johnlyon
from later versions of the third section of this shape-shifting poem, of three stanzas
whichculminate in the politically problematic examples of Kipling and Claudel:
Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique,
Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet.
Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him [Yeats] for writing well.Politics, rather than being addressed, is being written out of this poem in the
interests of higher, vaguer, and more suspect ‘things’, things that poetry apparently
can make happen.
The context of Auden’s life affords an excess of contradictory explanations of
why Auden is in flight from politics in this way. Thus thenon serviamof ‘poetry
makes nothing happen’ is seen to arise from a concession of the failure of the
Republican effort in the Spanish Civil War and a recognition of the shabbiness
of the Republican doings in that war. Alternatively, it is seen as excuse making
subsequent to the callow irresponsibility of the line in ‘Spain 1937’ regarding ‘The
conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessarymurder’, a line famously criticized
by George Orwell, and a line which Auden revised in later versions of that poem.^24
There is also, perhaps, embarrassment at what Auden and Christopher Isherwood
had once regarded as ‘a war all of our very own’,^25 the Sino–Japanese War, a
war which they had gone on to treat merely as a touristic frivolity. Critics, then,
seem to divide, either castigating Auden for his pretension and presumption in
ever supposing that poetry could have a political impact or chastising him for his
irresponsibility in failing to make effective use of what is held to be poetry’s political
power. And when the critics look to what was then the future, in particular the
looming Second World War, the contradictory pattern repeats itself. Critics quote
with disapproval, and go on to offer counter-examples of, Auden’s assertion that ‘I
know that all the verse I wrote, all the positions I took in the thirties, did not save a
single Jew.’^26 Others, especially when Hitler is included in Auden’s assertion, find
(^24) This paragraph offers an incomplete summary of the differing views of the critics cited in
n. 2 above. For an account of the original line in ‘Spain 1937’, its change and Orwell’s criticism, see
Mendelson’s editorial note inEnglish Auden, 425.
(^25) Auden’s words to Christopher Isherwood, quoted in Humphrey Carpenter,W. H. Auden: A
Biography(London: Allen & Unwin, 1981), 225.
(^26) Auden, quoted in Robinson,Poetry, Poets, Readers, 54.