Auden age of anxiety text
He entered as the smooth-faced mysterious druid of the English industrial landscape, the Marxist lyricist who spellbound a generation, and he emerged as the boozy, creased, garrulous Auden who lasted. In those nine years, he underwent an extraordinary transformation, which implicated every line on his face. That Auden tone, the one that matters most now, was made in New York between 19, when Auden came to this city and made it his home. Auden's emotional tone is our tone, even if his meanings are not always our meanings. And "September 1, 1939," far from being a call to renewed conscience after a period of drift, is actually a call to irony and apolitical retreat, a call not to answer any call.īut, past a certain point, poets can't be misread, not by an entire time, no more than an entire family can misread a father: the homecoming noises in the hallway are the man the accumulated impression is the poet. The quote from "For the Time Being" that Hughes used so effectively to warn against the mess the world can become in the absence of rationality was first meant to demonstrate the opposite-the rational voice, after all, is Herod's as he orders the massacre of the innocents. "Stop All the Clocks" was written as a jaunty, Noël Coward-like ironic pastiche of a mourning song, unmoored from grief-no more meant to be taken seriously as an elegy ("Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone"?) than "You're the Top" is to be taken seriously as a love poem. The odd thing is that Auden's poems are often saying the reverse of what we have now decided to hear. Even fashion models, and not just fashion models, now name their sons Auden, as they might ten years ago have called them Dylan, and pose with them on the cover of Vogue. Two of his lyrics about suffering and confusion-"Musée des Beaux Arts" and "September 1, 1939"-sprang to renewed life after last September 11th as the embodiments of our mood, posted on Web sites and subway walls. In the past year, Auden has been everywhere, by the sheer force of popular will. In the nineties, Robert Hughes led off his memorable polemic against postmodernism "The Culture of Complaint" with a long, marvelling quote from Auden's Christmas oratorio, "For the Time Being," where the liberal King Herod mourns the loss of rational consensus in the face of feckless sectarianism. In the eighties, his lyric "Stop All the Clocks" became the elegy of the AIDS era, sold on bookstore counters, by the registers. Even people who don't read poems often turn to poetry at moments when it matters, and Auden matters now. Yet, at the beginning of the new century, he is an indispensable poet.
The body of poetry that he produced after his emigration to America, in 1939, was pretty poorly regarded-Philip Larkin, once a disciple, had written a brisk, common-sense dismissal of it as "a rambling intellectual stew," while the greatest American reviewer, Randall Jarrell, another apostate, referred to the later Auden manner as one of a man "who has turned into a rhetoric mill grinding away at the bottom of Limbo."
") or, more brazenly, the line from "September 1, 1939"-"We must love one another or die"-which he had pointedly cut from his own canon.
The obituaries, though large, mostly quoted his lyrics from the thirties: "As I Walked Out One Evening" or "Lullaby" ("Lay your sleeping head, my love, / Human on my faithless arm. Marks Place in the East Village and become the model of a modern poet who had lost his way and got stranded on an island of his own pet phrases. He seemed miserable and seedy then, having made a failed return to Oxford after two decades on St. Auden died, in 1973, no one would have imagined that thirty years later he would come back as the poet of another age, our own.