Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Auden Final Paper
Auden Final Paper
Auden
By Tom Schultz
The Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley characterized poetry as “a mirror which
makes beautiful that which is distorted,” articulating the generally Romantic idea that
poetry is meant to inspire and compel the reader. This view has persisted reliably into the
modern era; E. L. Doctorow, for instance, posits that “good writing is supposed to evoke
sensation in the reader,” reaffirming the notion that poetry‟s aim is to inspire.
disagrees with this conception of poetry. He acknowledges but does not endorse in his
essay Against Romanticism that “the general public still thinks of poetry as something
vague and uplifting, and that true poets look like Shelley” 1. Auden rejects the premise
that poetry‟s worth is measured by its effectiveness and that evocation is the primary goal
of the poet. He asserts instead that “in so far as poetry, or any of the arts, can be said to
have an ulterior purpose, it is, by telling the truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate” 2. The
distinction between truth and effectiveness is an important one for Auden, who was
extremely careful in his poetry not to lapse into aphorism or to romanticize fact. Auden‟s
argument that the goal of poetry is truth also carries important implication with regard to
Auden‟s means and goals of revision. While most authors conceive of revision as a
means to elucidate the meaning of a work, Auden revised his poems because he
“distrusted their power in convincing his readers that they were on the right side of the
great struggles of the age” 3. In his poetry, Auden placed a higher premium on arriving at
a real, complex truth than on compelling his readers. Thus, Auden utilized revision not as
a means of clarifying or empowering a work but as a means of repressing his own power
of compulsion in order to explore the complexities of reality rather than merely its
to examine the poem “Spain 1937” as it represents one of Auden‟s most overtly political
It is also useful, before studying the Auden‟s poetry, to examine the historical and
political context surrounding Auden and its potential effects on his personal ethos.
Auden‟s formative years, both poetically and politically, came during the depressions and
fascist movements of the 1930‟s. Auden recognized during this time both the false
promise of fascist movements and the threat they posed to liberal democracy. He writes
in 1938 that fascism “induces [good people] to swallow something that purports to be real
justice… [it] is the most important problem of the countries of the world to-day” 4. The
effect of fascist demagogues like Hitler and Franco influenced Auden greatly, exposing
to him the real power and danger of uncontrolled pathos which he strived to eliminate
Conversely, Auden maintains that the success of fascism is due to the utter
failures of Liberal Democracy, whose results “have been social inequality, class war, lack
of social conscience, lack of social cohesion, lack of sociality” 4. Fascism has succeeded,
writes Auden, because Liberal Democracy “has made people feel that freedom is not
worth while” 4. These political attitudes indicate, if anything, a Marxist slant. However, it
include him in the intellectual Marxist movements of the time, movements that included
Auden contemporaries Stephen Spencer and C. Day Lewis. Auden wrote retrospectively
that “the interest in Marx taken by myself and my friends… was more psychological than
political; we were interested in Marx in the same way that we were interested in Freud, as
a technique of unmasking middle class ideologies, not with the intention of repudiating
our class, but with the hope of becoming better bourgeois” 5. Auden is thus better
proponent of it, not because he did not agree principally with Marxist tenets but because
Auden “clearly never believed that political values were ultimate, transcending moral and
religious ones;” 6 That Auden subjugated political allegiances to moral and religious ones
is central to his attitudes towards revision in that he cared more about a poem‟s honesty
than he did about its politics. Unlike many poets, therefore, Auden did not revise his
poems because of political changes of heart. He simply did not place an important
intellectual faction, however, his poetry of the time can be explained and interpreted in
these political contexts. Auden was committed to the fight against fascism, and his poems
reflect this antagonism. His poem “Spain, 1937,” first published in a five-page pamphlet
and then included, heavily revised, in a later edition of his poetry, is a reflection of
driver. Auden‟s time in Spain was, to say the least, disenchanting. He wrote in 1955 that
“no one I knew who went to Spain during the Civil War who was not a dyed-in-wool
Stalinist came back with his illusions intact” 5. Rather than cementing Auden‟s alignment
with Marxism, however, the Spanish Civil War revealed to Auden the dangers of any
utopian concept of government. Though Franco‟s fascism differed from Hitler‟s in that it
was reactionary instead of professedly socialist, it still carried with it the promise and
appeal of paradise, something that Auden distrusted greatly and recognized as a central
part of Marxist propaganda. While “Spain 1937” includes some vaguely Marxist
imagery, such as the anti-capitalist lines “our faces, the institute-face, the chain-store, the
ruin / Are projecting their greed as the firing squad and the bomb” 7 and the repeated
mention of “the struggle,” the poem in its entirety is better read as a rejection of fascism
Nevertheless, Auden‟s claims in “Spain 1937” are drastic. In the 24th stanza, he
seems to earnestly support “To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death, / The
conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder; / To-day that expending of powers
/ On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting” 7. In this passage, Auden
displays the same commitment to “just war” that is championed by the revolutionaries
and radical movement of the time, overtly rallying the reader against fascism and
possibly against the decaying capitalist structures mentioned elsewhere in the poem (“the
installation of dynamos and turbines, / the construction of railways in the colonial desert”
7
).
critics. Richard Goodman, reviewing the poem for the “Daily Worker,” called the poem
“the only poem by an Englishman anywhere near being a real revolutionary poem” 9, and
Cyril Connolly wrote in “The New Statesman and Nation” that “The Marxian theory of
history does not go very happily into verse, but the conclusion is very fine” 10.
The poem was also heavily criticized for its idealism. George Orwell, referring to
Auden‟s support for “just war” and revolutionary causes, wrote in “Inside the Whale”
that “Mr. Auden‟s brand of amoralism is only possible if you are the kind of person who
is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled… So much of left-wing thought is a
kind of playing with fire by people who don‟t even know that fire is hot” 11. The poem
Auden took Orwell‟s criticisms into account in revising Spain. But what
concerned him more in the revision process was not the actual political ideologies of his
poem but the idealistic and propagandistic tone it utilized. Auden was no stranger to
propaganda, both from his experiences in fascist Spain and in dealing with his Marxist
masquerade as literature in poetic form. He wrote in 1939 that “one of the best reasons I
have for knowing that Fascism is bogus is that it is too much like the kinds of Utopias
artists plan over café tables very late at night” 12. Auden realized the power his poetry
possessed over readers, and his revisions reflected his fear that effectiveness in his poem
Thus, Auden‟s revisions of “Spain 1937” include the elimination and mitigation
of some of the most powerful and overtly political stanzas of the poem. The elimination
of the lines:
Are projecting their greed as the firing squad and the bomb.
Madrid is the heart. Our moments of tenderness blossom
As the ambulance and the sandbag
Our hours of friendship into a people‟s army
serves to renounce by increment the strident anti-capitalist tone of the poem. This is
support of “just war.” He defended the passage from Orwell‟s criticism, reflecting in
1963 that “I was not excusing totalitarian crimes but only trying to say what, surely,
every decent person thinks if he finds himself unable to adopt to the absolute pacifist
position” 13 Nonetheless, Auden revised the line “To-day the deliberate increase in the
chances of death, / The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder,” changing
the phrase “deliberate increase” to “inevitable increase” and the phrase “necessary
Auden moves away from a revolutionary tilt; a deliberate increase in the chances of death
implies a willing sacrifice made towards the attainment of some goal, in this case
referring to the revolution against fascism and perhaps decadent capitalism. Inevitable,
defendants against fascist invaders rather than as arbiters of a revolution. The change
from a willing sacrifice to a necessary one removes the component of the line that directs
the reader to action, and in doing so abides by Auden‟s assertion that “Poetry is not
concerned with telling people what to do, but with extending our knowledge of good and
evil, perhaps making the necessity for action more urgent and its nature more clear, but
only leading us to the point where it is possible for us to make a rational and moral
choice” 14. The change of “necessary murder” to “the fact of murder” has the same
mitigating effect as the other revision in this stanza, removing the implied edict of the
line; “necessary murder” denotes an unfortunate means to an end. “The fact of murder,”
on the other hand, implies that murder has been thrust upon one‟s self by uncontrollable
forces; it is a fact of life. The appeal for action that existed in the first version of the
stanza is thus eliminated, effectively diminishing much of the poem‟s fervor and
vehemence.
Much has been made over the reasons for Auden‟s revisions of this poem. Some
critics have suggested that the reason for Auden‟s revision is merely in response to
George Orwell‟s criticism. However, Auden himself admitted that “these lines troubled
[him] almost immediately, for he referred to them obliquely a few months after the
poem‟s publication in his lecture „The Craft of Poetry,‟ given at Queen Mary Hall on 5
November 1937” 13. The exact text of this speech was not recorded, but Kathleen
Isherwood, who was in attendance, noted in her diary that Auden “maintained that poetry
could never be taken quite seriously thought it reflects on human behaviour or it can tell a
story” 14. Auden also refers to murder in this speech, relating it to his thesis that poetry is
metaphoric rather than literal. This speech was given more than two years before the
publication of Orwell‟s “Inside the Whale” and indicates that Auden‟s revision of the
poem had more to do with his own reservations than with Orwell‟s, and that Orwell‟s
criticism was, if anything, merely the straw that broke the camel‟s back.
Other critics have claimed that Auden revised “Spain” because of a political
change of heart. However, as was discussed earlier, Auden was never a true-blooded
Marxist, and “the degree of Auden‟s early political commitment has been exaggerated by
critics who wish to abuse him as a turncoat and backslider for his presumed desertion” 6.
Auden was not a Marxist at the time of the poem‟s publication, nor did he place much
stock in petty politics, and a shift in his political sympathies is thus hard-pressed to
poetry‟s goal is to “disenchant and disintoxicate” and his distinction between truth and
effectiveness. Auden‟s removal of a directive from the 24th stanza of “Spain” essentially
eliminates his argument in the poem for a “just war.” This is in keeping with his
statement that poetry is not meant to express literal truths or to “[tell] people what to do.”
Additionally, his elimination of an entire stanza shifts the focus of the poem from the
internal decay of a nation to the external invasion of it. The eliminated stanza is different
from the rest of the poem in its blatant nature. The line “yesterday the abolition of fairies
and giants / The fortress like a motionless eagle eyeing the valley,” for instance, vaguely
outlines the ills facing society but does not place a value judgment on them. The contrast
between this line and the eliminated line “and our faces, the institute face, the chain-store,
the ruin / Are projecting their greed as the firing squad and the bomb” is striking; the
eliminated line derides the decadent state of capitalism; the included line only mentions
it. The effect of this, rather than to add power to a poem‟s message and clear up unclear
necessarily exhorting the reader to take a position on it. One might argue that Auden
simply wanted to tone down his poem, and in many ways this assertion is correct. But in
doing so, Auden did not simply make the poem more subtle. Instead, he attempted to
arrive at a certain truth without judging that truth, a feat much harder to accomplish than
it seems.
What is perhaps most telling about “Spain,” however, is that Auden later censored
it completely from his canon. He speaks very little of the poem in his later essays, and
even then only in regret. Specifically, Auden lamented the final lines of the poem:
time is short, and
History to the defeated
May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.
He wrote in 1968 that “It would have been bad enough if I had ever held this wicked
doctrine, but that I should have stated it simply because it sounded to me rhetorically
effective is quite inexcusable” 13. Indeed, Auden seemed to conclude that Spain was a
poem unsalvageable in its taste for rhetoric over truth. The exhortations inherent in the
akin to political slogans. As an example, the line “To-morrow the bicycle races / Through
the suburbs of on summer evenings / But to-day the struggle,” might evoke the image of
a politician‟s promise. Auden knew first-hand via his experiences in fascist Spain the
dangerous falsehoods of demagogues, and as these lines form the backbone of the poem,
Auden may have simply deemed the poem unable to be saved through simple revision,
leaving him with little option but to leave it out of his canon.
It is clear in examining Auden‟s poetry and experiences that the modern fascist
movements had an indelible effect on his psyche and attitudes towards communication
and the written word. He rejected that poetry should be cathartic and moving to the
reader, a concept as old as Aristotle; “Orpheus,” wrote Auden in 1962, “is the archetype,
not of the poet, but of Goebbels” 15. Auden‟s assertions about revision are certainly
unique, but what is perhaps most interesting about his theory is the historical
circumstances under which it was articulated. Auden lived at a time when, almost more
than ever, the moral world was painted in black and white. Democracy clearly held the
moral high ground, and fascism was undeniably and terribly evil. Propaganda was a
readily accepted form of communication and political exigency (on the democratic side)
This is starkly not the case in Auden‟s mind. Though he strongly supported
liberalism and despised fascism, his poetry exhibits a complete reluctance to inspire any
kind of passion in the reader, and his revision ensures this. Auden‟s reaction to fascism is
clearly unique; rather than a renewed sense of democratic morality, Auden‟s lesson is that
This leads to a final question, that of Auden‟s response to traditional poets who
claim, like Vladimir Nabokov does, that poetry is an “intricate game of enchantment and
deception” 16. That is, is compulsion not inherent in poetry? In expressing any truth, does
entirely but rather something that must be dealt with carefully, by both readers and
writers. Auden does not deny compulsion‟s inherency in expression, but he asserts that
there is a point at which influencing the reader supersedes the quest for truth. Perhaps the
clearest expression of this is a couplet Auden wrote shortly before his death, in 1970:
1. Auden, W. H. “Against Romanticism” Modern Poetry and the Tradition. Ed. Cleanth
3. Mendelson, Edward. “Revision and Power: The Case of W. H. Auden” Yale French
Works of W. H. Auden. Ed. Edward Mendelson. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1996
6. Spears, Monroe K. The Poetry of W. H. Auden: The Disenchanted Island. New York:
9. Goodman, Richard. “Richard Goodman foresees true revolutionary poetry” The Daily
10. Connolly, Cyril. “From To-day the Struggle” The New Statesman and Nation. June
1937
12. Auden, W. H. “The prolific and the Devourer” New jersey: Ecco Press, 1993.
15. Auden, W. H. “The Dyer‟s Hand” The Complete Works of W. H. Auden. Ed. Edward