{"id":5673,"date":"2010-06-14T00:00:31","date_gmt":"2010-06-13T22:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=5673"},"modified":"2010-06-02T01:16:32","modified_gmt":"2010-06-01T23:16:32","slug":"w-h-auden-1907-1973-poet-of-the-age-of-anxiety","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2010\/06\/w-h-auden-1907-1973-poet-of-the-age-of-anxiety\/","title":{"rendered":"W.H. Auden: (1907-1973) Poet of the Age of Anxiety"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Bridge of Beauty and Understanding<\/strong> <\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

Only the bridge of Beauty will be strong enough for crossing from the bank of Darkness to the side of Light <\/em>– Nicholas Roerich<\/p>\n

The United Nations General Assembly in resolution A\/RES.62\/90 has proclaimed the year 2010 as the International Year for the Rapprochement of Cultures \u201cto promote universal respect for, and observation and protection of, all human rights and fundamental freedoms.\u201d Cultures encompass not only the arts and humanities but also different ways of living together, value systems and traditions.\u00a0 Thus 2010 should provide real opportunities for dialogue among cultures.\u00a0 It is true that to an unprecedented degree people are meeting together in congresses, conferences and universities all over the globe. However, in themselves, such meetings are not dialogue and do not necessarily lead to rapprochement of cultures. There is a need to reach a deeper level.\u00a0 Reaching such deeper levels takes patience, tolerance, the ability to take a longer-range view, and creativity.\u00a0 Thus we are pleased to present the creative efforts of individuals who have helped to create bridges of understanding among cultures.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

W.H. Auden: (1907-1973) Poet of the Age of Anxiety<\/strong> <\/strong><\/p>\n

Wystan Hugh Auden, is appreciated as a bridge builder by two separate groups of poetry readers.\u00a0 Each group celebrates half of his poetic life and rather tries to forget about the other half, seeing one part of his life as the perfect image of the modern poet who then lost his way. There is the W.H. Auden (he rarely used his first names) of the 1930s, the English political poet who reported on the Spanish civil war and the start of the Sino-Japanese war in 1939.\u00a0 Then, there is the poet living in the USA during the 1940s who became a US citizen and became primarily concerned with what was called at the time \u201cneo-orthodox Protestant\u201d theology.\u00a0 Finally there is a third phase of his life,\u00a0 the writer largely of book reviews and short literary essays living much of the time in Italy and Austria until his death in 1973 in Vienna.\u00a0 The one constant aspect running through his life and coloring his more personal writings was a homosexual bonding to men that he hoped would last and never did, as reflected in his poem\u00a0 It\u2019s No Use raising a Shout: <\/em><\/p>\n

It\u2019s no use raising a shout.<\/p>\n

No, Honey, you can cut that right out.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t want any more hugs;<\/p>\n

Make me some fresh tea.<\/p>\n

In 1930, shortly after publishing his first book of poems, he went to live in Berlin.\u00a0 The Berlin of Weimar Germany was more tolerant of open homosexuality than was the England of his youth.\u00a0 In Berlin, he began an intensive literary and on-again-off-again sexual relationship with Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986). The two men had known each other slightly at Oxford University.\u00a0 The somewhat older Isherwood was already well introduced in the English publishing and art world.\u00a0 He helped Auden with introductions to editors.\u00a0 It was T.S. Eliot\u2019s publisher Faber & Faber which published Auden on Eliot\u2019s recommendation even if Eliot\u2019s conservative religious and political positions were the opposite of Auden\u2019s .<\/p>\n

In Berlin, Auden and Isherwood became aware of social unrest and the clash between the Communists and the rising Nazi party.\u00a0 Auden became a Marxist because Marxism provided a ready-made structure to explain conflict.\u00a0 All his life Auden was interested in developing frameworks to interpret social and religious categories, and the Marxist dialectic was both a philosophy of history and a structure to understand current events.\u00a0 Auden, however, was never attracted to the political parties that were the manifestations of Marxist views.<\/p>\n

With Isherwood, Auden wrote a number of verse plays that combined humor, irony with the issues of the day.\u00a0 It was a socially-conscious art but they never departed from a certain ironic tone and a concern with language.\u00a0 Auden was always concerned with the impact of words, and his poems were usually clear and in a conversational style.\u00a0 He could recognize the importance of style and the use of words of other poets such as Yeats.<\/p>\n

In the 1930s, confronted with social unrest, William Butler Yeats moved increasingly to the Right even urging \u201cthe despotic rule of the educated classes\u201d.\u00a0 In 1933, Yeats was for a short time drawn towards General O\u2019Duffy, leader of the Irish Fascists \u2014 the Blue Shirts.\u00a0 Fortunately, O\u2019Duffy was a clown from whom Yeats separated quickly but not from some of O\u2019Duffy\u2019s \u2018law and order\u2019 ideas.\u00a0 Thus, although Yeats had become an opponent of Auden\u2019s values, Auden\u2019s tribute to Yeats on his death in 1939 is one of the most moving and just. \u201c But there is one field in which the poet is a man of action, the field of language, and it is precisely in this that the greatness of the deceased is most obviously shown.\u00a0 However false or undemocratic his ideas,\u00a0 his diction shows a continuous evolution toward what one might call the true democratic style.\u00a0 The social virtues of real democracy are brotherhood and intelligence, and the parallel linguistic virtues are strength and clarity, virtues which appear even more clearly through successive volumes by the deceased.\u201d<\/p>\n

When the Spanish civil war broke out, Auden was immediately drawn to the Republican cause.\u00a0 He went to Spain thinking of becoming an ambulance driver. \u00a0However, his literary talents were more needed in the information and propaganda services.\u00a0 In Spain, he saw that the political realities were more ambiguous and troubling than he thought, but he saw that war was ready to expand.\u00a0 He also saw the link between events in Europe and Asia.\u00a0 In 1938, Auden and Isherwood went to China to cover the Sino-Japanese conflict and jointly wrote a powerful account Journey to a War.<\/em><\/p>\n

On their way back by boat from China, Auden and Isherwood decided to stay in the USA. \u00a0Auden in New Year Letter <\/em>reviews the political decade in which he had been the leading poetry voice of the Left:<\/p>\n

Who, thinking of the last ten years<\/p>\n

Does not hear howling in his ears<\/p>\n

The Asiatic cry of pain<\/p>\n

The shots of executing Spain<\/p>\n

See stumbling through his outraged mind<\/p>\n

The Abyssinians, blistered, blind,<\/p>\n

The dazed uncomprehending stare<\/p>\n

Of the Danubian despair<\/p>\n

The Jew wrecked in the German cell,<\/p>\n

Flat Poland frozen into hell.<\/p>\n

Once in the USA, the Auden-Isherwood couple broke. Auden wrote:<\/p>\n

If equal affection cannot be<\/p>\n

Let the more loving one be me.<\/p>\n

Isherwood moved to California and became part of the religious-mystical circle around Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard.\u00a0 Isherwood became a cultural bridge builder toward India and Indian thought. He\u00a0 became a disciple of the Indian teacher Swami Prabhavananda and cooperated in the translations of a number of Indian religious texts.\u00a0 Later Isherwood\u2019s memories of Berlin Goodbye to Berlin <\/em>served as the basis of plays and films.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Auden stayed on the East Coast, first teaching at Swarthmore, a Quaker college near Philadelphia from 1942-45; he then lived in New York City in the literary fashionable St Marks Place.\u00a0 He began writing for US journals, in particular The New Yorker <\/em>and Vogue <\/em>both of which paid well so that he could write without having to have a regular teaching job, though he was often asked to give lectures at universities.\u00a0 Auden became increasingly influenced by the Protestant theologian and political analyst Reinhold Niebuhr who was teaching in New York City.\u00a0 Niebuhr combined a socialist-leaning politics with a Protestant theology which stressed that humans were always limited in their ability to do good by the reality of sin, which is self-centeredness.\u00a0 In the Niebuhr spirit, Auden wrote \u201c Man is not, as the romantics imagined, good by nature.\u00a0 Men are equal not in their capacities and virtues but in their natural bias toward evil.\u00a0 No individual or class therefore can claim an absolute right to impose its view of good upon them.\u00a0 Government must be democratic, the people must have a right to make their own mistakes and to suffer for them.\u201d<\/p>\n

In New York, Auden entered into a long-term literary and homosexual relationship with Chester Kallman, a younger poet and writer.\u00a0 The two together began writing opera libretti for the English composer Benjamin Britten, who also spent the war years in the USA.\u00a0 They wrote together the words for Britten\u2019s opera Paul Bunyan \u2013<\/em> a folk hero that Britten used to deal with his newly-discovered American themes, as well as the words for many of Britten\u2019s song cycles.\u00a0 Kallman and Auden wrote Rake\u2019s Progress<\/em> for Igor Stravinsky who had also moved to the USA as well as an opera of Hans Henze based on The Bacchae <\/em>of Euripides.<\/p>\n

To mark the war years and the start of the Cold War, Auden wrote The Age of Anxiety <\/em>which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1947.\u00a0 While the book was not that widely read, the title gave its name to a whole period and sections of it were often quoted.<\/p>\n

By 1948, Auden was again attracted to life in Europe but largely places that were not associated in his mind with his experiences of the 1930s.\u00a0 He spent part of each year in Italy and later both Italy and Austria.\u00a0 He returned to Oxford University to give some lectures on poetry, but post-war England held out few attractions for him.\u00a0 Although he continued writing book reviews and short essays, his declining years never caught the spirit of the times as did his 1930s poems and his 1947 Age of Anxiety. <\/em>Nevertheless, he is a prime example of the cultural bridge builder, reacting to political events in societies outside his own but seeing how these political and cultural events have an impact on the wider society.<\/p>\n

*****<\/p>\n

A useful biography is Humphrey Carpenter W.H. Auden: A Biography (<\/em>London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981);<\/p>\n

His plays and dramatic writings with Christopher Isherwood are presented by Edward Mendelson (Ed.) W.H.Auden and Christopher Isherwood. Plays and other dramatic writing, 1928-1938 (<\/em>Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).<\/p>\n

For his religiously-inspired writings in the USA see Arthur Kirsch Auden and Christianity <\/em>(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005)<\/p>\n

__________________________<\/p>\n

Rene Wadlow, Representative to the United Nations, Geneva, Association of World Citizens and member of TRANSCEND.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The United Nations General Assembly has proclaimed the year 2010 as the International Year for the Rapprochement of Cultures. Thus we are pleased to present the creative efforts of individuals who have helped to create bridges of understanding among cultures.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[82],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5673","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-united-nations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5673","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5673"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5673\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5673"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}