Cultural Cohesion Read Online Free PDF

vocabulary of espionage—a vocabulary which was a matter of life and death to those from whom he borrowed it—seemed then, and can still seem now, trivial beyond forgiveness. It’s worth remembering, though, that Auden was in a war too, and needed to hide himself just as deep. And his war had been going on since time out of mind.
    To use his own phrase, the wicked card was dealt: in the face of totalitarianism, homosexuality was no longer a valid image for collective action. The world was not a school and adolescence was at long last over. Auden’s exile began in earnest. In New Year Letter we learned that those hunted out of ordinary life are “wild quarry,” but are granted the privilege of themselves becoming hunters—hunters of the past. New Year Letter is one of the synthetic works by which Auden accepted the responsibility of comprehending European culture—an acceptance which was to lead him in the course of time to his position as the most variously erudite poet since Goethe. The Strong Man had faded out and the Dictator was in control, leaving
    Culture on all fours to greet
    A butch and criminal elite
    which is as clear, and personal, an image of violation as you could wish.
    The innocence of young love retained its purity through knowledge, of itself and of the multiple past which justified the pluralist political dream—now solely an ideal, and more radiant for that—of the Just City.
    White childhood moving like a sigh
    Through the green woods unharmed in thy
    Sophisticated innocence
    To call thy true love to the dance.
    In Another Time , his collection of lyrics from that period, Auden ushered in the new decade with a reiteration of his solitude:
    Ten thousand soldiers marched to and fro:
    Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me.
    The sentries were still walking the ridges. During the long decade of warfare and recovery they gradually and mysteriously grew fewer and less imbued with missionary zeal. In the decade between Another Time and Nones Auden seems to have faced the fact that art, politically speaking, has no future, only a past. Whatever Auden the person was up to, Auden the poet had begun to accept and love the world. He no longer thought of homosexuality as newness—just a permanent apartness. From Nones the diligent stylistic analyst will deduce that the poet’s studies of The Oxford English Dictionary had got as far as the letter C. The lover of his poetry will find that the period of dialectical tension has come to an end. Often taken as a gratuitous glibness, Auden’s later insistence that all his poetry put together had not saved a single Jew was already a plain fact. Poetry, he had said even before the 1930s were over, makes nothing happen. In Nones there was sardonic realism about love but any idealism about it had been banished. What idealism there was was all about art, and the eternal order which art formed outside history.
    As a mind, Auden curved away from the purely Germanic culture and developed a growing kinship with the all-embracing Latin one, of which he is indeed the true modern representative in English after Eliot. Despite his domicile in Austria and his involvement with German opera, his final affinity appears to have been with the thought of Valéry—whose shelf of Gallimard paperbacks is the closest contemporary parallel to Auden’s preoccupations with the aphorism and the ideal order of creativity.
    In Christianity Auden found forgiveness for sin. But to redeem the luxuriance of his early cleverness he had to work out his own cure, and as with Dante the cure was technical . Holding his art to be a sacrament, Dante acted out his penitence in the form of technical behaviour. For the early sin of rhyming Christ’s name with a dirty word he makes recompense in The Divine Comedy by never rhyming it with anything except itself—the only word to be so treated. The triadic symmetries of The Divine