johnlyon
in the NewRepublic, 8 March 1939, but was in the second published version in
theLondon Mercuryin April of the same year. Around this time Auden was also
writing a prose piece, ‘The Public v. the Late Mr. William Butler Yeats’, for the
Spring 1939 number ofPartisan Review. Though critics contest the priority of the
relation,^20 this prose work and the second section of the elegy are intimately bound
up with one another. Yet readers seeking the clarity of an exposition in discursive
prose are disappointed: in ‘The Public v. the Late Mr. William Butler Yeats’ Auden
divides his voice between that of a Public Prosecutor and a Counsel for the Defence,
staging an imaginary court-room drama.^21 Such a division of voice suggests that
thinking for Auden, rather than being a matter of holding a problem in the mind in
all its complexity and complication, typically involves a process of striking contrary
(and simplifying) attitudes: hence the either/or campery (‘Shall I pluck a flower,
boys,shallIsaveorspend?’^22 ) of Empson’s affectionate ‘Just a Smack at Auden’
remains one of the most important documents in Auden’s critical reception. The
argumentative acumen of neither of Auden’s lawyers inspires much confidence.
It is not entirely clear that they are contesting the same case, and the fictional
context only partly excuses the loose knockabout quality of the ‘exchanges’: this is
a very casual court-room. For all the exactness of some of the characterizations of
Yeats which may be plucked from it—Yeats’s ‘feudal mentality’, for example—the
tendentiousness of the Public Prosecutor’s case is crudely parodic. So the first
brief paragraph begins with a disclaimer that it is the work, not the man, that
is to be judged, and then proceeds immediately to drive thead hominemattack
home: ‘I must only remind you that there is usually a close connection between the
personal character of a poet and his work, and that the deceased was no exception.’
While conflating man and poet, the Public Prosecutor does at least have the merit
of concentrating on Yeats. By contrast, a master ofnon sequitur,theCounselfor
the Defence jumps around in altogether more general, loftier regions. At one point
he is asking—apparently rhetorically—‘He [the Public Prosecutor] has sneered
at the deceased for not taking arms, as if shooting were the only honourable and
useful form of social action. Has the Abbey Theatre done nothing for Ireland?’ Yet
such a question is not allowed to trouble the most famous passage, the passage
most intimately related to the middle section of the Yeats elegy: within a paragraph
Auden, as Counsel for the Defence, is declaring,
For art is a product of history, not a cause. Unlike some other products, technical inventions
for example, it does not re-enter history as an effective agent, so that the question whether
art should or should not be propaganda is unreal. The case for the prosecution rests on the
fallacious belief that art ever makes anything happen, whereas the honest truth, gentlemen,
is that, if not a poem had been written, not a picture painted, not a bar of music composed,
the history of man would be materially unchanged.
(^20) For a discussion of the differing views, see Robinson,Poetry, Poets, Readers, 42.
(^21) Auden, ‘The Public v. the Late Mr. William Butler Yeats’, inEnglish Auden, 389–93.
(^22) Empson, ‘Just a Smack at Auden’, inComplete Poems, 81.