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Overview
Originally published in 1990.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691633060 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2016 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #1059 |
| Pages: | 198 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.30(w) x 9.40(h) x 0.70(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Auden's Apologies for Poetry
By Lucy McDiarmid
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1990 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06784-1
CHAPTER 1
Pardon and "Pardon"
... few now applaud a play that ends
with warmth and pardon the word to all,
as, blessed, unbamboozled, the bridal pairs,
rustic and oppidan, in a ring-dance,
image the stars at their stately bransles....
— "City without Walls," 1969
"Pardon's the word to all," announces Shakespeare's unbamboozled Cymbeline, shedding holy tears as lovers join in an atmosphere of universal charity. The line, one of Auden's favorites, echoes through his poems and essays for years. Pardon, along with "unbamboozled," implies reconciliation: the harmony of the dancing bridal pairs comes into being when errors are corrected and faults forgiven. If only for the duration of a grand finale, the dancers mirror a heavenly order. The idealized scene of warmth and pardon recurs over the centuries, whenever "earthly things made even / Atone together"; when Count Almaviva, more unbamboozled even than Cymbeline, begs, "Contessa, perdona!" in Le nozze di Figaro ; when Lady Catherine condescends to visit Pemberley, "in spite of that pollution which its woods had received"; or when Iolanthe's life is saved once more, because "every fairy shall die who doesn't marry a mortal."
In Auden's plays and poems also the scene recurs: as the operatic harmony of shepherds and Wise Men in For the Time Being ; as the reconciled spirits of loggers and foreman at the Christmas dinner in Paul Bunyan ; as the "wedding feast" of kindred spirits in New Year Letter. Commentary on moments of forgiveness abounds in Auden's prose, from the 1935 description of psychoanalysis as a cure founded in "the forgiveness of sins ... confession ... absolution" to the 1959 observation that in drama "it is impossible to distinguish between the spirit of forgiveness and the act of pardon" (EA 340; DH 200). Whether Isabella forgives Angelo, or whether Prospero forgives Antonio, are issues of some moment for Auden (DH 200–201, 526). Even his epigraphs tend to focus on forgiveness, in Blake's aphoristic couplet, "Mutual forgiveness of each vice / Such are the gates of Paradise," or Hannah Arendt's pronouncement, "The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility — of being unable to undo what one has done — is the faculty of forgiving."
Yet the voice that invokes the scene of bridal pairs in "City without Walls" is one the poem ultimately rejects. Two subsequent speakers condemn his prolix nocturnal ravings and shut him up brusquely. But what's wrong with warmth and pardon and dancing bridal pairs? Isn't this what Auden likes, precisely the way he chose to end his libretto Delia: A Masque of Night (1953)? Isn't this the theatrical version of what Blake and Hannah Arendt (not to mention the Christ of the Gospels) were talking about? Isn't this ultimate spiritual value?
Not quite. Longing not for genuine reconciliation but for "a play that ends / with warmth and pardon" (emphasis added), this voice speaks in the tones of Auden's fuddy-duddy Anglican-Edwardian persona. Tut-tutting away in the middle of the night like a fastidious uncle, he castigates audiences for their lack of taste, not their lack of charity. What he wants is a pretty play; nothing wrong with that, but his language vaguely suggests that there is something morally wrong with disliking theatrical trappings; and that if the "word" for all is warmth and pardon, if there is enough dancing in circles, if the couples make a tidy social contrast, if everything is lovely and orderly, then blessings and spiritual values must abound.
As a literary subject, forgiveness is less important to Auden than the problem of dissociating the idea of forgiveness from the idea of art; of distinguishing pardon from "pardon," the true spiritual condition from the trappings of Shakespearean comedy in which it is usually expressed: the dance, the solemn music, the formal blessings. For Auden, the subject of forgiveness is virtually inextricable from the issue of art's representation of it.
Auden has observed that The Tempest ends "sourly" because the pardons granted are merely official, not permeated by love and forgiveness (DH 526). But when he wrote his own version of the play he did not sweeten the sourness or add more warmth and pardon, turning angry Prospero into mild Cymbeline. Instead, Auden turned his "commentary" on The Tempest, The Sea and the Mirror, into a discussion of the spiritual fraudulence of aesthetic effects. Auden's Antonio, for instance, is not interested in being forgiven but in analyzing what is spurious about Prospero's accomplishments. Antonio "reads" a hypothetical post-finale scene of The Tempest as if it were a play pretending to genuine warmth and pardon:
... it undoubtedly looks as if we
Could take life as easily now as tales
Write ever-after: not only are the
Two heads silhouetted against the sails
— And kissing, of course — well-built, but the lean
Fool is quite a person, the fingernails
Of the dear old butler for once quite clean,
And the royal passengers quite as good
As rustics, perhaps better, for they mean
What they say, without, as a rustic would,
Casting reflections on the courtly crew.
Yes, Brother Prospero, your grouping could
Not be more effective: given a few
Incomplete objects and a nice warm day,
What a lot a little music can do.
(CP 360)
This is one version of that perfectly reconciled society that the nocturnal voice of "City without Walls" commends, yet to Antonio it is a "grouping," an artificial, primarily visual joining of disparate selves to create the illusion of harmony. Victims of Prospero's music, unconscious of the special effects they endure and the scene they form part of, the characters bask in a mild aesthetic glow, thinking (so Antonio implies) they are nicer than they used to be. "On the stage," writes Auden, "it is impossible to show one person forgiving another," but it is not impossible to show someone orchestrating a comic ending (DH 200). Auden shows more orchestration, not more forgiveness, than Shakespeare.
"What a lot a little music can do" — Auden knew that well, having confused aesthetic effect with spiritual transformation on one recent occasion. In the opening passage of New Year Letter, Auden describes a visit to Elizabeth Mayer on 4 September 1939, the day England entered what became the Second World War. Painfully conscious of disorder in the macrocosm, Auden finds a pleasanter and more orderly little world in Elizabeth Mayer's cozy "cottage on Long Island." The manuscript draft shows Auden correcting himself about what exactly he did find there.
... Buxtehude as we played
One of his passacaglias made
Our minds a civitas of sound
Where nothing but assent was found,
For love had set in order sense
And feeling and intelligence....
But why "love"? Is Buxtehude a prophet of charity? The civitas is composed of "sound," the "assent" a musical harmony. Ever wary of the illusory spiritual exaltation inspired by music, Auden crossed out "love" and wrote in "art." To music, not agape, belongs the credit for the temporary feeling of warmth and pardon. Elizabeth Mayer and her record player may just have been Prospero and his fairy spirits.
Hence Auden begins The Sea and the Mirror with a warning not to confuse the poem with anything spiritually significant. "Well," says the Stage Manager, dismissing his own distinctions between the life onstage and the life offstage,
... who in his own backyard
Has not opened his heart to the smiling
Secret he cannot quote?
Which goes to show that the Bard
Was sober when he wrote
That this world of fact we love
Is unsubstantial stuff:
All the rest is silence
On the other side of the wall;
And the silence ripeness,
And the ripeness all.
(CP 352)
The notion of private release of emotion to an unknown, mysterious being suggests that God is referred to, but no such simple appellation is given this deity. He or she can only be described as extraliterary, unquotable. Shakespeare, by contrast, is eminently quotable: allusion is one way to show the difference between literary and metaphysical gods. Blending and combining lines from Hamlet, King Lear, and The Tempest, the Stage Manager locates ultimate spiritual value beyond quotation. Whatever "ripeness" is, it is not — like Shakespeare, or like Auden for that matter — quotable. And being extraliterary, extralinguistic, it is not in this poem.
I
In 1935 Auden approvingly gave a religious name and a religious purpose to one kind of art, "parable-art, that art which shall teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love" (EA 341–42). Twenty-five years later the religious vocabulary persisted, even though this time the definition was cast as a warning. In "The Virgin and the Dynamo" Auden sets up an analogy between the "verbal society" of a poem and a happily reconciled human society, only to caution against confusing the beauty of the first with the goodness of the second:
Every beautiful poem presents an analogy to the forgiveness of sins; an analogy, not an imitation, because it is not evil intentions which are repented and pardoned but contradictory feelings which the poet surrenders to the poem in which they are reconciled. The effect of beauty, therefore, is good to the degree that ... the possibility of regaining paradise through repentance and forgiveness is recognized. Its effect is evil to the degree that beauty is taken, not as analogous to, but identical with goodness, so that the artist regards himself or is regarded by others as God, the pleasure of beauty taken for the joy of Paradise, and the conclusion drawn that, since all is well in the work of art, all is well in history. But all is not well there. (DH 71)
Given the dangers of such confusion, why make the analogy in the first place? Why define art in terms of forgiveness? Because the need to relate poetry to something of ultimate spiritual value, whatever that "something" might be — forgiveness, love, warmth and pardon — impels Auden to get poetry as close as possible to these absolutes. But not too close: the association of "beautiful poem" and "forgiveness of sins" must not be understood as constituting identity.
The proximity is teasing: it establishes, or rather reaffirms, the border between the quotable and the unquotable, between literary textuality and extraliterary value. This is the one border in Auden's landscape that never goes away. All the gamekeepers and ambushes and neuroses that bar the way out of a frozen wasteland in the early poetry gradually lose their power to threaten and obstruct: their disappearance has been well charted. But as they disappear, the ontological barrier between art and whatever absolute values might exist outside it becomes more important and pronounced. Soon after Auden's move to New York, when the last geographical border is crossed, the ontological one becomes the chief subject of his poems and essays.
Much has been written on Auden's emigration and the subsequent changes in his poetry. Scholars on the eastern shores of the Atlantic, enchanted by the prophetic tones and apocalyptic vision of Auden in the thirties, tend to denigrate the poems he wrote on this side of the Atlantic. would like to suggest a new way of seeing the change in Auden, insisting at the same time on a strong continuity of interest between "English" Auden and "American" Auden.
The shift from space to time in Auden's titles has often been noted: in the late 1930s they "referred to Iceland, Spain, Dover, Oxford, Paris ... Hongkong, China and Brussels." Soon after moving to New York, Auden "turned his attention ... to time," writing Another Time, New Year Letter, "Spring in Wartime," "Autumn 1940," and For the Time Being. For the significance of such a change, note what Auden himself wrote in 1932:
The urge to write, like the urge to speak, came from man's growing sense of personal loneliness. ... But, while speech begins with the feeling of separateness in space, of I-here-in-this-chair and you-there-in-that-chair, writing begins with the sense of separateness in time, of "I'm here to-day, but I shall be dead to-morrow, and you will be active in my place, and how can I speak to you?" (EA 305–6)
So long as Auden lived in England, his model for poetry was implicitly oral: poetry was conceived as speech, and its audience as listeners. And so long as the oral model existed even vestigially in Auden's mind, he retained the hope that poetry would in some way effect some kind of spiritual change in its audience. Although Auden knew perfectly well that his actual audience consisted of readers, he nevertheless used the language of "orality."
By the late 1940s, Auden's definitions and metaphors took for granted a "literate" model of poetry. That is, Auden thought of poetry as writing and emphasized a reading audience. Although his aesthetic pronouncements from this later period occasionally credit poetry with minor spiritual transformations, most of the time Auden insists on poetry's inability to effect change in its readers.
The development from oral to literate models of poetry is gradual. Read chronologically, essays from the 1930s show only minor changes in an oral and "spatial" notion of poetry. In most of these essays Auden writes as if literature were a substitute for human contact, and the motivation to write virtually a wish for love. "Words are a bridge between a speaker and a listener," Auden observes in the 1932 essay "Writing." People write because they "feel alone, cut off from each other. ... How can they get in touch again?" Books are written mainly "for company and creation." The model is not simply that of oral literature, ballads or ancient epic or drama: it is conversation:
When we read a book, it is as if we were with a person. A book is not only the meaning of the words inside it; it is the person who means them. ... When we say a book is good or bad, we mean that we feel towards it as we feel towards what we call a good or bad person. (EA 310)
Books "are like people, and make the same demands on us to understand and like them."
Auden emphasizes the materials of writing rather than the immediate, personal connection between two people only when he comments on the failure to communicate: "Forests are cut down, rivers of ink absorbed, but the lust to write is still unsatisfied." The words "lust" and "unsatisfied" suggest how much Auden has in mind other frustrating forms of human contact while he discusses reading and writing. Literature's "purpose" is a very immediate social one, to "bridge the gulf between one person and another," particularly in a time when "the sense of loneliness increases." (Auden's definition of literature sounds like Donne's description of love, which "defects of loneliness controuls." In its ideal form poetry, also, "Interinanimates two soules.")
In the introduction to The Poet's Tongue (1935), Auden cites approvingly the definition of poetry as "memorable speech," and in elaborating describes a context that sounds like a private romantic encounter: poetry "must move our emotions or excite our intellect, for only that which is moving or exciting is memorable, and the stimulus is the audible spoken word and cadence, to which in all its power of suggestion and incantation we must surrender, as we do when talking to an intimate friend" (EA 327).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Auden's Apologies for Poetry by Lucy McDiarmid. Copyright © 1990 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- Contents, pg. vii
- Preface, pg. ix
- Acknowledgments, pg. xv
- Abbreviations, pg. xix
- INTRODUCTION. The Finest Tumbler of His Day, pg. 3
- CHAPTER ONE. Pardon and "Pardon", pg. 14
- CHAPTER TWO. The Generous Hour: Poems and Plays of the 1930s, pg. 46
- CHAPTER THREE. The Other Side of the Mirror: New Year Letter, For the Time Being, and The Sea and the Mirror, pg. 73
- CHAPTER FOUR. Apologies for Poetry: Poems 1948-1973, pg. 119
- CONCLUSION. Writing This for You to Open When I Am Gone, pg. 159
- APPENDIX. The Manuscript Drafts of New Year Letter, Part III, Opening Passage, pg. 169
- Index, pg. 173
What People are Saying About This
"Lucy McDiarmid is the most original and important Auden critic to appear in many years. Auden's Apologies for Poetry offers brilliant new readings of the major later works, from New Year Letter to 'The Cave of Making.' This book should mark the beginning of a new understanding of those works and a markedly higher valuing of them. It will compel a fundamental reassessment of the Auden canon."—Samuel Hynes, Princeton University