The Hidden Law

...after tea, Auden, seeing the jacketed tank of Sacks's motorcycle declared, "I like that, it shows you care for the bike...

...One only hopes that his concluding salvos and the structural aggressiveness of this book do not signal Hecht's straying into the abyss of the current culture wars...

...William M. Sullivan E or writers, the appeal of polemic over critique is obvious...

...The common ground between the poets, which The Hidden Law slowly reveals, is distilled in a fragment from Hecht' s poem, "Peripeteia": I stood in childhood, waiting for things to mend...

...Bailyn's position tempts him to slight the fact that The Federalist towers and endures, as George Washington predicted and hoped it would, because, while a tract for the times, it was also self-consciously something more...

...In his affectionate memoir of Auden, Oliver Sacks speaks of the deep association of the word "cosy" with the English poet: "The first time I had tea with him-back in 1969--I found the teapot in a teacosy, and my egg in an egg-cosy...

...We need his rigorous and attentive interpretation too much...

...This is a sensible corrective, but Bailyn's editing seems a little too eager to reinforce the point, since even on a generous reading, the text of The Federalist is in danger of being lost amid so much context...

...Hecht' s own poetry is more overtly indebted to the ravaging power of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound...

...But unlike Hecht, Auden's vision is tempered by his anxiety-ridden desire for safety and domesticity, as in "A Walk after Dark," a late poem contemplating death: It's cosier thinking of night As more an Old People's Home Than a shed for a faultless machine, That the red pre-Cambrian light Is gone like Imperial Rome Or myself at seventeen...

...Despite some useE' ful observations along the way, in Looking Backward: A Critical Appraisal of Communitarian Thought, Derek L. Phillips proceeds to do just that...

...All are found to be not only "highly critical of political individualism and liberalism" but also "emphasize very similar features in characterizing social groups as communities...

...In The Debate on the Constitution, however, the two essays are separated from each other by George Mason's "Objections," (grouped together with a long list of replies) and by an unrelated essay of"Cato," both of which were also printed on November 22...

...The strongest reflections in The Hidden Law concern Auden's widely misunderstood view of poetry as "frivolous," which come in expected places such as during an extended commentary on "In Memory of 18:17 December 1993 CommonwealW...

...One that might lead To solitary, self-denying work That issues in something harmless, like a poem, Governed by laws that stand for other laws, Both of which aim, through kindred disciplines, At the soul's knowledge and habiliment...

...Those who have read "Behold the Lilies of the Field" or "The Deodand" know Hecht as a poet of exacting diction and vision, who relentlessly keeps human brutality and pain in view...

...Hecht does not share this vocation to horniness, and part of his book's rewards stem from the dissonance between the poets...

...The thematic exposition of the book is tacit rather than explicit...

...In order to get a better orientation, begin with the final chapter where Hecht reveals his intention to write a book "without any prior agenda": "I determined to address myself to those poems, collections, essays, plays, or fragments of Auden's recorded conversations that particularly delighted, interested, or (sometimes) provoked me, but especially those works that inspired admiration or seemed to demand comment and elucidation...

...In accord with this scheme, each chapter is centered on a single volume of poetry and involves close readings of individual poems...

...Elsewhere, in Faces of the Revolution, Bailyn has argued that The Federalist was less important in the politics of ratification than Americans have been taught to believe...

...A useful discipline, perhaps...

...Hecht gives special attention to Auden's spirituality, and rejects, as prejudices against religion, the common critical judgment that Auden's early work is superior to all that followed, and that the poet descended from political engagement into quietism...

...PRESENTERS: Susan Muto Archbishop William Levada AuguJtine DiNoia Francis Kelly Benedict Ashley John Haas Timothea Elliot Mary Jo Tully William Murphy M. Francis Mannion Michael Maslowsky George Niederauer Sponsored by the Archdiocese of Portland in Oregon FEBRUARY 7 TO 11, 1994 FOR INFORMATION OR REGISTRATION: ARCHDIOCESE OF PORTLAND IN OREGON OFFICE OF MINISTRY FORMATION 2838 E. BURNSIDE STREET, PORTLAND, OR 97214 Ill (503)233-839 l/FAX(503)234-2545 Ill m mini m m --III-- REGISTRATION DEADLINE: JANUARY 24, 1994 "111-Commonweal 17 December 1993:19...

...IYMPOSIUM ON THE CATECHISM OF THE CATHOLIC CHURC A national symposium bringing together experts in various theological and catechetical disciplines to examine the content and pastoral implications of the Catechism of the Catholic Church...

...The Hidden Law draws a very strong line between poetry and prose...

...Against this stance the critic pits his own (and implicitly, Auden's) richer understanding of "nothing," and the more ethical struggle to be and produce something "harmless...

...10, since all three essays appeared on the same day...

...Like the best statements on both sides of the ratification debate, The Federalist speaks to the theoretical foundations of the laws, telling us something fundamental about ourselves...

...A SWING & A MISS LOOKING BACKWARD A Critical Appraisal of Communitarian Thought Derek L. Phillips Princeton University Press, $29.95, 248 pp...

...He sets these judgments in counterpoint to Auden's equally scrupulous but different sense of his failures...

...Auden's poetry also gives sustained attention'to the confusions of "The Age of Anxiety" (the title of his famous "baroque eclogue," a portion of which first appeared in this magazine) and to the hideous carnage erupting from what he called, in his poem "September 1, 1939," "a low dishonest decade...

...Hecht writes, "For I find it always requires active moral energy simply to keep from doing harm to others even inadvertently, and that, in view of the ever present inequities in human life, we can never be unaware of the unmerited suffering around us which we cannot hope ever to fully repair...

...I have never seen a bike with a bike-cosy before...

...Transitions between poems are abrupt...

...Even in a rigidly chronological scheme, these selections could have been printed after The Federalist No...

...Both poets are deeply attracted to the discipline of self-denial, the laws of form, and the idea of anonymous heroism, all of which are related to their more central commitment to creating a "harmless" poetry...

...9 from its sequel by fifty-nine pages...

...A POET'S POET THE HIDDEN LAW The Poetry of W.H...

...The reader of Hecht's poetry will recognize his precision but will need a moment to adjust to the willfully prosaic style...

...B. Yeats" and its famous line, "For poetry makes nothing happen," as well as in completely unexpected places such as the chapter on "For the Time Being...

...The writers principally considered-Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor, and the authors of Habits of the Heart (of which the reviewer is one)~are by "considerable agreement" judged to be "the major communitarian thinkers...

...Daria Donnelly he Hidden Law is a fascinating study ofW...

...There, Hecht mounts a full-scale attack on T.S...

...Hecht, who teaches at Georgetown University, wants to outrage colleagues who inflate their iraportance by studying ever smaller portions of a poet' s life and work or who have critical preoccupations to which a "poet and his work are tortured into conformity...

...The Symposium will examine the four books of the Catechism on successive days through major presentations, workshops, panel discussions and forums...

...While critique demands that one present the best arguments of the work in question in order to show its limits, the genre of polemic has few rules of fair play...

...Arguing for the quality of the religiously engaged poetry, Hecht gives three chapters to "For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio" (1944), "Nones" (1951), and "The Shield of Achilles" (1955...

...Phillips's strategy is to take the loose usage of "communitarian" as a label for a variety of current writers on social and political issues, and try to find in that label a conceptual core centered on the notion of "community...

...Not until the final chapter are thematic patterns arising from a close reading of the poems explicitly discussed, such as Auden's effort to integrate the polarities of public and private life, and his conviction that frivolity is the foundation of an ethical poetry...

...But it's absolutely right...

...As an irritable and demanding admirer, Hecht does not shirk from pointing out where Auden is too tough or too easy on himself and his poetry...

...Reading this book you feel the enormous debt Hecht owes to the clearsighted and modest claims for poetry with which Auden blessed the generation of poets who came of age during World War II...

...Hecht is immensely sympathetic to the seriousness of Auden's intellectual and emotional commitments and the skepticism that kept him searching...

...62, on the Senate, and the crucial continuation of the argument in No...

...Auden Anthony Hecht Harvard University Press, $35,488 pp...

...H. Auden, not simply because Anthony Hecht interprets Auden's poetry with enormous intelligence and attention, but also because his temperament is at odds with his subject...

...The effect of Bailyn's ordering is to separate The FederalistNo...

...The structure of The Hidden Law is deliberately provocative...

...The danger is that the polemicist will allow indignation to distort perception into caricature and then seriously try to dismantle a straw figure...

...Eliot's view, professed in his essay on Baudelaire's Sat-,nism, that "it is better to do evil...than to do nothing...

...And by a similar contrivance, sixty-six pages intervene between The Federalist No...

...It is the virtue of The Debate on the Constitution, other quarrels aside, that it provides us with so much of that indispensable civic curriculum...

...Yet Hecht admires Auden more, because where the modernists' nostalgic desire for order drove them to various mythologies and ideologies, Auden stayed with the age, taking up and partially abandoning each of several ways of ordering human experience, including Marxism, Freudianism, and Anglican Christianity...