war, politics, and disappearing poetry it altogether more difficult to refute: ‘Nothing I wrote against Hitler prevented one
Jewbeing killed. Nothing I wrote made the war stop a minute sooner.’^27
Theimmediatecontext—Auden having so recently left Europe, then on the
brink of war, for America—has, like Auden’s own poem, a strong element of
nonsense. It is difficult to imagine a more serious recognition of the poet and his
political responsibility than the question asked of Auden’s seeking refuge in the
United States by Sir Jocelyn Lucas, MP, in the House of Commons on 13 June
- Yet, in a bizarre misprision ofHenry V, the government minister, in his reply,
thought he was being asked about the sportsman H. W. (‘Bunny’) Austin, currently
representing Oxford abroad at tennis.^28 The situation resembles something out of
Alice: anyone for tennis?
The other context for Auden’s elegy is, of course, the life and works of Yeats,
the poet who, according to the first line of Auden’s poem, himself ‘disappeared in
the dead of winter’. Yeats’s long writing career managed nearly every possible view
of the relation between poetry and politics. The elusive ambiguity of his account
of ‘Easter, 1916’, with its oxymoronic refrain memorializing a ‘terrible beauty’,^29
provoked Auden’s Public Prosecutor to note sarcastically that ‘To succeed at such
a time in writing a poem which could offend neither the Irish Republican nor
the British Army was indeed a masterly achievement.’ In seeming contradiction
of such a stance, late in his life Yeats was wondering, ‘Did that play of mine send
out|Certain men the English shot?’^30 Yeats, moreover, was the writer who made
poetry literally disappear: when in 1936 he published his notoriousOxford Book of
Modern Verse 1892–1935, the poets of the Great War, pre-eminently Wilfred Owen,
were not there. More oddly and accurately, they were both there and not there,
since a goodly portion of Yeats’s ‘Introduction’ was given over to a discussion of
their absence: following Matthew Arnold in the nineteenth century, Yeats asserted
that ‘passive suffering is not a theme for poetry’. And Yeats went on to offer this
most extraordinary anecdote in defence of tragic joy:
Florence Farr returning third class from Ireland found herself among Connaught Rangers
just returned from the Boer War who described an incident over and over, and always with
loud laughter: an unpopular sergeant struck by a shell turned round and round like a dancer
wound in his own entrails. That too may be a right way of seeing war, if war is necessary; the
way of the Cockney slums, of Patrick Street, of theKilmainham Minut,ofJohnny I hardly
knew ye, of the medievalDance of Death.^31
It may be; by whatever class and way one travels, it may not.
(^27) Auden, quoted in Charles Osborne,W.H.Auden:TheLifeofaPoet(London: Eyre Methuen,
1980), 291.
(^28) The incident is recounted in Carpenter,W. H. Auden, 291–2.
(^29) W. B. Yeats, ‘Easter, 1916’, inThe Poems, ed. Daniel Albright (London: Dent, 1990), 228–30.
(^30) Yeats, ‘Man and Echo’, ibid. 392.
(^31) Yeats, ‘Introduction’, inidem(ed.),The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892–1935(Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1936), pp. xxxiv and xxxv.