W. H.
AUDEN (1907-1973)
Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, England, the son of a doctor and of a former nurse. He was
educated at private schools and Christ Church, Oxford. After graduation from Oxford he traveled
abroad, taught school in England from 1930 to 1935, and later worked for a government film unit.
His sympathies in the 1930s were with the left, like those of most intellectuals of his age, and he
went to Spain during its Civil War, intending to serve as an ambulance driver on the left-wing
Republican side. To his surprise he felt so disturbed by the sight of the many Roman Catholic
churches gutted and looted by the Republicans that he returned to England without fulfilling his
ambition. He traveled in Iceland and China before moving to the United States in 1939; in 1946 he
became an American citizen. He taught at a number of American colleges and was professor of
poetry at Oxford from 1956 to 1960. Most of his later life was shared between residences in New
York City and in Europe—first in southern Italy, then in Austria.
Auden was the most prominent of the young English poets who, in the late 1920s and early 1930s,
saw themselves bringing new techniques and attitudes to English poetry. Stephen Spender, C. Day
Lewis, and Louis MacNeice were other liberal and leftist poets in this loosely affiliated group.
Auden learned metrical and verbal techniques from Gerard Manley Hopkins and Wilfred Owen, and
from T. S. Eliot he took a conversational and ironic tone, an acute inspection of cultural decay.
Thomas Hardy's metrical variety, formal irregularity, and fusion of panoramic and intimate
perspectives also proved a useful example, and Auden admired W. B. Yeats's "serious reflective"
poems of "personal and public interest," though he later came to disavow Yeats's grand aspirations
and rhetoric. Auden's English studies at Oxford familiarized him with the rhythms and long
alliterative line of Anglo-Saxon poetry. He learned, too, from popular and folk culture, particularly
the songs of the English music hall and, later, American blues singers.
The Depression that hit America in 1929 hit England soon afterward, and Auden and his
contemporaries looked out at an England of industrial stagnation and mass unemployment, seeing
not Eliot's metaphorical Waste Land but a more literal Waste Land of poverty and "depressed
areas." Auden's early poetry diagnoses the ills of his country. This diagnosis, conducted in a verse
that combines irreverence with craftsmanship, draws on both Freud and Marx to show England now
as a nation of neurotic invalids, now as the victim of an antiquated economic system. The
intellectual liveliness and nervous force of this work made a great impression, even though the com-
pressed, elliptical, impersonal style created difficulties of interpretation.
Gradually Auden sought to clarify his imagery and syntax, and in the late 1930s he produced
"Lullaby," "Musee des Beaux Arts," "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," and other poems of finely
disciplined movement, pellucid clarity, and deep yet unsentimental feeling. Some of the poems he
wrote at this time, such as "Spain" and "September 1,
1939," aspire to a visionary perspective on political and social change; but as Auden became
increasingly skeptical of poetry in the grand manner, of poetry as revelation or as a tool for political
change, he removed these poems from his canon. (He came to see as false his claim in "September
1, 1939" that "We must love one another or die.") "Poetry is not magic," he said in the essay
"Writing," but a form of truth telling that should "disenchant and disintoxicate." As he continued to
remake his style during World War II, he created a voice that, in contrast not only to Romanticism
but also to the authoritarianism devastating Europe, was increasingly flat, ironic, and
conversational. He never lost his ear for popular speech or his ability to combine elements from
popular art with technical formality. He daringly mixed the grave and the flip- pant, vivid detail and
allegorical abstraction. He always experimented, particularly in ways of bringing together high
artifice and a colloquial tone.
The poems of Auden's last phase are increasingly personal in tone and combine an air of offhand
informality with remarkable technical skill in versification. He turned out, as if effortlessly, poems
in numerous verse forms, including sestinas, sonnets, ballads, canzones, syllabics, haiku, the blues,
even limericks. As he became ever more mistrustful of a prophetic role for the poet, he embraced
the ordinary—the hours of the day, the rooms of a house, a changeable landscape. He took refuge in
love and friendship, particularly the love and friendship he shared with the American writer Chester
Kallmann. Like Eliot, Auden became a member of the Church of England, and the emotions of his
late poetry—sometimes comic, sometimes solemn—were grounded in an ever deepening but rarely
obtrusive religious feeling. In the last year of his life he returned to England to live in Oxford,
feeling the need to be part of a university community as a protection against loneliness. Auden is
now generally recognized as one of the masters of twentieth-century English poetry, a thoughtful,
seriously playful poet, combining extraordinary intelligence and immense craftsmanship.
As I Walked Out One Evening 1
As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.
And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
"Love has no ending.
"I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street.
"I'll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars 2 go squawking
Like geese about the sky.
"The years shall run like rabbits
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages
And the first love of the world."
But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
"O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.
"In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.
"In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.
"Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling3 snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver's brilliant bow.
"O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed.
"The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.
"Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer
And Jill goes down on her back.4
"O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress;
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.
"O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart."
It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming
And the deep river ran on.
1938, 1940
Notes: 1. Title from Auden's later collections.
2. The constellation of the Pleiades, supposed by the ancients to be seven sisters.
3. Literally, making white.
4. The giant of "Jack and the Bean Stalk" is trying to seduce Jack; the "lily-white Boy" (presumably
pure) becomes a boisterous reveler; Jill, of "Jack
and Jill/' is seduced.
