THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

one of the most sharply focused poems in the collection, was rejected by Auden who insisted that On this Island be
substituted for the American edition. The poem (later renamed ‘Seascape’) from which both titles derive is concerned
with
[p. 564]
perspectives; it distinguishes the ‘far off’ from a ‘stable here’, but it also leaves a reader of the poems that surround it
free to interpret how its insistent direction, ‘Look’, be applied. Auden may cast himself as a ‘lover of islands’ in his
maritime address to Isherwood, ‘Journey to Iceland’ of 1937, but his view of Iceland is tentative, escapist, and half
idealized. Following the evaporation of Auden’s Marxist enthusiasm for communal action in the 1940s, a continental
pull slackens, insular responses predominate, and ‘unreality’ becomes an emphatically acceptable norm in the
sequence of meditations on Shakespeare’s The Tempest — The Sea and the Mirror (1945). On Prospero’s island, in
contrast to all its earlier foreshadowings in Auden’s verse, ‘flesh and mind | Are delivered from mistrust’ and Ariel,
the ‘unanxious one’, is bidden to entrance and rebuke ‘the raging heart | With a smoother song | Than this rough
world’. In an even later celebration of islands in the fifth of the ‘Bucolics’ (published in The Shield of Achilles in
1955) the shore of a ‘lake turned inside out’ seems ‘cosy’ to the individual who fascinatedly rejoices in ‘that class |
Whose only member is Me’.
Auden’s gradual eschewal of a narrowly political sympathy with the demands of a present community are
countered by new, creative, though sometimes quirky responses to the ‘old masters’ (poets, painters, thinkers, and
composers). In the various critical essays later collected as The Dyer’s Hand (1962) and Forewords and Afterwords
(1973) he can be both infuriating and incisive. The inherited literary tradition equally marks his poetry. The ‘Letter to
Lord Byron’, published in Letters from Iceland in 1937, suggests a real relish for the ‘something light and easy’ (and
the ultimate seriousness) of Don Juan (a text which Auden had taken with him to ‘humourless’ Iceland). Reworkings
and rethinkings of an inherited tradition were especially evident in the verse that emerged in his first American years.
In ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, for example, Auden identifies suffering and ‘its human position’ as a key concern of art
(though in the Brueghel painting of the fall of Icarus to which the poem refers ‘everything turns away | Quite leisurely
from the disaster’). The two elegies to W. B. Yeats and Sigmund Freud (both of 1939 and both written in the tradition
of Milton’s Lycidas) celebrate continuity as much as they mourn the departed and the condition of the age. Yeats’s
words ‘are modified in the guts of the living’ and ‘persuade us to rejoice’ even in ‘a rapture of distress’, while Freud,
the ‘rational voice’ and the demystifier of the human condition, provides the wisdom that ‘to be free | Is often to be
lonely’. Much of Auden’s later work continues the process of bouncing tangentially and experimentally from works of
art. His responses to Shakespeare in The Sea and the Mirror, to Hogarth in the libretto for The Rake’s Progress,
which he and Chester Kallman provided for Stravinsky in 1951, and to Mozart in his free translation (also with
Kallman) of Schickaneder’s libretto to The Magic Flute (1957), all reveal an interfusion of the bawdy, the
commonplace, the unexpected, the evanescent, the magical, and the philosophical.
In spite of his withdrawal from the politics of community into the philosophy (and theology) of individualism,
Auden spoke with a public, if reticent, voice. A
[p. 565]
good deal of his most assured verse emerges from his discovering for himself what Eliot had called an ‘objective
correlative’, that is ‘a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events’ which become the formula for ‘particular’ emotion.
For Auden the imagining or contriving of a landscape serves as a reification of a psychological state or premiss. When
in ‘In Praise of Limestone’ he reflected on karst contours, he sought to typify his own unpredictability, his
elusiveness, even his fondness for change and changing things. Here is a limestone landscape which draws ‘we the
inconstant ones’, one shaped by a rock which dissolves in water and which produces ‘a secret system of caves and
conduits’. The argument of the poem is made up of trickles of thought which seem to appear and disappear as a
speaking voice rises and falls. The worried, heterogeneous, and contrived scenery of the Poems of 1930 is abandoned
for a landscape which is now literally subverted, subverting, and unpredictable. It is a place where joy surprises and
where Eros and Agape, human and divine Love, achieve a conditional but ultimate victory in the imagination:
In so far as we have to look forward
To death as a fact, no doubt we are right: but if
Sins can be forgiven, if bodies rise from the dead
These modifications of matter into
Innocent athletes and gesticulating fountains,
Made solely for pleasure, make a further point:
The blessed will not care what angle they are regarded from,