The New Lifetime Reading Plan

In our country Yeats [103] and Eliot [116] would probably figure as the two most pervasively influential English-language poets. To them I would add a third: W.H. Auden. For me and many others his is the most eloquent and representative poetic voice of what he dubbed the "Age of Anxiety.^,, The tonality of that age was announced by Eliofs The Waste Land and by Yeats's "Things fali apart; the centre cannot hold." This preoc- cupation with our dysfunctional society Auden developed in his long and short poems, in his plays (several written in collab- oration with Christopher Isherwood), and in his somewhat undervalued criticai essays.

There are ways in which Auden reminds one of Goethe [62]. Like Goethe he was no garret-poet, but led a very active life, traveling extensively, constantly in touch with the extralit- erary world, constantly metamorphosing in the Goethean style. A quester like Goethe, he passed from youthful rebellion against the tradition in which he had been reared to an uneasy leftism to a rediscovered Anglo-Catholicism. One wonders whether, had he lived another fifty years, he would have remained an Anglo-Catholic. Like Goethe he was a man in motion, the carrier of possibility.

Born a British subject, Auden became an American citizen in 1946, and so his work achieved a certain amplitude by draw- ing from two major historical traditions. The name Audun (so spelled) appears in Icelandic sagas, and Auden was much influ­enced, particularly in the actual techniques of his verse, by the great body of poetry of the far North.

Auden's father was a distinguished physician, and the son was brought up in an atmosphere of scientific inquiry and dis- cussion. At one time in his undergraduate years he planned to become a biologist, and his work is filled with metaphors and allusions drawn from the earth sciences and the revolution in physics, as well as from applied sciences such as metallurgy, mining, and railroad-building. Here, too, he reflects the drift of our time, as does his involvement with Freudian [98] and Jungian thought, metaphysics, ethics and politics. He was mas- ter of a treasury of language, often extending to a difficult-to- follow private symbolism. But even his more incomprehensible phrases have magic.

Auden was homosexual, but this does not seem to have affected his openness to the erotic drives that sway ali men and women. A large fraction of his poetry deals with love—usually frustrated, incomplete, longed-for, distrusted love. But the poetry is simply good love poetry.

Perhaps the wittiest English poet since Donne [40], Auden erases the line between light and serious verse. Like Eliot and the later Yeats, he throws away the romantic lexicon of the great nineteenth-century English poets. Into his intricate metaphysical verse he cunningly introduces the vernacular and creates the unique Auden poetic sentence. Thus his work is full of linguistic surprises, often turning on near-rhymes or odd alliterations. A technical experimenter, he invented new forms, along with ringing the changes on ali the older forms, includ- ing those to be found in Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic poetry. He often felt that his critics had not sufficiently appreciated his capacities as a metrist.

Auden is not an "easy" poet, and his density tends to increase in his later poems. He cannot be read straight through. Try the shorter poems first, including such classics as

"In Memory of W.B. Yeats," and "In Memory of Sigmund Freud." Then make your way as best you can. Five years from now, come back to him—and you may find that somehow he has become part of you. Great poets have a way of creating and educating their own audiences.

No brief quotation can even suggest the range of Auden's emotional world, but here are three Auden quatrains, written in wartime, which reveal something of his sense of the poet's role in "the nightmare of the dark":

Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse, Sing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountain start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise.

C.F.

127

ALBERT CAMUS

1913-1960

The Plague, The Stranger

Like many of his generation, Camus was much preoccupied by man^ incomprehensible situation within a seemingly absurd universe. Appropriately enough, he was killed at the age of forty-six in an automobile accident. For the world of the mind, though perhaps not for the absurdist, this was a major tragedy. With unmatched eloquence and moral seriousness Camus spoke for his disillusioned postwar contemporaries. Because his underlying theme was the permanent human condition, he speaks to us today.