Something went out of public life the day that W.H. Auden died in 1973 at age 66. Oh, there were still people writing poetry, still journals publishing it, still a section labeled “Poetry” in high school textbooks, still a cultural lip service paid to the old literary endeavor. But after the death of Auden, nothing in poetry seemed much to come to any good. We put out the stars, and swept the wood.
After Auden, English speakers no longer had what they had for 200 years, from at least Alexander Pope to Robert Frost: a name, a picture, a public figure to point at and say, Yes, whether we like his poetic techniques or not, his politics or not, his religious views or not, we agree that this is a genuine and important poet, enriching the tongue we speak and read. The settled-upon cultural place of poetry was still there, for a little longer, but the place itself was vacant. Public poetry emptied out with Auden’s passing, and no one could fill it in again.
The recent publication of an annotated edition of The Shield of Achilles, the National Book Award-winning volume Auden published in 1955, is a reminder of just how good Auden actually was — and of what it once meant to speak with the public voice of poetry. Expertly annotated and introduced by Alan Jacobs, a widely published professor at Baylor, the book contains Auden’s work in the years after his 1951 Nones. Including the completion of his poem-cycle of canonical hours begun in that earlier collection, the book contains 28 poems, with all the usual Audenesque tricks.
Thus, for example, the collection’s first section (which Auden labels “Bucolics”) opens with a strange and difficult poem, built of three- and four-foot lines, that ranges in diction from the ironically casual “our First Dad” to such science words as teleost fish and arthropod, and throws in toward the end a mention of anamnesis, the pseudo-philosophical claim of remembering past lives. Or, in the second poem, “Woods,” we find a reference to the 15th-century Italian painter Piero di Cosimo, followed shortly by the lines “if you take / A snapshot at a picnic, O how short / And lower-ordersy the Gang will look.” And if there aren’t many poets who would toss off the jokey irony of “lower-ordersy,” there are even fewer who would dare to do so in a poem that opens with Renaissance painting and ends with the aphorism, “A culture is no better than its woods.”
Auden didn’t just see words. He felt them, tasted them, smelled them in all their varied social, tonal, and intellectual registers. To read him is to realize that he was possessed by a raging sort of synesthesia, that strange psychiatric condition that mixes the senses so that Fridays are experienced as the color yellow, music as smelling like burnt toast, or the feel of sandpaper as tasting like vinegar.
In the end, though, isn’t that insane? Isn’t it madness to take words as things you can hold in your hand? Things you can bang together to make an obscure music? A 1937 poem, “As I Walked Out One Evening,” opens as a parodic ballad and somehow morphs into horror:
The glacier knocks in the cupboard
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.
Such lines, Auden’s friend Hannah Arendt once declared, pitch themselves “against all that is most unsatisfactory in man’s condition,” convinced “that the gods spin unhappiness and evil things to mortals so that they may be able to tell the tales and sing the songs.” But she saw the madness the muse demands, and she understood that the cost of such poetry was mental suffering. “God knows,” Arendt cried at her friend’s death, “the price is too high and no one in his right mind could be willing to pay it knowingly.”
Out of all that, Auden built the public voice we have lacked in the decades after him. His poetry had its share of private moments and private jokes (“The Platonic Blow, by Miss Oral,” for example). But when Auden spoke, it was a public event and public pronouncement. His “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” (1939) concludes:
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.
He described his Christianity as a landscape:
I know nothing of
Either, but when I try to imagine a faultless love
Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur
Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.
Even where he is difficult to grasp, he speaks in a public voice, as when he ends a poem about the collapse of civilization with a vision of apocalyptic otherness:
Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.
And he tells us of nature’s moral structure:
The Hidden Law does not deny
Our laws of probability,
But takes the atom and the star
And human beings as they are,
And answers nothing when we lie.
There’s something here that 20th-century poetry was losing: Alexander Pope’s moral assurance, Lord Tennyson’s public confidence — but cast in the modern mixed idiom of jazziness and learning that T.S. Eliot had established a generation before Auden.
And whatever that public voice was, it reached something like its peak in the title poem of Auden’s 1955 collection. “The Shield of Achilles” draws on the story in Book 18 of the Iliad, where the nymph Thetis, mother of Achilles, asks the blacksmith god Hephaestus to forge for her son armor to replace what his friend Patroclus had lost to the Trojan prince Hector. And “She looked over his shoulder / For vines and olive trees,” for “ritual pieties” and “Men and women in a dance / Moving their sweet limbs.” She looked for the gentle scenes the god had hammered onto the shield in Homer’s original account.
But she finds instead that Hephaestus has shaped “An artificial wilderness / And a sky like lead” for the shield’s decoration. And interspersed with the shorter-lined stanzas of Thetis’s dismay are stanzas about the barren, lawless, violent world — the modern world — that the god foresees. His metal pictures end with a brutal boy:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who’d never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.
This is as great a moral statement as the second half of the 20th century provided. This is the public voice, spoken with authority.
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The question, of course, is where that authority comes from. In Book 10 of the Republic, Plato has the ideal city banish poets. The philosopher’s reasons are complex and much disputed, but one way to think about it is to ask that question of authority — for it is authority without responsibility. The poet provides no political governance; “Poetry makes nothing happen,” as Auden himself declared. And so poetry is a lure and distraction, a phantom and illusion that leads the young astray from the work of political society.
But W.H. Auden — in his genius, in his synesthesia that felt words like stones in his hand, in his mad suffering — grasped a source for the authority of his public voice that lay outside the political state. He heard the law built into grammar. He heard the connections that language makes independent of those who use that language. He heard the truth of words.
Joseph Bottum is a writer in the Black Hills of South Dakota and co-founder of the newsletter Poems Ancient and Modern.
