A liberating influence

Większość prac krytycznych poświęconych poezji Audena, na które trafiłam, budzi we mnie przemożne poczucie niezręczności, jak gdybym przyłapała autorów na tym, że nie za bardzo wiedzą, co napisać. Jak na razie chlubnym wyjątkiem była książka R. Victorii Arany W.H.Auden's Poerty: Mythos, Theory and Practice, a teraz mam przed sobą drugą budującą pozycję: Auden and After. The Liberation of Poetry 1930-1941 Francisa Scarfe'a. Esej napisany w 1941 roku może wydawać się zdezaktualizowany, przecież Auden wówczas nie napisał jeszcze swoich najważniejszych wierszy, ale mimo wszystkich ograniczeń i błędnych ścieżek, oraz "negatywizmu" (jak przyznaje sam autor), zawiera bardzo trafny obraz poezji Audena, do którego nikt, w moim odczuciu, nic istotnego nie dodał. Esej Scarfe'a potwierdza moją intuicję, że poeta, jak każdy człowiek, nie zmienia się w ciągu życia, tylko idzie swoją własną drogą, i ta droga jest od początku widoczna dla kochającego oka, jakim, niewątpliwie, było krytyczne oko Scarfe'a ("It adds a precious seeing to the eye; a lover's eyes will gaze an eagle blind", Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost).

Kilka cytatów, które wydają mi się szczególnie trafne, głębokie lub rozczulające:

He presents the bustle and humbug and smell of modern life by his capacity for mythological thinking, his feeling for all sorts of places, all sorts of people into whose life he has not penetrated but which he intuitively understands, his love of make-believe, his power for brutal generalization which gives point to many fragments of observation, and gives body to his personal beliefs. 

One of the most curious things about Auden is that in spite of his emphasis on psychology, on close examination his poetry is not particularly introspective [...] And it is also noticeable that while his poetry is "about chaps", there is very little about individual chaps and much more about people in general. 

The pseudopsychology, by which disease is represented purely as defense-mechanism and selfishness, leads Auden very often to treat suffering cruelly as though it were a joke. As for Freud, it is amusing to see that a poet who professes immense admiration for Dryden (that poet whom nobody reads, and who is out of the direct line of English poetry, and who, once again, was revived not by Auden but by Eliot, to whom he is better suited) - it is amusing to see this pseudo-classical poet, who is as different from Dryden as an octopus from a whale, holding a Freudian and ultra-romantic conception of the poet. 

Even Auden's Geography (which is one of his main assets: his poems carry us round the world in no time) is psychic, and it is his interpretation of places such as Dover, Iceland and Spain, which led me to use the term 'Psychic Geography'. 

Even his love poems seem to be about other people: he is a poet turned outwards. It is his being 'turned outwards' which accounts for much of his sermonizing. 

The main question now is, why has Auden had such a penetrating influence on the younger writers? A painter recently said to me: 'If I can paint a circle and two splashes of red, and regard my work as complete, I owe that to Picasso.' The same applies to Auden: he has been a liberating influence who gave a younger writers a self-confidence which they might otherwise have had to fight for dearly. Auden broadened into a highway the path which had been hewn into convention and hypocrisy by Eliot, Pound, Owen and the verslibristes. But he did more. The preceding generation was composed largely of intellectual poets - Eliot, Pound, Graves, Riding, Read, the Sitwells - and it is Auden who broke down the new snobbery of intellectualism which was in danger of creating a minority-poetry. He also enlarged, quite definitely, the poetry-reading public. The most suggestible of poets we have had for a long time, he was able to synthesize in his work an enormous amount of the achievements and methods of past writers. Reacting to numerous influences, he was able to enlarge for younger writers the vocabulary, syntax, rhythm and imagery of poetry. That is why so many of the younger poets are accused of 'deriving' from Auden, when it is not the case. Most often they have observed his methods and have used them in their own way. The truth is that, in a sense, Auden has done all this at his own expense, almost to his own detriment. What has happened is that he has not created his own recognizable manner, as Eliot did. He has created 'style which is no style' [...].  

Auden has a host of manners, good and bad. I do not propose to examine them: the pretentious but effective telegraphese of the 'Paid on Both Sides' which passes into the impressionist manner of some of his poems; his 'cine-style' which is a circular view, as the French say, on a whole landscape, town or country in a few lines; that style which is artificially tough and resembles Hemingway; another style in which he heaps up a series of abstractions, culminating in some of his American poems which, with their personified passions, suggest that this writer is lapsing into the eighteenth century and forgetting what passion is; those obvious devices, internal rhyme, half-rhyme, assonance, sprung-rhythm, the omission of pronouns, verbs and other desirable parts of speech, his puns, his conceits, his incorrect and slipshod epithets which startle momentarily, and all types of slang and private jargon: most of these things have already been adequately reviewed by other critics. It is not the presence of these things which creates the particular climate of Auden's poetry; it is rather the co-existence of them. [...]  

Any one poem of Auden is likely to be as much a mixed bag as any one of his books, and his books, in their strange juxtaposition of subject and tone, are rather like a cinema crowd emerging, from the stalls, the boxes and the pit, in a confused and democratic mass through the same exit. [...] Eliot, already so unclassical by the purest standards, is a champagne to a cocktail when compared with Auden. 

What are the real qualities of Auden? One of them is certainly an imaginative interest in the way people live. Even if he misinterprets, as in the case of Honeyman, he is not far wrong in his background. [...] 

And he has also a realization of the vastness and oneness of the human scene. We have seen already that he has no one-track mind: he does not see Spain as an isolated phenomenon, but a symbol of the consciousness of the world, and he usually treats any subject, however small, in its broadest implications.[...]  

Thirdly, his naiveness, in spite of his sometimes heartless jibes and his intellectual leg-pulling, has remained unspoiled, and he is capable of expressing a primitive and pure feeling [...] 

Forthly, Auden has also the vast, living vocabulary which is essential to any poet who wants to be of his time and of the future. He is enabled by this to write on many levels. He is also sensitive (much more than many who have followed him) to the musical qualities of words, though he has shown a tendency to fall rhythmically into rather set patterns [...] 

The most important point about Auden's style is that, for good or ill, he has tried to write poetry very close to common speech, and that he has succeeded. Generally speaking, one might say that in his early poems he tried to express a fairly universal, and in any case a second-hand, subject-matter in an intensely personal style, and since then he has moved towards a more personal subject-matter and a more impersonal style. His ideas are being more and more imprinted with his own particular twist of mind, and one sees increasingly that he is quite incapable of orthodoxy of any kind.