Life & Background
Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York in 1907, the son of a doctor, and went to Oxford intending to study biology before turning to English. He became the centre of the 1930s generation of poets that included Spender, MacNeice, and Day-Lewis, and taught school while establishing himself as the voice of a decade of economic crisis and approaching war. He went to Spain in 1937 and to China in 1938. In January 1939 he moved to the United States with Christopher Isherwood, a departure attacked in Britain as desertion on the eve of war; he became an American citizen in 1946. He met Chester Kallman, his partner for the rest of his life, that spring, and returned to Anglicanism. He wrote opera libretti, criticism, and a great deal of verse, and died in Vienna in 1973.
Musée des Beaux Arts
The poem begins with a flat critical statement — that about suffering the Old Masters were never wrong — and argues that they understood its human position: how it happens while someone else is eating, or opening a window, or just walking dully along. While the aged reverently await the miraculous birth, there are always children who did not especially want it to happen, skating on a pond at the edge of the wood. The second section turns to Brueghel's Icarus, in which a boy falls from the sky and everything turns away quite leisurely from the disaster: the ploughman may have heard the splash but it was not an important failure for him, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen something amazing sails calmly on.
The poem's technique is its argument: a conversational, almost prosaic voice, unemphatic line-lengths, and rhymes so widely spaced they barely register — a form that refuses to dramatise, exactly as the painting refuses to. Auden's range elsewhere is enormous, from strict sestinas and canzones to blues and ballads, and he revised and disowned his own work aggressively, cutting September 1, 1939 for the line about our having to love one another or die, which he came to consider dishonest. His elegy In Memory of W.B. Yeats contains his most quoted position — that poetry makes nothing happen — immediately qualified by the claim that it survives as a way of happening, a mouth.
Why Auden Matters
Auden is the pivotal English poet between the modernists and the postwar generation, and his 1930s work is the standard body of political poetry in English for that decade. His technical range makes him the usual example of formal virtuosity in twentieth-century verse, and his revisions and self-censorship raise questions about authorial intention that come up in textual criticism. The line about poetry making nothing happen is one of the most contested statements in modern criticism.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- Poems1930
- The Orators1932
- Look, Stranger!1936
- Spain1937
- Another Time1940
- The Age of Anxiety1947
- The Shield of Achilles1955