Wystan Hugh AUDEN by Christophe Billan

Sources:

http://www.audensociety.org/
http://www.evene.fr/celebre/biographie/wystan-hugh-auden-1758.ph (in french)
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/127p/
http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc3

Book:

"The dyer's hand and others essays."
In this volume, W. H. Auden assembled, edited, and arranged the best of his prose writing, including the famous lectures he delivered as Oxford Professor of Poetry. The result is less a formal collection of essays than an extended and linked series of observations--on poetry, art, and the observation of life in general. The Dyer's Hand is a surprisingly personal, intimate view of the author's mind, whose central focus is poetry--Shakespearean poetry, in particular--but whose province is the author's whole experience of the twentieth century.

"Forwards and afterwards."
The essays in this collection were written as reviews, mainly for The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker, on books by or about Alexander Pope, Vincent van Gogh, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, and A. E. Housman, or as introductions to editions of the classical Greek writers, the Protestant mystics, Shakespeare, Goethe, Kierkegaard, Tennyson, Grimm and Andersen, Poe, G. K. Chesterton, Paul Valéry, and others. Throughout, these prose pieces reveal the same wit and intelligence--as well as the vision--that sparked the brilliance of Auden's poetry.

"Auden And Christianity: A Spiritual Biography." (Arthur KIRSH)
Famous for his declaration that "Poetry makes nothing happen," W. H. Auden thought quite differently about Christianity, which he regarded as possessing a marvelous power to change human lives. Inexplicably, however, critics have largely neglected the effects of Auden's mature commitment to Christianity. Kirsch remedies that neglect with this much-needed study of how Auden's religious beliefs shaped his artistic vision. He depicts Auden as an often perplexed and frequently heterodox believer, one who wrestled with profound doubts. But whatever his theological irregularities, Auden voiced a Christian faith both intense and poignant in poems such as "For the Time Being" and "Horae Canonicae." And it is a Christian humility and self-discipline that Kirsch sees in Auden's oft-noted metrical virtuosity. Neither a dogmatist nor a homilist, Auden always wrote as one simply overwhelmed at both the one-time miracle of divine love manifest in Jesus and the ongoing miracle of human love expressed in forgiveness and acceptance. A fascinating blending of aesthetics and theology

1° PART : Early Years.

Not long after he began writing poetry at age fifteen, Auden came to understand that words were the medium in which he should work. T.S ELIOT's poetry questioned the recognised English poetic tradition particularly attacking the Shakespearan tradition, but Auden didn't agree with him and developed the conception that the most influential figures of poetic heritage spoke to him directly through their poetry.
He was interested in reviving everyday poetic forms and drew on popular traditions of anonymous poems, skipping rhythms, riddles, ballads and music hall songs.
At the same time, Auden was questioned by growing mass unemployment, the defeat of the German working class and the rise of fascism. He turned to what he imagined to be Marxist politics. In response to this crisis he was searching for a poetry that could play a positive role in such a period. In parallel, Auden, concerned about his homosexuality, developed interest in science and Freudianism. Poetry had to express a real revolt against bourgeois conditions.
Leaving England for Berlin, Auden had taken his poetic inspiration from German culture and particularly the writings of Rainer RILKE.
Auden, however, was soon to rebel against the restrictions on his artistic independence imposed by the limitations of socialist realism, the so-called Marxist aesthetic propounded as a monolithic official doctrine. Despite numerous pieces of advices Auden wrote "Spain" a poem objectifying events that he recoiled from.. "I did not wish to talk about Spain when I returned because I was upset by many things I saw or I heard about.". He faced political and personal contradictions and he tried to distance himself from them. In 1939 he wrote to RILKE: "It is I believe no accident that as the international crisis becomes more and more acute, the poet to whom writers are becoming increasingly drawn should be one who felt that it was pride and presumption to interfere with lives of others (for each is unique and the apparent misfortunes of each may be his very way of salvation)."
It was time for Auden to leave Europe and discover the second part of his life and his work.

Auden and Isherwood.

2° PART: The conversion

When Auden left England with ISHERWOOD he was the most celebrated young poet in England but he knew that his career was at a dead end. All the models for the writing life which he had tried out in the previous decade had come to seem empty. At that stage, Auden's uncertainties were numerous. During the Civil War in Spain he had been shocked and disturbed to see that supporters of the republican party had closed or burned many of Barcelona's churches. The world war in progress caused many situations where people were unashamed of their feelings and attempted to put no civilized face upon them. Auden felt the desire to react against this denial of every humanistic value. Faith and civilizational values became his central preoccupations. He was concerned with the questions he could not answer, with the doubts that his intellectual helpers left unassuaged. Between 1941 and 1947 he wrote many poems traducing these concerns about a civilization in crisis. Among them are to be found "For the time being a Christmas oratorio", "the sea and the mirror: a commentary on the tempest" and" the Age of Anxiety: a baroque eclogue" Beyond these concerns MENDELSON was to note that Auden faced a significant interrogation concerning Art. The presence of a gift implies the activity of a giver. But who or what gives the gift of poetry? Can Art have spiritual significance? Auden specified to his friend Ursula Niebuhr that his poems were about the Christian conception of Art.
Thereafter, as Auden settled into his middle age, his writing began to lose some of its tautness and he turned to the writing of several meditative sequences of shorter poems. In the midst of opera libretti and a great amount of discursive prose he continued to write poems that were remarkable for both their technical skill and their thematic investigations, including "Under Which Lyre" a treatise on aesthetic and moral choices. "In praise of limestone" a nuanced analysis of the nature of human personality. "The shield of Achilles" is probably one of his very greatest poems, which pprobably sums up the maturity of his mind. Auden denounced the excess of modernity in which it is no longer possible to find humanity. An efficient, cold, mechanic and ugly world is turning man into a robot. His juxtaposition of an ideal world and the modern vision creates a feeling of despair and drama.
Between 1965 and 1974 many critics have particularly objected against his tendency to dot his texts with old and disused words. But even if it is usually admitted that these poems are not his greatest accomplishment, there are among them, many which possess great charm and some occasional depth.