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378 The twentieth century: 1900–45
Its nuts need oil, carbon chokes the valves,
The excess sugar of a diabetic culture
Rotting the nerve of life.
These lines illustrate a further characteristic use of language in thirties
poetry: the use of the definite article ‘the’. It is, for instance, present in
the already quoted opening lines of Consider. The word ‘the’ suggests
something familiar and recognisable. The thirties poets regularly present
a clinical catalogue of familiar objects, places, and ideas. Readers feel
comfortable with familiar objects but their perception is challenged
by placing the objects in unfamiliar contexts, giving a new perspective.
The listing style does not always clarify how one object or place or
idea relates to another. The poem retains an ambiguity which the
readers have to elaborate for themselves.
At the end of the 1930s, poets looked back on the decade and tried
to evaluate the rapid and radical changes that had taken place. In the
poem Ist September 1939, W.H. Auden wrote:
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty Second Street,
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade.
Auden, somewhat disillusioned, emigrated to America and during
the following thirty years his poetry became more personal and more
spiritual. It also came to reflect a belief that poetry cannot by itself
create a better world even when it attempts to communicate with a
wider reading public. One wry conclusion which Auden reached at
the end of the 1930s was that, as he put it in the poem In Memory of
W.B. Yeats, ‘poetry makes nothing happen’.
Later in his career, Auden wrote: ‘Poets are, by the nature of their
interests and the nature of artistic fabrication, singularly ill-equipped
to understand politics or economics.’ This affirmation, in an essay
(The Poet and the City, in The Dyer’s Hand, 1962), effectively
undermines and questions the commitment of a generation. The
question remains as to how much its political idealism was subjective