This review was published in the Summer 2024 issue of the Ver Poets members’ newsletter, Ver Poets Poetry World. To join Ver Poets and receive a free copy of the newsletter together with the other benefits of membership visit their website here.
Last year, as well as airing Four Sides of Seamus Heaney to mark the 10th anniversary of the poet’s death (reviewed in the Spring Issue of Ver Poets Poetry World), BBC Radio 4 also broadcast Three Faces of WH Auden, a series of three half-hour programmes compiled by the poet Michael Symmons Roberts to mark the 50 years since Auden died. Still available on BBC Sounds, the programmes examine Auden as a political poet, a religious poet and a love poet.
Among the contributors are Alan Bennett, Alexander McCall Smith, author of What W. H. Auden Can Do for You, Rowan Williams (the former Archbishop of Canterbury is himself a poet), Katherine Bucknell, a founder of the W. H. Auden Society and editor of Auden’s juvenilia as well as Christopher Isherwood’s diaries, the English poets Hannah Sullivan and Zaffar Kunial, and the American poet Carl Phillips. There are also recordings of the Auden himself.
Roberts travels to Austria—to the house in Kirchstetten, now a museum, where Auden spent the summers away from New York, and to Vienna to interview academics researching Auden’s time in Kirchstetten—though presumably budgetary constraints have him talking about the painting, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, in the Breughel Room at Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum (which Auden visited) rather than in the Musée des Beaux Arts in Brussels, where it actually hangs and after which Auden’s poem was named.
Inevitably, Three Faces begins with Auden’s famously lined face, which he himself described as like ‘a wedding cake left out in the rain’ (David Hockney’s observation, as recounted by Alan Bennett, was altogether earthier). It wasn’t the result, as I’d thought, of years of hard living, but partly due to a medical condition called Touraine-Solente-Golé syndrome. Roberts acknowledges that the sheer range of ‘one of the most industrious, polymathic, multi-faceted poets of the twentieth century’ makes it impossible to sum up Auden’s work in three programmes, although as Auden was fond of systems (he used to draw up timetables for his day) he hopes that he would at least approve of the series’ structure.
Auden’s period as a political poet and leader of the British cultural left during the 1930s, ‘that low, dishonest decade’, did not last for long. It began with a visit to Germany and started to decline after he travelled to the Spanish Civil War. Katherine Bucknell believes that it was reality that changed him; and Auden himself said that he had been writing about things he didn’t know enough about. It was not only his views that Auden changed, of course, but also his poems, frequently revising them after publication, or even suppressing them—most famously in the case of “Spain 1937” and “September 1, 1939”. He had already altered the ending of the latter (now described as one of his most read and quoted poems) from ‘We must love one another or die’ to ‘We must love one another and die’ on the grounds that the original version was dishonest, even if more effective. Auden the great phrasemaker came to distrust rhetoric. Zaffar Kunial points out that the famous dictum in “In Memory of W B Yeats” that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’ is an expression not of poetry’s powerlessness, but of its strength, given the terrible things that were made to happen by dictators who used rhetoric and propaganda as a weapon. Poetry, the poem goes on to say, ‘survives / In the valley of its making … A way of happening, a mouth.’ (The same point is made in an extensive discussion of the poem in Kamran Javadizadeh’s Close Readings podcast, in which fellow American academic, Robert Volpicelli, who has written a book called Transatlantic Modernism and the US Lecture Tour, cites a letter Auden wrote saying how ashamed he felt to have roused the audience with a rhetorical after-dinner speech about the Spanish Civil War. Although, as the BBC programme says, Auden wrote the poem on the voyage out to America, the middle section, which contains these lines, was added when the poem was republished shortly after the speech.) Although Auden continued to deal with political issues, he did so more obliquely in later work, such as “The Fall of Rome” or “The Shield of Achilles”.
His interest in religion began as the result of a sudden, powerful experience in June 1933 described in “A Summer Night”, the poem that starts, ‘Out on the lawn, I lie in bed, / Vega conspicuous overhead’, though it would be wrong to call it a conversion, since—as the programme says—Auden had been confirmed in the Church of England when he was 13 and subsequently lost interest rather than his faith itself. Some of his poems are overtly religious, others not, but dialogue between religious faith and doubt is one of the key strands. Rachel Mann, who is a priest as well as a poet, says his religious poetry is ‘infuriatingly simple and complex’. Katherine Bucknell advises against starting with “The Age of Anxiety”, which ‘no one really understands’, and Rowan Williams thinks that Auden saw himself as a sage, but let poetry do its own work, although he was not afraid of very high levels of abstraction. Auden himself was suspicious of poetry that makes direct religious references and Roberts thinks that in his religious poetry Auden is exploratory not explanatory, trying to work something out. For all its difficulty, he says, Auden’s religious poetry is full of humanity and compassion. After his death, it emerged that Auden had lived ‘a life of private generosity, paying people’s medical bills, school and college costs for German war orphans, paying for repairs at a homeless shelter, often at times when he had very little money of his own.’
A different kind of love, eros, is the subject of the final programme. Alan Bennett reads from “O Tell Me the Truth About Love” and we hear Auden himself reading “As I Walked Out One Evening” (‘You shall love your crooked neighbour / With your crooked heart.’) Hannah Sullivan detects a sense of distance and impersonality in the early love poems, which Rachel Mann puts down to his homosexuality, a criminal offence at the time. Alexander McCall Smith thinks this accounts for the poems’ sense of impermanence—“Lullaby”, which is probably his most famous poem, is about the fragility of love that won’t last. As he grew older, Auden became more relaxed in the use of poetic form and wrote with less distance from the subject, as in the poem “Since”, about his relationship with Chester Kallman, which begins: ‘On a mid-December day, / frying sausages / for myself, I abruptly / felt under fingers / thirty years younger the rim / of a steering wheel’.
Although they remained partners, the physical relationship between Auden and Kallman waned. Auden took up with Hugerl, a Viennese car-mechanic and sex-worker, who also burgled houses, including Auden’s own. Auden, it seems, forgave him, always persisting in loving other people (‘If equal affection cannot be, / Let the more loving one be me’). It’s therefore fitting that he’s now most widely known as a love poet. Not only is “Lullaby” his best known poem, but “Funeral Blues”, which was used in Four Weddings and a Funeral (and was Zaffar Kunial’s first proper encounter with Auden), brought him back into popular consciousness.
It may be impossible to do Auden justice in such a short space of time, but these three half-hour programmes make a very good fist of it. Roberts says that Auden is a poet he has always returned to, although different poems have compelled him as he’s grown older. Perhaps not only Auden, but also his readers have their phases.
Stephen Claughton
Stephen Claughton 