war, politics, and disappearing poetry This is nonsense, albeit memorable nonsense. Yet to start adducing specific con-
trarycases (the Abbey Theatre, perhaps?) to refute the Defence’s claim is to mistake
the kind of game being played. Such a resonant assertion is more thorough-
goingly nonsensical. ‘[M]aterially’ writes a considerable leeway into the assertion
of unchangeability: just what kind of matter matters? More importantly, without
the arts a large part of what Auden calls ‘the history of man’ would have gone
unrecorded. But, most extremely, the ‘history of man’,so defined,ceasestobe
intelligible as the history of man, and ‘history’ and ‘man’ in such a context become
nonce-words. Again, history and politics seem to be exerting a pressure on art, and
on writings about art, which puts sense, self-protectively, to flight.
Sense and efficacy are, however, welcomed back in the third and final section of
Auden’s elegy for Yeats—but more in religious rather than political terms. In this
the poem participates in a lengthy tradition in the English elegy—Gray’s ‘Elegy
Written in a Country Churchyard’ is perhaps the best-known example—where
acceptance and consolation, or at least their appearance, are achieved by means of an
equivocation between politics and religion. Now less conversational and consciously
imitative of Yeatsian verse, Auden’s poem can talk of time’s capacities for worship,
forgiveness, and pardon; and the poet is again accorded very considerable powers:
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;
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.This final attitude appears as an extraordinary fusion or confusion of Nietzschean
tragic gaiety—which W. B. Yeats himself endorsed, most particularly in ‘Lapis
Lazuli’—and Christianity. Auden’s espousal of Christianity in 1940 is incubating
here, shadowing the larger shift in commitments as we move from earlier to later
Auden. There is something quasi-biblical—suggestive of swords turned to plough-
shares—in the turning of the curse into wine, and the springing up of oases in
deserts. Moreover, ideas of imprisonment and freedom—man in the prison of his
mortal flesh—are held loftily at metaphorical or metaphysical height, necessarily
keeping at a distance more troubling, more literal, and more political senses of these
ideas. The move away from the political is further underlined with the removal,^23
(^23) For an account of this textual change, see Robinson,Poetry, Poets, Readers, 48.