Auden's Gargantuan Talent
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
On Poetry AUDEN'S GARGANTUAN TALENT BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL There was a punitive study hall in my high school, aptly called "Purgatory," where I served countless dismal hours. In the depths of...
...In an important sense the poet was, of course, right...
...Indeed, it is too much...
...From an esthetic standpoint, it is hard to blame those Old-Left critics who find Auden's post-Marxist verse enervated...
...Soft rock does not inspire awe, being too familiar, and we are drawn to "Immoderate soils" and ominous voices (Auden's world has always been animated by talking objects) that remind us life is short, man frail, love illusory...
...If the stream of his poetry ran shallower in late years, it remained fresh and musical...
...And yet the watershed is also reminiscent of those noble wrecks encountered by the hero of Romance in his sojourns through the wasteland...
...In 1933 Auden wrote the vigorous "Paysage Moralise," deploring a sterile civilization, attacking religion as the opiate of the people, and calling for a new vision: It is our sorrow...
...It celebrates lightness in a dark and hostile world, and marks Auden as an Arcadian: " 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...
...Orthodoxy seems, however, to have sharpened his acute vision of human perversity, of the refusal to love and desire to destroy...
...By the time of the poet's death in 1973, I thought my old enthusiasm for his verse had expired as well...
...If it form the one landscape that we, the inconstant ones./ Are constantly homesick for, this is chiefly/Because it dissolves in water...
...Even the superb New Year Letter, best in its Swiftian scrutiny of the American scene, is almost maudlin in the concluding vision of the Good Life...
...Law Like Love" makes its comparisons with an economy that amounts to genius...
...Conflicting with the social radicalism is a terrible nostalgia for what is lost...
...The poet confirms this: "They were right, my dear, all those voices were right/And still are: this land is not the sweet home that it looks.' But the mission of limestone is to instruct against hardness of heart and intellectual arrogance...
...Poetry neither feeds the hungry, softens the tyrant, nor, alas, uplifts the character...
...By 1948, the murmuring streams are a shadowy image of otherworldly love that cannot really be envisioned in this life...
...the deserted mine is a perfect embodiment of decaying industrial society...
...Letter to Lord Byron chats in Rhyme-royal about art and morals, as one equal to another...
...Law, which is the sun to gardeners, the wisdom of age to grandfathers and mob rule to the crowd, is to lovers: Like love we don't know where or why Like love we can't compel or fly, Like love we often weep, Like love we seldom keep...
...The Watershed," for example, tersely describes an abandoned lead mine, then commands the observer, Go home now, stranger, proud of your young stock, Stranger, turn back again, frustrate and vexed: This land, cut off, will not communicate...
...Nor did our library contain Paid on Both Sides, an early charade that transposes the bloody feuds of Icelandic sagas to a community centered around rugger and the Honor Code...
...Everything Auden wished to preserve is included in a book of Falstaffian proportions...
...In Praise of Limestone" is his lovely apology for the shortcoming...
...Shall it melt...
...places where "crowds along the pavement/Were fields of harvest wheat," and "The crack in the tea-cup opens/A lane to the land of the dead...
...Because he never confused art with religion, he recognized that, "plainly it is not/To the Cross or to Clarte or to Common Sense/Our passions pray but to primitive totems/As absurd as they are savage...
...Auden rarely chose to be introspective, realizing that on those few occasions when he did, he was unable to attain an elevated seriousness...
...Songs from the Auden/Isherwood plays are no less devastating comments on bourgeois malaise than anything in Brecht...
...Unfortunately, after evoking our pity and terror, the poet leaves us with the limp assertion that "there must be sorrow if there can be love...
...But while many readers might well prefer such excluded pieces as the famous "Spain 1937" and "Petition" to the innumerable odes, elegies, aphorisms, and movie scripts that have been preserved, the best of the Marxist phase is here, and transcends ideology...
...Yet even as it overwhelms the reader with superabundance, the volume stands as testament to a gargantuan talent...
...look shining at/New styles of architecture, a change of heart...
...Beautiful and witty, "In Praise of Limestone" also displays that resignation characteristic of the later verse, a continual swerving away from the notion that poetry has any function beyond pleasure...
...In old age he objected that these lines had been dishonest—he always hated modern buildings...
...In Memory of W. B. Yeats,' written six years later, asks less: "In the deserts of the heart/Let the healing fountain start...
...This masterful metaphor depicting the desolation of Pride is matched by a brilliant personal correlative: "In the depths of myself blind monsters know/Your presence and are angry, dreading Love...
...Like Alice through the looking glass, he was so sure of himself he could see the illogical world for what it was...
...When Auden returned to the church, his muse remained unbaptized...
...For those who turned from Auden to a very different kind of poetry, it may take time before he can be seen afresh...
...It concludes ominously: "Near you, taller than the grass,/Ears poise before decision, scenting danger...
...Then water Would gush, flush, green these mountains and these valleys, And we rebuild our cities, not dream of islands...
...Auden often reminded us that German culture did not prevent two wars, or a love of classics brutality in a schoolmaster...
...Now, as if to restore perspective, Edward Mendelson has compiled the definitive Collected Poems (Random House, 692 pp., $17.95...
...It can still comfort our fallen con dition, and "persuade us to rejoice...
...The watching poet, too, is cut off: Headlights of his car "may cross a bedroom wall," but will "wake no sleeper...
...In the depths of chagrin and boredom, I discovered the modern poetry shelf within reach of my desk...
...College English majors in the '60s were caught in transition between a generation as reverential toward Auden as our teachers had earlier been toward Eliot, and one that saw both reputations eclipsed by the numinous musicality of Wallace Stevens...
...Nevertheless, his Protean voice never became that of "an old man in a dry month waiting for rain...
...The limestone is analogous to the author, "whose works are but extensions of hi power to charm...
...I rediscovered the "unconstraining voice" that years ago liberated my spirits...
...For poetry makes nothing happen," he told us when Yeats died, Yeats having thought otherwise...
...But in reviewing Collected Poems...
...Here cleverness is transcended by a compassion that breaks one's heart...
...Auden's most unequivocal achievement was his satire: No other poet of our century has had such effortless command of technique and tone...
...Although it contains work of four decades, Collected Poems gives an erroneous overview of Auden's career...
...He was especially fertile in conceiving images of meanness: What we love Ourselves for is our power not to love To shrink to nothing or explode at will, To ruin and remember that we know What ruins and hyaenas cannot know...
...When, in the '40s, Auden returned to the Anglican Church of his fathers, he began to disavow the young firebrand who had cried, "Harrow the house of the dead...
...Auden was wisest when joking, and frequently most serious...
...after that, and for many years, the voice of W. H. Auden became my chief comforter...
...Equally important, Auden's bleak vision of transitory human love and enduring human folly confirmed adolescent despair, and those Edenic ruminations of Buccolics or "In Praise of Limestone" did something to alleviate it...
...Yet as the early writings demonstrated, pleasure comes precisely from believing that a poem we find moving is more than words on the page?that it reveals profound truths, that the word can be made flesh and dwell among us...
...The scene combines realism with allegory...
...Marx's spectre haunts the ruin so literally that our hackles rise...
...What attracted me was the poetic juxtaposition of childhood's imaginative perspective with the adult's: quests in which "The over-logical fell for the witch/ Whose argument converted him to stone...
...None of the available reading included his observation, "The best reason I have for opposing Fascism is that at school I lived in a fascist state...
...Following the 1966 edition, edited by the poet, Mendelson has continued to omit blatantly Marxist poems...
Vol. 59 • December 1976 • No. 24
