W(ystan) H(ugh) Auden
Possible Lines of Approach
Auden as modern poet
Formal approaches
Auden as political poet
Auden as religious poet
Auden as love poet
Notes on Approaching Particular Works
“[Funeral Blues]”
“Spain 1937”
“Musee des Beaux Arts”
“In Memory of W.B. Yeats”
“September 1, 1939”
“The Shield of Achilles”
Questions for Discussion
Critical Viewpoints/Reception History
Possible Lines of Approach
Auden as modern poet
When asked about his own influences, John Ashbery once asserted that Auden was “the
modern poet,” and it can certainly be productive to study Auden as a modernist, one who
began his career imitating T.S. Eliot (who would publish Auden’s first collection at Faber
and Gwyer). Auden quickly developed his own distinctive voice, mixing styles and
genres, merging high and low, combining colloquial idiom and mythology; this method
would make him arguably the most important poet of the 1930s.
Formal approaches
Another possibility is to trace the arc of his evolution as a poet: an early poem such as
“[O what is that sound]” takes the form of a traditional ballad, though the sing-song
rhyme belies the darkness of the content; later poems—“Musee de Beaux Arts” and
“Spain 1937,” for example—utilize free verse, matching complexity of ideas to
complexity of pattern; still later, there is interest in the classics—as in “[Song of the
Master and Boatswain],” a response to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, or in “The Shield of
Achilles”—and a return to the use of more traditional poetic forms.
It is also possible to think of Auden as a writer who transcends literary movements, a
poet who makes use of the tenets and conventions of Romanticism and Modernism but
swears allegiance to neither. It is perhaps this idiosyncrasy that has made Auden so
influential for so many generations of poets.
Auden as political poet
Auden’s work in the 1930s established him not only as an important poet but also as a
prophetic, progressive voice of the political left. Auden’s first published collection,
Poems (1930), took the political and economic unrest Auden witnessed during the time
he spent in Weimar Berlin in the late 1920s as its main subject. Later poems—notably
“Spain 1937”—testify to Auden’s involvement with and interest in leftist politics.
Notably, Auden had “Spain” printed as a pamphlet on his return to England following his
visit to Spain to aid the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War, with the proceeds
contributed to Spanish medical workers.
Still, Auden’s experience in Spain seems to have been a turning point of sorts. Though he
had intended to volunteer as an ambulance driver, he was instead put to work writing
propaganda. In the course of his time in the censor’s office, he became disturbed by what
he perceived as Stalinist control of the Republican agenda; he was also apparently deeply
troubled by forced church closings.
What is more, Auden became increasingly convinced that a poet must be “more than a bit
of a reporting journalist,” as he himself later put it. The turn away from an explicit
concern with politics and towards a focus on human experience, on the perception and
understanding of suffering is evident in the poems Auden would write in the lead-up to
World War II, particularly “September 1, 1939” and “Musée de Beaux Arts.” In his later
years, having settled in New York and concerned with the possibility of his poetry being
used as propaganda, Auden went so far as to rewrite many of his earlier, explicitly
political poems, while denying publication rights for the original versions.
Auden as religious poet
Auden grew up the grandson of two clergymen in an Anglo-Catholic household. Though
he turned away from the church in his teens, Auden joined the Episcopal Church in 1940,
at the age of 33, and Christianity became an important, if not defining, aspect of his life.
The evolution of Auden’s beliefs is remarkable for its effect on his poetry. His move
away from an inward-directed Protestantism toward a theology focused on the
significance of human suffering is most readily evident in poems such as “Musée de
Beaux Arts,” “The Shield of Achilles,” and “The Truest Poetry Is the Most Feigning.”
Auden as love poet
Auden’s philosophy may best be captured by these lines from his “The More Loving
One” (1957): “If equal affection cannot be / Let the more loving one be me.”
Love—romantic love, friendship, unrequited love—is a frequent theme in Auden’s
poetry.
Of interest in this regard are the following poems: “[O what is that sound],” “[Lullaby],”
“[As I walked out one evening],” and “The Truest Poetry is the Most Feigning.” It may
also be productive and interesting to consider “[Funeral Blues]” and “In Memory of W.B.
Yeats” as love poems, to ask students what two of Auden’s best-known elegies suggest
about the nature of love.
Notes on Approaching Particular Works
“[Funeral Blues]”
Form: Sixteen-line poem, in four stanzas of four lines each; the rhyme scheme of each
stanza is aabb.
Background/Approaches: The poem appeared as “Funeral Blues” in 1940’s Another
Time; an earlier, five-stanza version was first included in The Ascent of F6 (1936), a
verse play co-authored by Auden and Christopher Isherwood, a close friend and frequent
collaborator; the longer original was intended as a parody of an elegy for a political
leader. In 1938, Auden contributed the poem, now in four stanzas, with the last two
stanzas entirely different from the last three of the five-stanza version, to The Year's
Poetry, 1938. The poet had intended this rendition to be sung by the soprano Hedli
Anderson, in a setting by Benjamin Britten.
You may want to begin by asking students to consider how “Funeral Blues” functions as
an elegiac poem. What does the text offer by way of remembrance? Celebration? Love?
Who seems, ultimately, to be its main focus: the dead or his mourner? What is the poem’s
implicit vision of the past and its explicit vision of the future?
In a similar vein, you might ask students whether the poem makes clear the relationship
between the speaker and the person he mourns. Is such clarity important? Why or why
not? How has the ambiguity contributed to the many uses the poem has been put to, both
by Auden himself (as noted above) and in popular culture?
Connections: Among Auden’s own work, “Funeral Blues” could be studied alongside
“In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” Auden’s elegy for his fellow poet. Ask students to consider
how Auden makes use of the elegy, where he seems to be following conventions of the
genre and where he is subverting them.
You may also wish to consider other famous elegies, such as Tennyson’s In Memoriam
A.H.H., which commemorates the sudden death of the poet’s friend Arthur Hallam, and
John Milton’s pastoral elegy, Lycidas.
“Spain 1937”
Form: Ninety-two line poem, in 23 stanzas of four lines each, written in free verse.
Background/Approaches: In January of 1937, Auden went to Spain in order to work
alongside a medical unit and show his support for the Republican cause in the Spanish
Civil War; instead, he was put to work in the censor’s office. On his return to England, he
completed a poem, entitled “Spain,” which was published as a pamphlet, with all
proceeds to benefit Spanish medical workers. The poem, significantly revised and
entitled “Spain 1937,” then appeared in Another Time (1940). Auden would eventually
come to disavow the poem entirely, claiming that its politics were never his own, but
simply views he found rhetorically effective. Though George Orwell labeled “Spain”
“one of the few decent things that have been written about the Spanish war” in his 1940
essay “Inside the Whale,” Auden came to see the work as fundamentally dishonest.
You may thus want to begin by asking students what they make of the politics of the
poem: do they see it as propaganda? As reportage? As historical analysis? To this end,
you may also want to discuss the importance of politics and history to an understanding
of the work; that is, is it, ultimately, a poem about the Spanish Civil War, or are there
other potential ways to make sense of it?
Consider as well the strategies Auden uses. How does repetition function in the poem?
What is to be made of the reiteration of “yesterday” and “today” and “tomorrow”? How
does the poem work as on-the-scene reporting? How does it make use of history as a
trope?
Connections: In terms of Auden’s poetry, you may want to discuss “Spain 1937”
together with “September 1, 1939,” another poem concerned with historical events, with
war, its origins, and its consequences. You might also want to consider Auden’s account
of the Spanish Civil War alongside George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia.
“Musée des Beaux Arts”
Form: Twenty-two line poem, in two stanzas, written in free verse.
Backgrounds/Approaches: “Musée des Beaux Arts” was first included in 1940’s
Another Time, a collection seen by many critics as a turning point in Auden’s career,
marking his turn towards high-church Christianity, and his first American volume.
The poem takes its title from the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique in
Brussels, where Auden spent some time in 1938; while in Brussels, Auden had seen
Pieter Brueghel’s painting The Fall of Icarus at the museum. Brueghel’s painting, dating
from about 1554, depicts a ploughman, a shepherd, and a fisher in the foreground, while
Icarus himself is manifested only as a leg flailing in the sea, a small, seemingly
insignificant detail in the right-hand corner.
Because “Musée des Beaux Arts” is an example of ekphrasis, or a description of a visual
work of art, you might want to begin by asking students to examine Brueghel’s painting
(readily available online) and to consider its presentation of the story of Icarus. To that
end, you might find it useful to briefly recount the myth of Icarus, who, along with his
father Daedalus, fashioned wings of wax and feathers so as to escape prison, only to fly
too close to the sun and fall to his drowning death as his waxen wings melted. Contrast
the tragedy of the myth to its depiction in Brueghel’s painting; how might Auden’s poem
be working with both depictions? What, precisely, do the “old masters” know about
suffering? Why is this knowledge significant? What do we make of the way
Brueghel—an “old master”—represents suffering? Does the poem’s speaker ultimately
agree with the masters’ vision? You might also ask students to think about how the
presentation of suffering may be understood in light of Auden’s increasing commitment
to Christianity.
Consider too the time of the poem’s composition. In 1938, Auden had visited war-torn
China, which had been recently invaded by the Japanese Imperial Army. In March of that
year, Austria was incorporated into the Third Reich, and that September saw the Munich
Agreement, under which Chamberlain agreed to the cession of Czech Sudetenland to
Germany. You might wish to call students’ attention to these historical developments,
reflecting on their possible bearing on the conception of suffering offered in “Musée des
Beaux Arts.”
Connections: One possible pairing is to read “Musée des Beaux Arts” together with
W.B. Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan,” another poetic retelling of a Greek myth that has
frequently been a subject of painting. Another possibility for comparison is John Keats’s
“Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Finally, consider reading “Musée des Beaux Arts” alongside
another example of ekphrasis, Auden’s own “The Shield of Achilles.”
The American poet William Carlos Williams has also written a poem about Brueghel’s
painting, entitled “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” and you may find it productive to
have students compare and contrast the two poems and their respective presentations of
one artwork.
“In Memory of W.B. Yeats”
Form: Seventy-seven line poem, in three parts. The first part is made up of seven stanzas
of varying line length, written in free verse. Part two consists of one free-verse stanza.
The last part is made up of nine stanzas of four lines each; each stanza is rhymed aabb.
Backgrounds/Approaches: Originally appearing in Another Time, Auden’s elegy for the
Irish poet W.B. Yeats was one of the first poems he would write following his move to
New York.
Yeats had clearly been an important influence on Auden, as well as a tremendous
presence in twentieth-century poetry. You thus might wish to begin a discussion of “In
Memory of W.B. Yeats” with a brief overview of Yeats’s career, particularly as Auden’s
poem deliberately echoes some of Yeats’s own work.
One important consideration in approaching the text is to think through Auden’s use of
the elegy form here. Though the poem is very much a tribute to Yeats, a monument to an
important, influential poet, it is also a kind of poetic manifesto, a treatise on Auden’s
understanding of history, addressing a particular moment in time as Europe is preparing
for war. You might want to begin by asking students to assess exactly what Auden makes
of Yeats. How might they reconcile two of the descriptions the speaker offers: on the one
hand, Yeats is “an honoured guest” (42); on the other, he is “silly like us” (32). You may
wish to note here that Auden largely rejected the theory that great men propel history
forward, emphasizing instead that great deeds may be performed by ordinary people.
In following this line of discussion, you may then ask students to think about what is
being honored in the poem. One possibility is to focus on Part Two of the poem, noticing
how Auden moves from cataloguing biographical tidbits from Yeats’s life to a discussion
of poetry itself. Ask students what view of poetry and its power is being offered. How
might such a view be connected to the time of the poem’s writing? What consolation can
poetry provide?
Connections: “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” could be read alongside Auden’s own
“Funeral Blues,” as well as a number of other famous elegies, including Tennyson’s In
Memoriam A.H.H. and Milton’s Lycidas.
You might also consider asking students to read some of Yeats’s own political poetry in
preparation for discussing Auden’s tribute; some possibilities are “Easter 1916,”
Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” and “The Second Coming.” Another fitting possibility
would be to consider “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” in connection with Yeats’s “In
Memory of Major Robert Gregory,” an elegy to a soldier killed in action on the Italian
front in the First World War.
“September 1, 1939”
Form: Ninety-nine line poem, divided into nine stanzas of eleven lines each, in free
verse.
Backgrounds/Approaches: The poem—whose title denotes the date of the German
invasion of Poland, and thus marks the outbreak of the Second World War in
Europe—originally appeared in the October 18, 1939 issue of The New Republic. It was
subsequently included in Another Time (1940). By the time he reprinted the poem in
1945’s The Collected Poetry of W.H. Auden, however, Auden had apparently come to
feel that he “loathe[d] that poem” (as he would confide in a letter to the critic Laurence
Lerner) and he excluded the second-to-last stanza; the poem was altogether left out of his
Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957, published in 1966. For many years Auden went so
far as to refuse permission to editors who wished to include the text in anthologies, with
two notable exceptions: he allowed the poem to be reprinted in The New Pocket
Anthology of American Verse, with the last line of the eighth stanza altered to read “We
must love one another and die,” and in Poetry of the Thirties, alongside a note
proclaiming “Mr. W. H. Auden considers th[is poem] to be trash which he is ashamed to
have written.”
Because it is impossible to ignore the historical significance of “September 1, 1939,” you
may want to begin by giving students a chance to reflect on the speaker’s emotions and
thoughts at witnessing the outbreak of World War II. You may also wish to note that the
poem was widely circulated in the days following September 11, 2001 and read on
National Public Radio. What is the poem’s vision of tragic, monumental events? What
can it be said to offer by way of consolation? What does it make of misery and defeat and
their consequences? Is there, ultimately, hope?
Connections: “September 1, 1939” consciously echoes W.B. Yeats’s “Easter 1916,” both
in its title and its form. Like Yeats, Auden is here concerned with history, and one
possibility in connecting the two texts is to consider what the poets make of events that
seem to be changing the very course of history. What vision of historical failure and
redemption is offered by the two poets?
“The Shield of Achilles”
Form: Sixty-seven line poem, in nine-stanzas of varying rhyme schemes.
Background/Approaches: “The Shield of Achilles” is the title poem of Auden’s 1955
collection. The poem’s title refers to the shield Achilles used as armor in his fight with
Hector, and the poem itself is a retelling of the battle as it is depicted in Book 18 of
Homer’s Iliad. Thus, you might want to begin by briefly summarizing the story for the
students: Achilles’ mother Thetis pleads with Hephaestos, the god of blacksmiths, to
provide new armor for her son, whose shield has been lost by his friend Patroclus, killed
by Hector in the course of the Trojan War. Auden’s poem describes Thetis as she watches
Hephaestos making the shield, as well as the scenes the god inscribes on it. You may
wish to note here that these scenes are not those which are depicted on the shield in The
Iliad; indeed, the tension of the poem is created by the contrast in Thetis’s expectations,
which are based on the scenes described by Homer.
The difference in Homer’s and Auden’s scenes may be a good starting point for
discussion. Ask students to consider why the poet may have chosen to depict Achilles’s
shield in a way that contrasts with its presentation by Homer. What point is being made
here about history, war, responsibility? What does the contrast suggest about Auden’s
perception of the differences between his own time and Homer’s? What is achieved by
switching between the differing scenes within the poem itself?
You may wish to note that some classical scholars have interpreted the shield as
representing the world itself, the basis of civilized life. What, then, can be made of
Auden’s shield? What does it seem to suggest about life in mid-twentieth century?
Connections: You may want to consider asking students to read Homer’s description of
the shield of Achilles as a way of beginning a discussion of Auden’s poem.
Another possibility is to pair “The Shield of Achilles” with Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan,”
another twentieth-century retelling of a classical myth.
Questions for Discussion
1.
What is Auden’s relationship to politics? To history?
2.
How does Auden seem to be defining poetry? What does he believe to be the
function of art? What can poetry accomplish?
3.
What does Auden’s poetry seem to suggest about suffering? How does art help us
understand human suffering? What can poetry teach us about the pain of others?
4.
What role does religion play in Auden’s work?
5.
What is Auden’s vision of love? How do the elegiac poems also function as love
poems?
6.
How does Auden use traditional poetic forms? In what ways is he very much a
modern poet?
7.
What do the poems suggest about Auden’s evolution as a poet? What is suggested
about his artistic development? How do the poems of the 1930s compare to and
contrast with the later works?
Critical Viewpoints/Reception History
Auden’s status in the realm of twentieth-century poetry is perhaps best conveyed through
two conflicting verdicts: on the one hand, the Scottish poet Hugh McDiarmid referred to
Auden as “a complete wash-out”; on the other, the American poet John Ashbery
proclaimed him “the modern poet” in a 1980 interview. In other words, little consensus
seems to exist. The Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky has labeled Auden “the
greatest mind of the twentieth century,” while the American poet Robert Creeley
complained that his time at Harvard in the 1940s was marred by Auden’s dominance of
the syllabus. British critics tend to value Auden’s early work highly, while American
critics tend to feel that Auden’s real achievements are more readily evident in the later
stages of his career (coincidentally, the stages Auden spent living in the United States).
Auden’s first submitted manuscript was rejected by Faber and Gwyer, where T.S. Eliot
was editor at the time. Nonetheless, Eliot took an interest in Auden, and, in 1930, Faber
and Gwyer published Auden’s Poems. That book was well received, marking the
beginning of Auden’s dominance of English poetry throughout the decade.
In 1937, New Verse dedicated an issue to Auden, readily making evident the range of
responses Auden would come to inspire: Geoffrey Grigson, in “Auden As a Monster,”
described Auden’s verse as “monstrous”; Edwin Muir labeled Auden’s imagination
“grotesque”; Bernard Spencer saw him as “brutalizing” the language; Dylan Thomas
proclaimed him “wide and deep.” At once impressed and frightened by Auden’s power,
these commentators appear to have articulated a persistent theme in discussions of
Auden, figuring Auden as a kind of poetic monster. His poetry, it seems, was capable of
seducing; in 1976’s “Shorts for Auden,” the Irish poet Seamus Heaney says of the
Collected Poems, “in the end one assents with a ‘yes’ as pleasured and wholehearted as
Molly Bloom’s.”
But if the 1930s were the “Auden Generation,” as Samuel Hynes claims (The Auden
Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s [Princeton University Press,
1982), the 1940s proved to be more ambiguous. For one, Auden’s reputation was
complicated by his 1939 move to America. Seen as a mistake and a betrayal by much of
the British literary establishment, Auden’s relocation seemingly made him ineligible for
inclusion in British surveys and anthologies. At the same time, American editors failed to
generate much enthusiasm for Auden as an American poet. Indeed, the confusion over
Auden’s national identification persisted well into the 1990s; Ian Sansom notes that
Auden was excluded from George Watson’s critical survey British Literature since 1945
(Palgrave Macmillan, 1991); nor does he figure in 1989’s Norton Anthology of American
Literature. (An interesting point of comparison here is T.S. Eliot’s move in the other
direction.)
Still, Auden did seem to find an American audience. While the British press and literary
journals focused on debating Auden’s move, his Collected Poems had gone into a fourth
printing, having sold some 14,000 copies, by the time Auden became an American citizen
in 1946. Auden’s influence in America was strongest in the effect of his work on
American poets, particularly then-young poets such as John Berryman, John Ashbery,
and Robert Duncan. Auden also came into greater prominence as editor of the Yale
Younger Poets series, from 1948 to 1959, publishing first collections by Ashbery,
Adrienne Rich, and W.S. Merwin. Indeed, as Ian Sansom argues in “Auden and
Influence” (The Cambridge Companion to W.H. Auden, 2004), it is possible to talk of
“Auden generations,” to discuss Auden’s significance by tracing his influence on several
poetic movements, whether admiring (the New York poets) or largely repudiating (the
Beats). Confusion over what to make of Auden continued into the 1950s, with much of
the debate—at least in England—focused on Auden’s politics or, more precisely, what
was perceived as his lack thereof. (Significantly, in this respect, Auden seems to have
been his own biggest critic, though his own assessment appears to stand in direct
opposition to those who saw him as having betrayed his early political promise; after he
emigrated to the United States, he came to largely reject most his “political” poetry,
extensively revising, disavowing, or entirely suppressing many early works.)
By the time of Auden’s sixtieth birthday in 1967, however, the confusion appeared
mostly settled. The influential Review declared that part of its philosophical mission was
a return to Auden. Starting in 1967, Auden appeared at every Poetry International
Festival until 1973, the only poet to make such regular appearances; he drew huge
crowds to his readings. His death, on September 29, 1973, seemed to cement and secure
his reputation: his obituary in the Times of London hailed him as the “undisputed master”
of English poetry.
The 1980s and 1990s saw Auden become a fixture in the university curriculum (though
he had been widely taught long before his death). As far as the general public is
concerned, Auden enjoy greatest attention when “Funeral Blues” was read in the 1994
film Four Weddings and a Funeral; a subsequently published pamphlet edition of ten of
his poems, including “Funeral Blues” (Tell Me the Truth About Love) sold more than
275,000 copies. Auden again came into public prominence when “September 1, 1939”
was read on NPR following the September 11th attacks. This (re)turn to Auden as a poet
capable of capturing something essential about our lives and the way we live them is
potentially far more instructive than scholarly studies or critical responses have been, for
here there is no need to classify the work as British or American, as Romantic or Modern,
as political or religious; he is neither prophet nor revolutionary, but rather, finally,
simply, an artist.
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Yevgeniya Traps of Queens
College, The City University of New York, for the preparation of the draft material.