A political poet
In 1939 W.H. Auden wrote, "poetry makes nothing happen." The stereotypical image of the poet is that of the dandy and the intellectual, the self-admiring youth scribbling hot-headed odes comprehensible only to himself. How can someone dedicating themselves to something the vast majority of the people have little interest in ever be relevant or influential in the "real" world?
In his Oxford days in the late 1920s Auden conformed to the satirical stereotype of a poet: he was apolitical, sexually absorbed and his poetry was often obscure in the extreme. However, as he emerged from the emotionally-retarding hothouse of literary Oxford into the politically charged 1930s, he began to develop an interest in public life. Influenced by a growing leftism in intellectual circles, he moved towards socialism. By 1937 his convictions were such that, like many of his contemporaries, Orwell included, he travelled to Spain to fight with the Republicans in the Civil War, telling a friend "Here is something I can do as a citizen and not as a writer".
Auden's initial enthusiasm was misplaced; his experiences in Spain proved painful. The Republican military campaign was badly organised and frequently abortive, meaning much of his time was spent drinking; waiting for action that never came. Dispirited by personal privation, moral compromise and the looming spectre of defeat, Auden was fortunate not to be injured, but many close to him were not so lucky.
Soon after arriving in Spain, the poet spent a night drinking with a young journalist, Basil Murray, the Hungarian novelist Arthur Koestler, and a lame Romanian fighter pilot. Within two months, Murray and the pilot were dead.
However painful they were, Auden's experiences in Spain were deeply formative. From his pain he fashioned the startlingly direct and morally powerful poem Spain. How many idealistic young people must have been roused to action by Auden's brutally challenging call to arms? 'What's your proposal? To build a just city? I will/I agree. Or is it the suicide pact, the romantic/Death? Very Well, I accept, for/I am your choice, your decision. Yes, I am Spain.' It was as a writer, not as a fighting citizen, that Auden made most political impact during the Civil War.
Auden suffered much critcism after leaving after only a few months, but it was in 1939 that he was to take his most controversial action.
On the eve of WWII he sailed for America with his friend, the poet Christopher Isherwood- to many, leaving Britain in its hour of need seemed an act of gross cowardice. Of Auden, George Orwell wrote, "so much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot"; Evelyn Waugh was of the opinion that Auden left Britain, "at the first squeak of an air-raid warning".
But Auden continued to be politically engaged, and to great effect. It was from New York that he wrote September 1, 1939, expressing the despair and flickering hope of his generation. Didactic in the best possible way, and framing penetrating insight with an almost religious devotion to truth, it is a poem with a modest, but genuinely public mission: 'All I have is a voice/To undo the folded lie/ The romantic lie in the brain/Of the sensual man in the street'.
It is a bleak poem, but one that sees the uselessness of despair, positing human warmth as an alternative to the cold and faceless mechanisms that create prejudice and exploitation- 'Ironic points of light/Flash out wherever the Just/ Exchange their messages:/May I, composed like them/Of Eros and of dust/Beleaguered by the same/ Negation and despair/Show an affirming flame.'
Auden's beliefs and interests changed across his next 25 years in America, his intellectual focus turning from politics to religion and his emotional landscape darkening, seeming at times to lack the affirmative spirit that gave his earlier work much of its public significance. However, even in his bleakest poems, such as The Shield of Achilles, one feels his tortured empathy for the suffering of humanity, and his intact hatred for oppression and cruelty : 'What their foes liked to do was done, their shame/Was all the worst could wish for; they lost their pride/And died as men before their bodies died.'
Even as he languished in personal loneliness and physical decay, Auden did not give up on the world outside his own pain; his late poetry is still infused with his characteristic empathy.
In W.H. Auden, we see a man who avoided the conventional stereotype of the poet, eventually disproving his own scepticism as to the power of poetry. He was a man profoundly concerned with the public good; his central mission was not so much personal revelation as genuine communication with other human beings. His work conveys an emotional power and an ability to dislocate received ideas that speaks volumes for the artform's potential for public good.
It is true that only a very small number of people in the world read poetry, and are thus affected by it . We may not all be poets, but it is something like the poetic impulse - the desire to know, to empathise and to transform - that allows us to act with goodness and with positive political effect in the "real" world.
27th Jan 2005