I'm reading Auden's 'Collected Poems' at the moment, and it can be a frustrating as well as a rewarding task. For me there's no doubt that he's one of the great Anglo-American poets and one of the cleverest. However, this cleverness can be an obstacle: he sometimes sounds as if he's simply showing off. Auden has infuriated some readers and critics because of this intellectual cleverness — and also because of his wide range of diction and reference, and his poetic uncategorisability: no sooner does he master one form or style, then he perfects another. But whether he writes rhyming quatrains or free verse, lyric or light verse, parody or poetic drama, he is always uniquely Auden.
Like many of Auden's poems, 'Consider This and in Our Time' seems to me clear in its general thrust, but obscure in many of its details — so it's a good poem to study at the start of this blog, I feel. You can find the poem here; it is dated 1930.
When I read a poem for the first time I tend to read it straight off, trying to follow the main tenor of the poem, absorbing its atmosphere, allowing any meaning and musicality to speak directly to me as unconsciously as possible. I try to be open to it and its effect, ridding myself of any previous prejudice I may have had about the author or the poem's style and reputation. Bits I don't understand, or go completely above my head, I don't worry about. I may read it again like this, perhaps two or three times. Then I want to go back and work things out in more detail, look up words and references I don't know, ask questions, paraphrase certain sections. The wonderful thing about a good poem is that you can return to it again and again, and it will reveal more and more.
The general political, social and psychological ruination Auden portrays in 'Consider This and in Our Time' is, I think, fairly clear; what can be difficult is the particular way he writes about it, using words and phrases which may seem puzzling. Who, for instance, is the 'supreme Antagonist, / More powerful than the great northern whale'? Satan? The Devil? And why the specificity and deliberate obscurity of 'the great northern whale', anyhow? And what is 'life's limiting defect', and if it's death, why does Auden choose to describe death in such a ponderous and ironic way? And why do all the six lines which follow 'Long ago, supreme Antagonist' intentionally use a strange and clumsy syntax? Further on in the poem, why is the 'peril' 'polar'? And who are the 'boys' and why are they 'ruined'? And, later still, what's all this about 'fugues', 'irregular breathing', 'alternate ascendencies', 'explosion of mania' and 'classic fatigue'? (They appear to be manifestations of psychological illness.)
How important is it to clarify as far as possible the exact meaning Auden intends, or is it OK to get the general poetic gist? Did you like this poem or not, and why or why not? Or does one need to reread it several times, and try to unravel some of the ambiguities, before one even knows whether one likes it or not? I'm putting these questions to myself, and I invite you also to consider these questions. And I look forward to reading any thoughts and ideas you may have.
I'm particularly impressed by how Auden blends exact, revealing details — 'hawk', helmeted airman', 'cigarette-end smouldering on a border', 'the Sport Hotel', 'in furs, in uniform' — with expressions of a more amorphous and generalised unease (dis-ease?) — 'the powerful forces latent / In soils', 'immeasurable neurotic dread', 'haunted migratory years' etc.
I really like the rant and snipe of this. Only read it once but just wanted to let you know I was interested in your idea of chatting about poems, so I'll be back - as Arnie says ;-)
ReplyDeleteSee you soon, Irene.
DeleteOh,this is such a good idea solitary walker! (sorry, Robert I mean. I mean also Robert). I just wanted to let you know that. I would like to join in once I have read the poem. Thank you for thinking of it!
ReplyDeleteSee you later, Morelle.
DeleteI have never studied Auden, so the things you write about him are unknown to me, but "Funeral Blues" is one of my favorite poems (after "Four Weddings and a Funeral" I confess).
ReplyDeleteLike ireneintheworld I have read this poem once and can feel a tug to go back to it, so I think you chose a good one.
More later.
The 'Funeral Blues' poem is deservedly well known and beautifully crafted, isn't it? Accessible — but not 'simple' when you look at it closely. In comparison, 'Consider' may seem almost deliberately obscure.
Delete"'Consider' may seem almost deliberately obscure."
DeleteExactly. I was thinking that this poem is full of wonderful lines - (Is he the greatest phrase-maker of the 20th century? I only ask. It's probably him or Wallace Stevens.) - which cut like shafts of moonlight (peotry) through what often seems like a wilful obscurity. And it's a very 30s poem, no?
I think you make some very good points here. Manx Dave. I agree this poem is full of great lines — in common with many of Auden's poems. It occurs to me that that other great phrase maker, Dylan Thomas, stands in such contrast: many wonderful lines and phrases, but, beautiful as they may be, are Biblically rhetorical, regressively romantic and lacking intellectual force; Auden's lines, on the other hand, are sound (often underplayed, perfectly-judged, subtle effects) plus meaning wrapped in one package. Anti-romantic and Modernist. Which brings us to the 30s, and that between-the-Wars generation of poets of which Auden was a part: anti-war, to some extent anarchic about politics and society, partly despairing, sometimes apocalyptic. Cue this poem!
DeleteExcellent initiative, Robert. I will be back to engage when current work projects ease up a little.
ReplyDeleteI look forward to reading the posts and thoughts.
Thanks, Roselle. Looking forward to your company along the way.
DeleteWill be following along quietly. So much going on right now for me. Thank you for this path, too.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Am!
DeleteThe 'Old Sport' club, that tiny percentage of the population called the 'Ruling Class', served by the Hoi Polloi who gossip it all out to their nearest and dearest...I really love this whole image. Love how he has set up the POV so that we are flying overhead and seeing all.
ReplyDeleteYes, that panoptic vision in which we share... and 'hawk and 'helmeted airman' just perfectly chosen with the alliteration and connotations of war and hunting/being hunted (airmen can be prey as well as hunters) and aloofness and a keen eye (ref. 'eyes of stoats' later on!)... Those first 13 lines are my favourite section of the poem, I think. The way he creates the atmosphere and milieu of that fag-end, slightly menacing but fatigued society is quite brilliant.
DeleteI must admit that what I most want to know about this poem is what he is referring to in the lines: "More powerful than the great northern whale/ Ancient and sorry at life's limiting defect," especially “life’s limiting defect.” Despite several hours researching on line and reading some dreadfully dull criticism, I still have no idea what it means. I’m not sure the critics know what it refers to, either.
ReplyDeletePersonally, this poem reminds me more of T.S. Eliot than it does Auden, or, at least, Auden’s later poetry, the poetry I was taught at college here in America. In many ways it seems like Auden’s version of Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” No wonder Eliot chose to publish Auden’s works.
That said, there are some great lines in the poem, my favorite being “Supplied with feelings by an efficient band.” That’s a startling way of revealing the group’s lack of true feelings and foreshadows the last lines of the poem. The last two lines of the poem “To disintegrate on an instant in the explosion of mania/ Or lapse for ever into a classic fatigue” seem equally effective, though somewhat derivative of Eliot’s “The Hollow Men.”
It may well be that this poem is more easily understood by English readers (especially in 1940?) than modern American readers considering much of it seems to refer to the English landscape, but I found it nearly impossible to understand many of the references in the poem like “In Cornwall, Mendip, or the Pennine moor/ Your comments on the highborn mining-captains,/Found they no answer, made them wish to die”
If a poem is going to demand hours and hours of outside reading to explicate it, then it should provide insights that justify that kind of investment. Eliot’s “Waste Land” would probably meet that criteria, but I’ll have to admit that I was just plain weary of the “Waste Land” by the time my professors got through explicating it. By the time we finished it most of the students in my class suffered from the same “classic fatigue” Auden describes at the end of this poem. Not sure it’s in the best interest of poets to limit their audience to college English majors.
Thanks so much for this interesting and considered comment, Loren. Your puzzlement about the 'great northern whale', 'life's limiting defect' and the 'highborn mining captains' is certainly shared by me. (I can only add that the three areas of England quoted are mining regions.) It's difficult to find any decent critiques on Auden and, as you say, the few critics there are often disagree with each other anyway.
DeleteGood point about how much time and energy we should put into researching those poems full of obscure references and literary allusions — I agree that, if we don't get the reward, it's fruitless to continue banging one's head against a brick wall!
Yes, you can detect Eliot's influence on this poem, can't you? (Re. Eliot, 'Four Quartets', which I prefer to 'The Waste Land', seems to read agreeably without one being constantly frustrated by the inherent obscurities — that kind of intuitive understanding which Eliot himself wrote about in one of his essays, I believe.)
I don't know that I can be very active here, but I've got this in my feed and will keep my eye out. This poem is one of oh, so many with which I'm not familiar. On a couple read-throughs, I had these thoughts: first, it seems it would be helpful, and maybe necessary, to know the context in which he is writing to get inside the poem. I'm not sure, though, in this case, that it would appeal to me to make the effort. There are some stunning moments (the "ruined boys" line is one for me--it could mean so many things, but it's certainly a resonant phrase), but overall, I feel the poem is suffocating under the weight of all its words. (I don't mean by this that all poems have to be short, this one just seems a bit prolix to me.)
ReplyDeleteHi Susan!
DeleteYes, I think the political context of England (and Europe) in the 1930s is important — as is the literary context of those 1930s poets: Spender, MacNeice etc.
I think there are stunning moments and phrases — but I don't think it's his best poem, though that opening is tremendous.
It just occurred to me last night that Dylan Thomas wrote a poem called 'I See the Boys of Summer in their Ruin', but I think that was written slightly later than Auden's poem.
Re. the prolixity, I'm not sure I completely agree with you, but I do know what you mean! It's probably not as polished as some of his poems (he kept editing and revising all the time — indeed, the 'final' version of this poem had fewer lines than the version I link to), but the neurotic edge to the poem, and its occasional clumsiness, perhaps reflect the state Auden was attempting to convey.
You make a good point about the "neurotic edge," etc. as possibly serving the poem. And he was surely a fine poet, so it's worth considering intention in the form, definitely. I think I may have been a bit disappointed to read an Auden poem that felt a little "lesser" to me.
DeleteIt's just come to me that this poem is quite Shakespearian in feel (the artist/god-like aerial view of human behaviour) — and also in rhythm, as it's written in a loose iambic pentameter!
ReplyDeleteIs the supreme Antagonist "Death," as it first seems, or is it something else, some form of human neurosis? Apathy and indifference?
ReplyDeleteYes — perhaps some anti-life disease of the spirit, silting, strangling and making derelict, beginninng quietly with a rumour, then ending in neurosis (that last 'fatigue' after 'explosion of mania' almost post-coital?)
DeleteLooking at the second stanza I feel that this is too self-indulgent and very of-its-time so that we, 84 yrs later, can't glean a meaning. The confusion of 'who' he's talking to/about, would be solved with just a little key to understand the whole of the rant...for want of a couple of words the poem was lost!
ReplyDeleteI wondered if he was talking to army recruitment, politicians, unionists...and it might take the rest of the month to work it out.
Definitely of its time, but the insidious spread of the disease is timeless, I feel. Fascism, perhaps?
DeleteInteresting idea, Robert. I think that the starting point should be the novel "Moby Dick" and a major crisis. However, we should not forget the fact that Auden was a great admirer of Kafavi- its historical look. A good poet never violates syntax accident. Just such is life.
ReplyDeletebogpan
Now, this is interesting! Melville and Cafavy were two authors with an enormous influence on Auden, I have read. I don't think the 'great northern whale' in this poem is Moby Dick exactly, but resonances abound. Some of the many themes of Melville's great, unique and unclassifiable novel are class, social status, egalitarianism, God, good and evil; he employs all sorts of disparate literary devices, and the book is soaked in Shakespeare and the Bible. It's hard not to see some of these strands in this poem, and in Auden's poems in general.
DeleteFor Auden, Melville's ocean was the barbarous state into which civilisation was always on the edge of relapsing.
Auden's poem 'Herman Melville' contains the line 'Evil is unspectacular and always human.'
The whale has had many symbolic meanings throughout history. Does Melville's whale represent Evil? Brute Nature? An unknowable God? A receptacle for our human fears and anxieties?
Cafavy's historical poems were about decline and decadence — and he was also gay like Auden, of course. Auden said Cafavy had 'a unique tone of voice' and that he was ' a person with a unique perspective on the world' — two phrases which can't help but recall Auden himself.
An idea which also arises is that Auden would have known Spengler's 'The Decline of the West', a work that Eliot much admired — though I have no idea how Auden reacted to it or how much it influenced him.
Auden is one of those poets who makes me feel that I should understand and appreciate his work more than I do. I'm tantalized by all of the intellectual gymnastics, but the poems seldom resonate with me on a personal level — and so it is with this poem. For whatever reason, I've always found some of his essays more interesting than his poetry. Many years ago, I read a very insightful Auden piece about prayer being nothing more than the art of listening, and I also seem to recall that he provided an thoughtful introductory essay to Dag Hammarskjold's "Markings."
ReplyDeleteI look forward to following the new blog and throwing in my two bits here and there. From the comments thus far, it appears that you're off to a great start!
Thanks for finding your way over here, George, and I look forward to hearing your comments as and when. I've always been rather intimidated by Auden too — though reading 'Collected Poems' has thrown up all sorts of surprises.
DeleteIt may amuse you to know that, in starting this discussion, you brought to the foreground for me, along with some Britten I've been listening to, the need to purchase a book of Auden's poems (I chose Selected Poems, for various reasons). I decided to read the selections from his first book of poems, and started in on a read of the one you quote here, which, however, didn't feel familiar until I got to those ruined boys. I've read it through three times now, not enough to get a grip on it, but I found the opening section (would it be called a canto?) enormously appealing for its bird's eye view of the landscape below. As someone else has commented, the line "supplied with feelings by an efficient band" stood out particularly, for me, as an evocation of the hollow woman and man (recognizing that there's a long pedigree for "hollow" about which I know only the barest bit). The contrast to the farmers, listening by radio (I'm presuming) is stark.
ReplyDeleteThough I feel I may get the general gist of the second canto, sowing seeds of dissension into a whirlwind of "immeasurable neurotic dread," I find this section overall opaque. I can make sense of it if I think of demagogues mining discontent to create an angry, frightened mob. I suspect he's observing and commenting on what he sees in his times, but I'm not secure in what I know of his time and place enough to speculate. Yeats' lines, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity," come to mind.
I haven't come to grips at all with the last canto, though I have some generalized sense that the party will soon be over. "It is later than you think."
This is as far as I've got; not very far!
Thanks so much, Susan — this kind of exploratory analysis is just what I'd like this blog to be about! Your Yeats quote seems a perfect echo of Auden's twin states of fatigue and mania.
DeleteRe. the historical and literary context, Britain in the 1930s was in social, political and economic turmoil — in the midst of the Great Slump following the US Stock Market Crash in 1929, and still trying to recover from the aftermath of WW1. There was debt, depression, poverty and unemployment. Very hard hit were the industrial (and mining) areas. George Orwell wrote eloquently about this in 'The Road to Wigan Pier' (1937) — the book graphically portrays the exploitation of young children by mill and mine owners — and Orwell's socialism and concerns about social injustice were also reflected in the work of the four main poets of the time, all on the political left: Auden, Spender, MacNeice and Day-Lewis. In 1936 Nazi Germany was looming and rearmament began. When you throw in a little Freudian psychology as well as Marx, the menacing and doomy atmosphere of those times is powerfully evoked in Auden's poem.
It's key to point out that Auden was obsessed with mines of all sorts (he seems to have developed almost a mythology about mines, differentiating natural caves and caverns from man-made industrial mines, relating hollows and fissures to parts of the human body, seeing symbols of decay and abandoned hope in derelict mine shafts and machinery etc. You could probably dig very deeply into this, bringing in Freudian psychology, his homosexuality etc. — if one had the desire!)
His poems are peppered with references to mines, engines and old industrial relics, and he found the bleak moorland landscape of the English Pennines, and the subterranean limestone landscape of the Yorkshire Dales, evocative and elegiac. In this poem, the three mining areas mentioned have a long history of mining, going back thousands of years — lead mines, copper mines, all kinds of mineral mines, coal mines — hence, I suppose, the mining captains lying in 'barrows', which are ancient burial mounds. Mines have their own self-destruction built in: cheap foreign imports, outdated technologies, sheer exhaustion of the seams (or an enforced Thatcherite closure, to bring us to more recent times!) will inevitably make them redundant sooner or later — as capitalist society itself may also implode?
I see the 'supreme Antagonist' as a death wish, a cunning, cynical, destructive rumour-monger (perhaps an arms trader, or a stockbroker dressed in a sharp city suit!), infecting the population with either accidie or apocalypse.
And those 'handsome and diseased youngsters' and 'ruined boys' sound like that 'beautiful generation' of the 1920s to me — hedonistic, living for today, frenetic, ultimately self-annihilating.
George: many thanks for this thoughtful reply and insights into the poem's Antagonist and ruined boys. Among other things, it's always interesting to learn of a poet's particular obsessions (like the mines) and of course the particularized historical background is immensely useful to "place" the poem. (I know the broad strokes, of course, but that's a quite different thing than the specific local impact.)
DeleteThanks for your follow-up, Susan. Though it's Robert, not George :)
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