helen goethals
stages of the War, Orwell had argued that a sense of community would provide the
connectionbetween the individual and the rest of humanity:
People sacrifice themselves for the sake of fragmentary communities—nation, race, creed,
class—and only become aware that they are notindividuals in the very moment when they
are facing bullets. A very slight increase of consciousness and their sense of loyalty could be
transferred to humanity itself, which is not an abstraction.^33
But the transfer did not occur, either poetically or politically. The end of the
Second World War shaded into the Cold War; belief in the individual and loyalty to
fragmentary communities became barriers to any real sense of common humanity.
‘Only connect’: E. M. Forster’s words resonate throughout the history of the
twentieth century, reminding us that failure to connect with others leads to war and
man-made death. The ‘terrible rain’, the ‘rain of ruin’, that characterized the last
phase of the War was not heaven-sent but, as Auden pointed out, a human tragedy,
resulting from a series of entirely human choices:
For the present stalks abroad
Like the past and its wronged again
Whimper and are ignored,
And the truth cannot be hid:
Somebody chose their pain,
What needn’t have happened did.^34‘What needn’t have happened did’: Auden continued to write (though in England
he was little read) because, with Emerson, he believed that ‘There is no calamity
which right words will not begin to redress.’^35 The wronged—civilians in Japan
or Iraq—suffer because no one connects with their suffering. During and after the
Second World War, the poets did not make enough political and poetic connections.
They gave the War a number of local habitations, but they failed to give it a name.
(^33) Orwell, ‘Notes on the Way’, 32.
(^34) Auden, ‘A Walk After Dark’, inCollected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber,
1976), 346.
(^35) Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Eloquence’, inComplete Works, vii, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson
(Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1903), 64.