Auden’s Public Voice

Also: The life and work of J.B. Ballard, the truth about the French Resistance, the Bible’s enslaved scribes, the problem with interactive art, and more.

Joseph Bottum has an excellent review of Alan Jacobs’s edited and annotated edition of W.H. Auden’s 1955 collection The Shield of Achilles in the latest issue of The Washington Examiner. What was so unique about Auden? “Auden didn’t just see words,” Bottum writes. “He felt them, tasted them, smelled them in all their varied social, tonal, and intellectual registers”:

To read him is to realize that he was possessed by a raging sort of synesthesia, that strange psychiatric condition that mixes the senses so that Fridays are experienced as the color yellow, music as smelling like burnt toast, or the feel of sandpaper as tasting like vinegar.

In the end, though, isn’t that insane? Isn’t it madness to take words as things you can hold in your hand? Things you can bang together to make an obscure music? A 1937 poem, “As I Walked Out One Evening,” opens as a parodic ballad and somehow morphs into horror:

The glacier knocks in the cupboard

The desert sighs in the bed,

And the crack in the tea-cup opens

A lane to the land of the dead.

Such lines, Auden’s friend Hannah Arendt once declared, pitch themselves “against all that is most unsatisfactory in man’s condition,” convinced “that the gods spin unhappiness and evil things to mortals so that they may be able to tell the tales and sing the songs.” But she saw the madness the muse demands, and she understood that the cost of such poetry was mental suffering. “God knows,” Arendt cried at her friend’s death, “the price is too high and no one in his right mind could be willing to pay it knowingly.”

Out of all that, Auden built the public voice we have lacked in the decades after him. His poetry had its share of private moments and private jokes (“The Platonic Blow, by Miss Oral,” for example). But when Auden spoke, it was a public event and public pronouncement.

I think it’s true, as Bottum writes, that “whatever that public voice was, it reached something like its peak in the title poem of Auden’s 1955 collection,” but this voice not only required a poet like Auden—a poet of whom readers could say, as Bottum writes, “whether we like his poetic techniques or not, his politics or not, his religious views or not, we agree that this is a genuine and important poet, enriching the tongue we speak and read—but also something of a shared culture, something we don’t have any more in the States.