Sunday/Auden

Auden and The People

In the first of three broadcast talks he gave in 1955, W. H. Auden (1907–73) suggested that two ideal figures – the Poet and the Historian – exist in uneasy tension in almost all poetry. The Poet, he argued, charms his audience into forgetting themselves in their fascination with the timeless, imaginary world evoked by the poem; the Historian makes his readers recognize in what they hear “something which they know to be true about themselves” – specifically, whether they have been faithful to “the True Voice . . . and so become what they ought to become” or, through indifference or belief in “the lying voices”, have failed to fulfill “their proper destiny”. Auden adopted this notion of authenticity from Kierkegaard, whose dislike of the idea of the public he shared: “A man has his distinctive personal scent . . . . A crowd has a generalized stink. The public is odorless” (“The Poet and the City”).

The title of Auden’s poem “The Chimeras”, first published in the TLS in 1951 and then appearing in his collection Nones (1952), recalls Kierkegaard’s description of the public as “a phantom . . . a monstrous abstraction, an all-embracing something which is nothing”. But Auden reaches back beyond this proto-existential view to Canto III of the Inferno where Dante meets those “sanza infamia e sanza lodo” (“without infamy and without praise”), punished for their lack of moral commitment while alive by never being allowed to die. Dante’s instinct is to feel sorry for them, but Virgil tells him not to waste his pity: “Let us not talk of them. Look and pass on”. Auden’s last three stanzas are a direct echo of Virgil’s words: “No one can help them; walk on, keep on walking”. And, in the familiar world of crowds, public buildings and popular speech, we are forced to recognize that we, too, are in hell. (tls)

 

Auden had no love for "The Public." "The Public v. the Late Mr. W. B. Yeats" was written for Partisan Review, a quarterly that easily mixed literature with socialist politics. Auden sent in the manuscript on 18 March 1939, perhaps only a few days after adding the middle section to his eulogy on the death of Yeats, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats." In form it is a pair of speeches by a public prosecutor and a counsel for the defense; each argues his side of the case to a jury implicitly consisting of the individual reader. No verdict is announced, and the dialogue leaves the final judgment open. But the unspoken point is that it is not Yeats who is being weighed in the balance of justice but the jury.

As Auden wrote later, "A man has a distinctive personal scent ... A crowd has a generalized stink. The public is odorless."

The Chimeras

Absence of heart – as in public buildings,
Absence of mind – as in public speeches,
Absence of worth – as in goods intended for the public,




Are telltale signs that a chimera has just dined
On someone else; of him, poor foolish fellow,
Not a scrap is left, not even his name.




Indescribable – being neither this nor that,
Uncountable – being any number,
Unreal – being anything but what they are,




And ugly customers for someone to encounter,
It is our fault entirely if we do;
They cannot touch us; it is we who will touch them.




Curious from wantonness – to see what they are like,
Cruel from fear – to put a stop to them,
Incredulous from conceit – to prove they cannot be,




We stroke or kick or measure and are lost:
The stronger we are the sooner all is over;
It is our strength with which they gobble us up.




If someone, being chaste, brave, humble,
Get by them safely, he is still in danger,
With pity remembering what once they were,




Of turning back to help them. Don’t.
What they were once was what they would not be,
Not liking what they are not is what now they are.




No one can help them; walk on, keep on walking,
And do not let your goodness self-deceive you:
It is good that they are but not that they are thus.        

                                  

W. H. AUDEN (1951)