweah 301 the past like Miss Havisham in Dickens's Great Expectations--an idea which survived in Hilda Mack, the old lady whose visions supply Mittenhofer with matter for his poems as Mrs...
...One of his more ambitious undertakings---that has perhaps gone unrecognized among those he had hoped would find his views congenial--was an effort to formulate a Christian theory of art that would replace Greek aesthetics...
...And they add: The theme of Elegy/or Young Lovers is summed up in two lines by Yeats: The intellect of man is forced to choose Perfection of the life or of the work...
...But Yeats, once Auden had discovered his later work, exerted a much more powerful fascination than any of these...
...The Ogre thrives on every tendency to seek truth in private revelation...
...The first is that there is a dialectical tension between the Aesthetic and the Ethical modes as Yeats had recognized in his lines: The intellect of man is forced to choose Perfection of the life or of the work...
...Of course Yeats had been one of ~ Auden's first singing-masters (although perhaps not always quite so fervently invoked as Yeats invoked his sages in "Sailing to Byzantium": O sages standing in God's holy fire As in the gold mosaic of a wall, Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre, And be the singing-masters of my soul...
...the Late Mr...
...Yeats is, no doubt, one of those whose too theatrical gestures he finds to have influenced "September 1, 1939...
...but the shadow of the great oak-tree is still there...
...In so refuting the Gnostic way, Auden may have had in mind the imaginary world of Yeats's A Vision--privately revealed through the instrumentality of his own fictional creations, Hanrahan (with "all his mighty memories"), Aherne and Robartes...
...A number of Auden's undergraduate poems are quite evidently influenced by Yeats, in tone, rhythm, or rhetoric...
...Cyril Connolly reviewing Dublin Portraits by W. R. Rogers quotes a remark of Austin Clarke's (which he mistakenly attributes to Frank O'Connor): "As far as the younger generation of poets are concerned here in Ireland, Yeats was rather like an enormous oak-tree which, of course, kept us in the shade...
...But, as we shall see, Auden was less reticent twenty years later in his comments on the origins of the opera Elegy /or Young Lovers which satirizes Yeats and his entourage...
...and "What kind of mature man can be intimately and simultaneously involved with a young girl and a mad old lady...
...The stages of his growing disenchantment with Yeats mark the hardening of his conviction that the greatest threats to individual freedom in the modern world were a direct legacy of the Romantic outlook on which Yeats prided himself...
...We always hoped we would reach the sun...
...His first podium for this was the weekly column he wrote for Commonweal during November and December of 1942...
...So did Wilfred Owen whose technique of slant-rhyme helped to shape the best of his undergraduate poems...
...But the revised line suggests the voice of a man banished from 13 May 1977:300 Eden...
...that was bad enough...
...To the librettists this seemed to call for "five or six persons, each of whom suffered from a different obsession...
...Revised versions omit these quatrains on time possibly because Auden changed his view of Claudel, in particular...
...Earlier changes in "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" came from dissatisfaction with the poem...
...But on asking themselves "What kind of person can dominate an opera both dramatically and vocally...
...and the ports have names for the sea...
...and of course Auden himself broadcasting on Spanish radio for the Republican Government in 1937, for in an age of ideologies the notion of the Bard persists in the "official spokesman...
...To Auden, the most dangerous legacy of Romanticism was the tendency to confuse the artist, the custodian of beauty, with the apostle, the custodian of truth...
...Market-gardening plots will comprise two acres per family...
...For a variety of attitudes and operatic voices, they decided also on a boy, a girl and a doctor...
...The original line, written in the voice of Yeats, demands declamation...
...Yet the phrase "the parish of rich women" casts Yeats in the role of the pastor of an admiring flock, and therefore, in the role of Bardic apostle or priest of the imagination...
...He twice edited Oxford Poetry--in 1926 with Charles Plumb and in 1927 with Cecil Day Lewis...
...I believe he would not...
...The simple explanation for Auden's attitude to "September 1, 1939" was his conviction that if his poems were to be authentic, the tone of voice must be unmistakably his own...
...He says, "works like A Fantasia o[ the Unconscious or Yeats's A Vision are not humble attempts at private myths, but are designed as the new and only science...
...AN APPEALmA Dutch missioner in landlocked Zambia, East Africa, is working with 40 families on a fiveyear program to set up family f2rms near Lusaka...
...Gifts for Father Hinfelaar's project should be sent to: The White Fathers of Africa, 1624 21st St., N.W...
...It was not the fault of Yeats and Rilke that I allowed myself to be seduced by them into writing poems which were false to my personal and poetic nature...
...but Auden's early debt to Yeats goes deeper than this...
...Then, having distinguished three religious standpoints, "Natural, Revealed, and Christian," he sought to color the second of these Gnostic: "The second believes that the Unconditional is, objectively, perpetually absconditus, but occasionally subjectively manifest to exceptional groups or individuals . . . . " By contrast, the third "believes that the Unconditional was objectively manifested upon one unique occasion (The Word was made Flesh and dwelt among us) . . . . " Auden developed these ideas in the long dramatic works, The Sea and the Mirror and For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, where Simeon puts the case for a Christian aesthetic: 'Because in Him the Flesh is united to the Word without magical transformation, Imagination is redeemed from promiscuous fornication with her own images...
...Auden was pleased with the oak-tree's shade until its shadow assumed a sinister shape: 'O what was that bird,' said horror to hearer, 'Did you see that shape in the twisted trees...
...Yeats's life supplied most of this, but some identifiable material from Auden's own experience as a poet is also used to flesh out Mittenhofer...
...Would Auden want lines that brought Yeats to mind inscribed on his monument...
...He first altered the final line of the eighth stanza from "We must love one another or die" to "We must love one another and die...
...and he signed it "Didymus" possibly to represent the tension between faith and reason in the Apostle Thomas who was called Didymus...
...Most of the money contributed so far (from a Canadian justice and peace organization and a Belgian funding agency) has been spent "to construct a bore hole for water...
...Auden himself gives two accounts of the genesis of Elegy /or Young Lovers...
...It is in the light of this view of the Bard as bellman for the Leader's dark intuitions that Auden eventually came to see Yeats as one of the Ogre's party...
...Finally, in 1967, Auden changed the first of the repeated resonant lines: O all the instruments agree The day of his death was a dark cold d a y . . . to the more matter of fact understatement, 'What instruments we have agree," and it is this change that best indicates the arena in which Auden wrestled with the spirit of Yeats...
...And reviewing Yeats's posthumous volume Last Poems and Plays in June, 1940, he faulted Yeats most of all for "his utter lack of effort to relate his esthetic Weltanschauung with that of science, a hostile neglect which was due, in part at least, to the age in which he was born when science was avidly mechanistic . . . . " Both statements confirm that Auden found Yeats's Gnostic outlook deplorable...
...Expanding on this idea he says that every poet in reading other poets, "has to distinguish between their merits, which may be very great, and their influence upon himsel[ which may be very Pernicious...
...One "The Public vs...
...Forty years later in a Preface to C. Day Lewis, the Poet Laureate, Auden recalled that it was he who introduced Day Lewis to the poetry of Frost and Hardy, and that Day Lewis had introduced him to the later poems of Yeats...
...they decided the answer was "the artist-genius of the nineteenth and early twentieth century,"mwhich is to say the poet as Bard...
...The Prosecutor also chides Yeats for his obsession with the occult, and mocks his failure to outgrow his folly: "In 1900 he believed in fairies...
...For example, Mittenhofer berates his aristocratic patron and devoted secretary, Carolina, Grafin yon Kirchstetten, for mistyping the word poets in his draft of verses as ports...
...while still at school...
...but this one, by muting the Yeatsian resonance and typical staginess that Auden referred to among friends as "walking in high heels," indicates disenchantment with the spirit of Yeats...
...In 1928, Yeats had written, "In Memory of Major Robert Gregory," beginning with the lines: Now that we're almost settled in our house, I'll name the friends that cannot sup with us Beside a fire of turf in th' ancient tower, 13 May 1977:298 And having talked to some late hour Climb up the narrow winding stair to bed...
...William Butler Yeats," was a prose exercise in the two voices of dialectic in which "The Public Prosecutor" and "The Counsel for the Defence" present cases for denying or according to Yeats the title of "great" poet...
...the essential thing is his production...
...And when Auden's own changed attitudes caused him to turn full circle--philosophically to "peme in a gyre"--the singing-master became an ogre...
...He points, for example, to the inconsistency of Yeats's extolling the life of the peasantry while preferring to live in "noble houses, of large drawing-rooms inhabited by the rich and the decorative, most of them of the female sex...
...and he identified Yeats's elegy for Robert Gregory as the first successful instance of this transformation: "A poem such as 'In Memory of Major Robert Gregory' is something new and important in the history of English poetry...
...But this was mere distaste for Yeats's foibles...
...Auden's earlier singing-masters were Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost for whom he says he developed a passion I EDWARD T. CALLAN, a pro/essor o/ English at Western Michigan University, is currently working on a critical study o/ W. H. Auden...
...The main battleground for this struggle, however, was not the elegy on Yeats, but the even more popular poem of the same period "September 1, 1939...
...The second movement of the elegy also addresses Yeats on the limitations of art which can no more moderate the madness of civil or international strife than it can change Irish weather: Mad Ireland hurt you in poetry...
...Lawrence, W. B. Yeats...
...The first of the elegy's three movements sets Yeats's death in an allegorical landscape freezing into inactivity: He disappeared in the dead of winter: The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted, And snow disfigured the public statues...
...Washington, D.C...
...Henze...
...Auden began his second column (November 13, 1942): "As a writer, who is also a would-be Christian, I cannot help feeling that a satisfactory theory of Art from the standpoint of the Christian faith has yet to be worked out...
...Genesis of a Libretto," which is signed by both Auden and his collaborator, Kallman, tells us that the composer...
...Such a transposition had actually occurred in the case of Auden's "Journey to Iceland," where the opening lines appear as: And the traveller hopes: 'Let me be far from any Physician...
...In a letter to Christopher Isherwood printed with this poem in Letters From Iceland, Auden, unlike Mittenhofer, accepted the change and said: "No, you were wrong...
...Wilhelm Reischmann, who keeps Mittenhofer "in good health and youthful vignur with medicines and hormone injections," corresponds to Dr...
...But Auden soon began to revise it...
...I have a further bewilderment, which may be due to my English upbringing, one of snobbery...
...Yeats, on the other hand, declared: "A poet is by the very nature of things a man who lives with entire sincerity . . . his life is an experiment in living and those who come after him have the right to know it...
...and also through the instrumentality of his wife's mediumship...
...The first...
...The third, and most direct repudiation of what Yeats stood for, is the opera, Elegy /or Young Lovers...
...The first is the persistence into the twentieth century of the nineteenth century notion of the Bard: the poet who regarded himself or who was regarded by others as the embodiment of the soul of his nation...
...Perhaps all the instruments we have agree on one thing: that the Gnostic imagination that finds truth in a mirror is unperturbed, and the Ogre's citadel unshaken...
...The word disappeared in the opening line is a measure of Auden's close reading of Yeats who used this word in A Vision as a technical term for death which he CommonweM: 299 thought of as "A brief parting from those dear," before reappearing in some new bodily form...
...Oliver Gogarty, Yeats's physician, who first suggested to him the Steinach procedure for rejuvenation...
...Then T. S. Eliot, particularly as the poet of The Waste Land, attracted him during his Oxford years...
...With the exception of Kierkegaard, most theologians . . . have accepted Greek aesthetics too uncritically...
...yet Auden has bluntly said that no poem of his, or of another, saved even one Jewish victim of the death camps...
...One can imagine it spoken by the Delphic oracle, or by the god, Apollo, himself...
...But Auden's disenchantment with Yeats ultimately went deeper than his dislike for exaggerated fuss and staginess...
...The substitution of making diminishes the expectation of inspired Bardic utterance that saying may hint at...
...This cooperative project "coincides with the concept of Zambian humanism which stresses self-reliance and the dignity of the individual...
...Auden went up to Oxford as a science exhibitioner in 1925...
...From so direct a revelation of "historical incidents drawn from the life of a poet--no matter whom," it seems safe to conclude with Cyril ConnoUy that anecdotes about Yeats's life at Coole Park supplied the character Carolina, Grafin yon Kirchstetten, who corresponds to Lady Gregory...
...He defines an authentic poem as one that convinces the reader that the poet has seen its visions of truth with his own eyes, and not through someone else's spectacles...
...Alas, I think it was a bad influence, for which, most unjustly, I find it difficult to forgive him...
...Auden also says that he finds in much "serious" poetry an element of theater, "of exaggerated gesture and fuss, of indifference to the naked truth" that revolts him...
...Eventually he discarded the poem altogether...
...and also to represent a Kierkegaardian double focus, or dialectic, running counter to the singleminded Romantics whom he had dubbed "the either-ors, the mongrel halves / Who find truth in a mirror" in New Year Letter the year before...
...The opening lines of Poem XIII of Auden's Poems, 1928, hand-printed by Stephen Spender during the Oxford vacation, show Auden's fascination with this elegy: Tonight when a full storm surrounds the house And the fire creaks, the many come to mind, Sent forward in the thaw with anxious marrow...
...and ending with the lines permanently inscribed on the memorial: In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise...
...In fact I feel certain that should his ghost visit the Poets' Corner the inscription would vex it...
...they have been washed in the blood of the mediator and redeemer Time...
...The change may seem slight, but anyone familiar with his poetry will recognize the voice of Yeats in the line "O all the instruments agree" (compare "O sages standing in God's holy fire" quoted above), while those familiar with Auden's work will recognize the more matter of fact "What instruments we have agree" as authentically his own...
...but in 1930 we are confronted with the pitiful, deplorable spectacle of a grown man occupied with the mumbo-jumbo of magic and the nonsense of India...
...Still no good, the whole poem, I realized, was infected with an incurable dishonesty and must be scrapped...
...He was frequently asked to explain both his revisions and his rejection of the poem, and he felt it necessary to tell the whole story in his Foreword to B. C. Bloomfield's bibliography: "Rereading a poem of mine, 'lst September, 1939/ after it had been published, I came to the line 'We must love one another or die,' and said to myself: 'That's a damned lie...
...He called this column "Lecture Notes'man allusion, no doubt, to that other famous reply to Plato: Aristotle's Poetics...
...wanted a chamber opera for a small cast and no chorus...
...Other characters in the opera were given qualities in common with Mrs...
...It never loses the personal note of a man speaking about his personal friends in a particular setting-in Adonais, for example, both Shelley and Keats disappear as people,--and at the same time the occasion and characters acquire a symbolic public significance...
...and some of these who welcomed Auden's revolutionary zeal in the thirties (not all of them lovers of poetry) may have been merely on the lookout for an effective Bard--a Kipling for the Popular Front...
...Two of these are his revisions of "In Memory of W. B, Yeats" and of "September 1, 1939...
...In the fifth volume of Poets of the English Language (1950) Auden warns that to the would-be poet in whom the notion of the Bard persists "the thought of a tyrant who will provide him with a myth of terror, of the prospect of total war as a cult, is not unwelcome...
...The artist-genius as the nineteenth century conceived him, made this aesthetic presupposition an ethical absolute, that is to say he claimed to represent the highest, most authentic mode of existence...
...And it is no doubt his anxiety to proclaim this danger, not personal animosity towards Yeats, that led to the invention of Mittenhofer who so confuses the Aesthetic and Ethical--the spheres of beauty and truthmthat he contrives the actual death of two young lovers to provide matter for his elegy...
...When Yeats died in January, 1939, Auden commemorated his death in two ways...
...In any event he became acutely conscious of the unmistakable kinship between the cult of the poet as Bard and the cult of the "inspired" national leader--Hitler, Mussolini, Stalinmthat threatened the survival of European democracy in the thirties...
...Connolly suggests that this remark of Clarke's gave Auden the idea of creating Mittenhofer: "this, and some anecdotes of Yeats's life at Coole," says Connolly, "formed, I believe, the genesis of Auden's opera Elegy /or Young Lovers...
...Genesis of a Libretto" does not directly name Yeats as the model for Mittenhofer, but Auden's T. S. Eliot Memorial Lecture, "The World of Opera," in Secondary Worlds comes very close to doing so...
...Still dissatisfied, he excised the whole stanza...
...It soon became a favorite anthology piece at least in America where it was much in demand at poetry readings...
...If successful, the plan will spread...
...Yeats's automatic writing supposedly supplied Yeats with matter for A Vision...
...In October 1939 the New Republic printed a poem of Auden's which took its title from the date on which Hitler's armies attacked Poland at the start of the Second World War...
...So also, with individual differences, are D.H...
...I I II I lll II AUDEN AND W. B. YEATS EDWARD T. CALLAN Did those friends of W. H. Auden who arranged for his memorial in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey think of him as the poet of only one poem, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," as one might think, for example, of Henley as the poet of "Invictus," or of Gray as the poet of "Elegy in a Country Churchyard...
...Yeats and with Yeats's friend and physician, Dr...
...They go on to claim that this idea of the artistgenius is a genuine myth "because the lack of identity between Goodness and Beauty, between the character of a man and the character of his creations, is a permanent aspect of the human condition...
...Furthermore, English reviewers of the recent edition of Auden's Collected Poems continue to deplore his revision of the line "O all the instruments agree," which, says the Times Literary Supplement, "at least sounded musical...
...Sometimes a man stands for certain things which is quite different from what one feels in personal grief...
...At the Abbey ceremony in October 1974, John Gielgud read the third movement of "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," beginning with lines that seemed a little inappropriate for the unveiling of Auden's stone: Earth received an honoured guest, William Yeats is laid to rest...
...The first title of that work, The Double Man, was intended to convey the same significance as "Didymus...
...Three things in particular mark the successive stages of Auden's disenchantment with Yeats regarded as the high priest of the Gnostic imagination...
...Oliver Gogarty...
...How could Yeats, with his great aesthetic appreciation of aristocracy, ancestral houses, ceremonious tradition, take up something so essentially lower-middle classmor should I say Southern Californian . . . . " Yet neither in his own voice nor the voice of the Prosecutor does Auden name the several women close to Yeats all of whom were in some degree devoted to occult practices or psychic studies...
...This poem, "September 1, 1939," was modeled quite closely on Yeats's "Easter 1916...
...The third movement of the elegy originally contained three quatrains---with Kipling and Paul Claudel as the instances of weakness---on how the passage of time erases the memory of an artist's personal shortcomings...
...20009...
...For such might now return with a bleak face, An image pause, half-lighted in the d o o r . . . ; and significantly, when Auden sought, in "Yeats as an Example," to identify Yeats's chief poetic legacy, he credited the Irish poet with transforming the occasional poem in English from an official performance of impersonal virtuosity, like Tennyson's "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington," into a serious reflective poem having at once personal and public interest...
...These included, for example, Yeats's wife from whose mediumship he profited in A Vision, Lady Gregory who shared his interest in psychical research, and both Maude Gonne and Florence Farr who were fellow members of the Order of the Golden Dawn...
...Speaking of the Miss Havisham character, Frail Hilda Mack, Auden says: "Remembering that Yeats had a wife from whose mediumistic gifts he profited, it seemed plausible that Mittenhofer should have discovered Frau Mack and made it his habit to visit her from time to time, bringing his entourage with him...
...which is to say that where the notion of the Bard persists, the public, like the "list'ning crowd" in Dryden's "Alexander's Feast," shout "A present deity," and the artist himself, Assumes the god, Affects to nod, And seems to shake the spheres...
...The second movement of the elegy addresses Yeats on shared human frailty: You were silly like us...
...Elsewhere, speaking in his own voice, Auden deplores Yeats's interest in the occult: "How on earth, we wonder, could a man of Yeats's gifts take such nonsense seriously...
...Auden's distrust of the imaginative Romantic genius who makes an infallible dogma of his own intuitions--a quality akin to the self-deification of intuitive Fiihrers like Hitler-extended to what he called Yeats's "determinist and 'musical' view of history" as it did to the theories of D. H. Lawrence which had also influenced his own early works particularly The Orators...
...I did not write 'the ports have names for the sea' but 'the poets have names for the sea.' However, as so often before, the mistake seems better than the original idea, so I'll leave it...
...His shadow takes the shape of a giant Aeon--Guardian of the Gnostic way...
...Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its making where executives Would never want to t a m p e r ; . . . The phrase "poetry makes nothing happen" may pain those who wish to cling to the notion of the Bard...
...Freud I never met, and Yeats i only met casually and didn't particularly like him...
...This grew in time into a kind of obsession...
...The second pointmaptly illustrated by the quotation from Shelley's De/ence earlier in this essay--is that when the Aesthetic mode takes itself too seriously and refuses 13 May 1977:302 to be content to play, it mistakenly presumes not that its sphere is the ethical, but that it is, in fact, the Religious in Kierkegaard's scheme...
...As the thirties wore on, Auden's admiration for Yeats as an occasional poet was tempered by his dislike for Yeats's fondness for the trappings of aristocracy, and his flirtation with General O'Duffy's Irish fascist organization, the Blueshirts...
...Significantly, in his final revision of this poem Auden changed the wording of his statement on poetry from "it survives/ In the valley of its saying" to "it survives / In the valley of its making...
...It went deeper also than the political differenees that divided them in the thirties...
...The librettists say they chose Vienna as the setting because the myth of the artist-genius was a European myth at the time when Paris and Vienna were the centers of European culture...
...This claim, fundamental to Auden's outlook, marks him as author-inchief of "Genesis of a Libretto," and not Kallman who found Kierkegaard's ideas uncongenial...
...At least in Auden's view Yeats and Lawrence, imbued with the notion of the Bard, made infallible dogma of their own intuitions quite as readily as Marx or Hitler...
...To return briefly to the claim made by Auden in the quotation above, that Elegy/or Young Lovers embodies a universal myth of the artist-genius, it is obvious that the language in the quotation assumes wide acceptance of Kierkegaard's categories, the Aesthetic, Ethical and Religious, as themselves universal...
...or perhaps because they come too close to echoing Shelley's Romantic claim in his Defense of Poetry where, in a parody of Scripture, he says that the faults of such illustrious poets of the past as, Homer, Virgil and Spenser, "have been weighed and found to have been dust in the balance...
...In his later career Auden's preoccupation with Yeats tended to increase rather than diminish...
...Kipling is an obvious instance of the notion of the Bard persisting into the twentieth century...
...and also to conclude that a second character, Mittenhofer's personal physician, Dr...
...The relative proneness of Auden and Yeats to this temptation may perhaps be gauged by their attitudes towards biographies of poets...
...Their first idea for a central character, with a suitably Romantic obsession, was an actor whose supreme ambition was to play the lead in Byron's Manlred...
...The other was one of the most justly famous of his own occasional poems, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats...
...Auden, who envied Shakespeare his luck, or good judgment, in leaving behind little that biographers could use, felt that, ideally, poets should be as anonymous as the builders of the pyramids...
...Auden's fascination with Yeats never really ended...
...The immediate points made in the quotation are two...
...In the second half of his life Auden developed an almost obsessive fear of the danger of Yeats's kind of outlook, and much of the story of Auden's development as a poet after 1940 is also the story of his struggle to exorcise the persistent spirit of Yeats...
...if their sins were as scarlet they are now white as snow...
...your gift survived it all: The parish of rich women, physical decay, Yourself . . . . These lines pass over Yeats's personal shortcomings with just a flicker of recollection...
...Auden's quarrel with Yeats's aestheticism reflects his more fundamental quarrel with the Platonism that lay at the heart of the Romantic sensibility...
...Speaking to Robert Craft in 1970 about his elegies on Freud and Yeats, Auden said: "These elegies of mine are not poems of grief...
...The context invites the understanding that poetry is not a proper medium for Apostles, and is misused by Bards who think themselves called to an apostolate...
...It was Yeats who invented a viable modem form for a particular kind of poem--an occasional poem in conversational style--at which Auden was eventually to become a master among poets writing in English...
...Although its opening has the plangent quality of the poetry of Yeats's old age, this memorial to Yeats is not an overflow of powerful feeling...
...Behind you swiftly the figure comes s o f t l y , . . . Ironically, because of the lines inscribed on his memorial in the Poets' Corner of Westminister Abbey--that national mausoleum for English Bards--- Auden does not escape the shadow of the great Celtic oak-tree even in death...
...Aesthetically speaking, the personal existence of the artist is accidental...
...Commonweal: 303...
...Auden distinguishes two effects of Romanticism on the modern mind...
...and having coyly warned us not to think of Mittenhofer's outrageous behavior an Austrian characteristic, they say "As a matter of fact, the only things about him which were suggested by historical incidents were drawn from the life of a poet--no matter whom--who wrote in English...
Vol. 104 • May 1977 • No. 10
