Cultural Cohesion Read Online Free PDF Page B

Comedy are a set of disciplines so strict that lyricism has no freedom to indulge itself: when it happens, it happens as a natural consequence of stating the truth. For the educated man, there is a moment of his early acquaintanceship with Dante when he realizes that all he has slowly taught himself to enjoy in poetry is everything that Dante has grown out of. A comparable moment of fear is to be had with Auden, when we understand that his slow change through the 1940s entails a renunciation of the art-thrill, and that the Audenesque dazzle is forever gone. For a poet to lose such a talent would have been a misfortune. For a poet to give it up was an act of disciplined renunciation rarely heard of in English.
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    A brief recapitulation of Auden’s innovations in technical bravura is worth making at this point. Unlike Brecht, who wrote both Die Moritat von Mackie Messer and Die Seeräuber-Jenny in the year of Auden’s first privately printed booklet, Auden never met his Kurt Weill. He met Britten, but the results were meagre. It is no denigration of Isherwood to say that if, of his two admired artistic types, Auden had teamed up with the Composer instead of the Novelist, modern English musical history would have been transformed. As it was, Auden’s talent as a lyricist was never developed: the songs for Hedli Anderson had the melody-defeating line-turnovers of ordinary poems, and his activities as a librettist—whether writing originals for Stravinsky or translating The Magic Flute —seem to me frustrating in the recognizable modern English manner. Auden had command of a linear simplicity that would have suited the lyric to perfection. As it was, however, he stuck mainly to poetry: and anyway it’s probable that the pressure of his homosexual indirectness would have distorted his linear simplicity as thoroughly as, and less fruitfully than, it dislocated his pictorial integrity. Alone with pencil and paper, Auden was free to explore his technical resources. They were without limit, Mozartian. Auden mastered all the traditional lyric forms as a matter of course, bringing to some of them—those which had been imported from rhyme-rich languages and for good reasons had never flourished—the only air of consummate ease they would ever possess. At the same time he did a far more thorough job than even vers libre had done of breaking down the last vestiges of the artificial grip the lyric still had on the written poem. He produced apprehensible rhythmic unities which were irregular not only from line to line but within the lines themselves. Finally he penetrated within the word, halting its tendency towards slur and contraction, restoring its articulated rhythmic force. This is the technical secret behind his ability to sustain the trimeter and tetrameter over long distances, driving them forward not along a fixed latticework of terminal and internal rhymes but with an incessant modulation across the vowel spectrum and the proliferating concatenated echoes of exploded consonantal groups.
    Hazlitt said that Burke’s style was as forked and playful as the lightning, crested like the serpent. Everybody sensitive to poetry, I think, has known the feeling that Auden’s early work, with its unmatched technical brilliance, is an enchanted playground. The clear proof of his moral stature, however, is the way he left the playground behind when all were agreed that he had only to keep on adding to it and immortality would be his.
    Auden’s later books are a long—and sometimes long-winded—penitence for the heretical lapse of letting art do his thinking for him. In Homage to Clio, About the House, City Without Walls , and Epistle to a Godson he fulfils his aim of suppressing all automatic responses. A blend of metres and syllabics, his austere forms progressively empty themselves of all mesmeric flair. Auden conquers Selfhood by obliterating talent: what