Reading Of The Poem 'Spetember 1, 1939' Written By W. H. Auden In Perscpective Of Russia-Ukraine War And Underlying Theme Of Homosexuality.
Introduction : This blog is a response to the Thinking Activity given by my professor Dr Dilip Barad Sir. In this blog I will be discussing few questions regarding W. H. Auden's poem 'Spetember 1, 1939' with reference to the Russia-Ukraine War which has been started from way back 20th February, 2014 and is still going on like a festering wound on the planet to the date. The war has gone to its peak and is being deemed as the would-be harbinger of the third World War in the world. The horror of the third World War is looming upon the world due to the war of ego, hollow politics, and blind competition to become the greatest national powers in the world amongst the major nations from Asia to Europe.
Auden was born and raised in a heavily industrial section of northern England. His father, a prominent physician with an extensive knowledge of mythology and folklore, and his mother, a strict Anglican, both exerted strong influences on Auden’s poetry. Auden’s early interest in science and engineering earned him a scholarship to Oxford University, where his fascination with poetry led him to change his field of study to English. His attraction to science never completely waned, however, and scientific references are frequently found in his poetry. While at Oxford, Auden became familiar with modernist poetry, particularly that of T.S. Eliot. It was also at Oxford that Auden became the pivotal member of a group of writers called the “Oxford Group” or the “Auden Generation,” which included Stephen Spender, C. Day Lewis, and Louis MacNeice. The group adhered to various Marxist and anti-fascist doctrines and addressed social, political, and economic concerns in their writings. Auden’s first book of poetry, Poems, was privately printed by Stephen Spender in 1928. Critics have noted that Auden’s early verse suggests the influences of Thomas Hardy, Laura (Riding) Jackson, Wilfred Owen, and Edward Thomas. Stylistically, the poems are fragmentary and terse, relying on concrete images and colloquial language to convey Auden’s political and psychological concerns.
Auden’s poems from the second half of the 1930s evidence his many travels during this period of political turmoil. “Spain,” one of his most famous and widely anthologized pieces, is based on his experiences in that country during its civil war of 1936 to 1939. Journey to War, a book of the period written by Auden with Christopher Isherwood, features Auden’s sonnet sequence and verse commentary, “In Time of War.” The first half of the sequence recounts the history of humanity’s move away from rational thought, while the second half addresses the moral problems faced by humankind on the verge of another world war. It was Auden who characterized the 30s as “the age of anxiety.” His 1947 poem by that title, wrote Monroe K. Spears in his Poetry of W.H. Auden, was a “sympathetic satire on the attempts of human beings to escape, through their own efforts, the anxiety of our age.” Auden struck a chord in readers with his timely treatment of the moral and political issues that directly affected them. Harold Bloom suggested in the New Republic that “Auden [was] accepted as not only a great poet but also a Christian humanist sage not because of any conspiracy among moralizing neo-Christian academicians, but because the age require[d] such a figure.”
Some critics have suggested that Auden’s unusual writing style germinated in the social climate of his childhood. Robert Bloom, writing in PMLA, commented that in Auden’s writing in 1930, “the omission of articles, demonstrative adjectives, subjects, conjunctions, relative pronouns, auxiliary verbs—form a language of extremity and urgency. Like telegraphese ... it has time and patience only for the most important words.” In his W.H. Auden as a Social Poet, Frederick Buell identified the roots of this terse style in the private, codified language in which Auden and his circle of schoolboy friends conversed. Buell quoted Christopher Isherwood, one of those friends and later a collaborator with Auden, who described a typical conversation between two members of the group: “We were each other’s ideal audience; nothing, not the slightest innuendo or the subtlest shade of meaning, was lost between us. A joke which, if I had been speaking to a stranger, would have taken five minutes to lead up to and elaborate and explain, could be conveyed by the faintest hint. ... Our conversation would have been hardly intelligible to anyone who had happened to overhear it; it was a rigamarole of private slang, deliberate misquotations, bad puns, bits of parody, and preparatory school smut.” Peter E. Firchow felt that the nature of Auden’s friendships affected not only his style but also his political views. In PMLA, Firchow noted that Auden thought of his friends “as a ‘gang’ into which new members were periodically recruited,” pointing out that Auden, “while never a Fascist, came at times remarkably close to accepting some characteristically Fascist ideas, especially those having to do with a mistrust of the intellect, the primacy of the group over the individual, the fascination with a strong leader (who expresses the will of the group), and the worship of youth.” (Source : https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/w-h-auden)
My next topic of discussion would be the place of and perspective towards homosexuality deliberately codified in the aforementioned poem by Auden. While discussing this point, I will compare The Buggery Act - 1533 and LGBT Rights in India along with the poem.
Brief Introduction to Wystan Hugh Auden :
English poet, playwright, critic, and librettist Wystan Hugh Auden exerted a major influence on the poetry of the 20th century. Auden grew up in Birmingham, England and was known for his extraordinary intellect and wit. His first book, Poems, was published in 1930 with the help of T.S. Eliot. Just before World War II broke out, Auden emigrated to the United States where he met the poet Chester Kallman, who became his lifelong lover. Auden won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for The Age of Anxiety. Much of his poetry is concerned with moral issues and evidences a strong political, social, and psychological context. While the teachings of Marx and Freud weighed heavily in his early work, they later gave way to religious and spiritual influences. Some critics have called Auden an anti-Romantic—a poet of analytical clarity who sought for order, for universal patterns of human existence. Auden’s poetry is considered versatile and inventive, ranging from the tersely epigrammatic to book-length verse, and incorporating a vast range of scientific knowledge. Throughout his career, he collaborated with Christopher Isherwood and Louis MacNeice, and also frequently joined with Chester Kallman to create libretti for musical works by Benjamin Britten, Igor Stravinsky, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Today he is considered one of the most skilled and creative mid-20th century poets who regularly wrote in traditional rhyme and meter.
Auden was born and raised in a heavily industrial section of northern England. His father, a prominent physician with an extensive knowledge of mythology and folklore, and his mother, a strict Anglican, both exerted strong influences on Auden’s poetry. Auden’s early interest in science and engineering earned him a scholarship to Oxford University, where his fascination with poetry led him to change his field of study to English. His attraction to science never completely waned, however, and scientific references are frequently found in his poetry. While at Oxford, Auden became familiar with modernist poetry, particularly that of T.S. Eliot. It was also at Oxford that Auden became the pivotal member of a group of writers called the “Oxford Group” or the “Auden Generation,” which included Stephen Spender, C. Day Lewis, and Louis MacNeice. The group adhered to various Marxist and anti-fascist doctrines and addressed social, political, and economic concerns in their writings. Auden’s first book of poetry, Poems, was privately printed by Stephen Spender in 1928. Critics have noted that Auden’s early verse suggests the influences of Thomas Hardy, Laura (Riding) Jackson, Wilfred Owen, and Edward Thomas. Stylistically, the poems are fragmentary and terse, relying on concrete images and colloquial language to convey Auden’s political and psychological concerns.
Auden’s poems from the second half of the 1930s evidence his many travels during this period of political turmoil. “Spain,” one of his most famous and widely anthologized pieces, is based on his experiences in that country during its civil war of 1936 to 1939. Journey to War, a book of the period written by Auden with Christopher Isherwood, features Auden’s sonnet sequence and verse commentary, “In Time of War.” The first half of the sequence recounts the history of humanity’s move away from rational thought, while the second half addresses the moral problems faced by humankind on the verge of another world war. It was Auden who characterized the 30s as “the age of anxiety.” His 1947 poem by that title, wrote Monroe K. Spears in his Poetry of W.H. Auden, was a “sympathetic satire on the attempts of human beings to escape, through their own efforts, the anxiety of our age.” Auden struck a chord in readers with his timely treatment of the moral and political issues that directly affected them. Harold Bloom suggested in the New Republic that “Auden [was] accepted as not only a great poet but also a Christian humanist sage not because of any conspiracy among moralizing neo-Christian academicians, but because the age require[d] such a figure.”
Some critics have suggested that Auden’s unusual writing style germinated in the social climate of his childhood. Robert Bloom, writing in PMLA, commented that in Auden’s writing in 1930, “the omission of articles, demonstrative adjectives, subjects, conjunctions, relative pronouns, auxiliary verbs—form a language of extremity and urgency. Like telegraphese ... it has time and patience only for the most important words.” In his W.H. Auden as a Social Poet, Frederick Buell identified the roots of this terse style in the private, codified language in which Auden and his circle of schoolboy friends conversed. Buell quoted Christopher Isherwood, one of those friends and later a collaborator with Auden, who described a typical conversation between two members of the group: “We were each other’s ideal audience; nothing, not the slightest innuendo or the subtlest shade of meaning, was lost between us. A joke which, if I had been speaking to a stranger, would have taken five minutes to lead up to and elaborate and explain, could be conveyed by the faintest hint. ... Our conversation would have been hardly intelligible to anyone who had happened to overhear it; it was a rigamarole of private slang, deliberate misquotations, bad puns, bits of parody, and preparatory school smut.” Peter E. Firchow felt that the nature of Auden’s friendships affected not only his style but also his political views. In PMLA, Firchow noted that Auden thought of his friends “as a ‘gang’ into which new members were periodically recruited,” pointing out that Auden, “while never a Fascist, came at times remarkably close to accepting some characteristically Fascist ideas, especially those having to do with a mistrust of the intellect, the primacy of the group over the individual, the fascination with a strong leader (who expresses the will of the group), and the worship of youth.” (Source : https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/w-h-auden)
The Original Poem :
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
How can we relate the present-day going on Russia-Ukraine war to the poem in the relevance of the war-imagery of the poem?
First let us talk about the reference of dictatorship given in the context of the second world war, and then compare to the deemed-dictator of Russia, namely Valdimir Putin - the president of Russia.
'And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;'
In this stanza of the poem, we find how dictators makes fine speeches to lull the foolish mass into the war which is completely based on their false ego and its hurting. Putin is nowadays considered as a budding dictator of Russia for attacking the smaller country Ukraine for not conforming to Russian rule.
Let us have a look towards a speech made by Putin reflecting his favourism to the dictatorship and vying nature against USA :
When it comes to the war-imagery, we can freshly relate the poem's to the war's one :
'Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.'
Now let us delve a bit into the present day condition of Ukrainian cities bearing brunt of the Russian army and the hidden hideous face of dictatorship of the modern times :
Decoding the underlying theme of homosexuality in allusion of Nijinsky & Diaghilev's love-affair. :
W. H. Auden seems to refer to his own hidden passion of homosexual love and his craving for it in the following stanza from the poem :
'What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.'
While perusing the aforementioned stanza, we may get the hint of Auden's suppressed desire which is 'to be loved alone' by the male bed-mate ; as Sigmund Freud says that our desires remain in the realm of our sub-conscious mind despite being suppressed with efforts and find outlet in our conscious activities :
Freud believed that many of our feelings, desires, and emotions are repressed or held out of awareness because they are simply too threatening. Freud believed that sometimes these hidden desires and wishes make themselves known through dreams and slips of the tongue (aka "Freudian slips").
So, how does the reference of Nijinsky and Diaghilev's love-affair connote to Auden's personal life? Well, it is the prerequisite to have some biographical evidence either stated by a person itself or found posthumously in order to conduct a biographical study of any person.
In explaining how the underlying theme of homosexuality is observed in the poem, I would like to cite some statements taken from the article of Morgan Walker on the website 'Modern American Poetry' which was shared by my professor Dr Dilip Barad Sir in the classroom as a part of virtual study and blended learning :
- W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” can be interpreted as having two messages regarding society. On the surface, the poem comments on how the dishonesty and manipulation of government can lead to war. The author uses this primary interpretation as a vessel to mask and deliver his underlying critique of homophobia. In order to create duality in interpretation of the poem, Auden uses codified language to conceal the underlying theme of the lack of acceptance of homosexuality in society. The poem creates metaphors, such as a contrast of light and dark and uses implications through historical figures and government to show the offense done to homosexuals. The two interpretations of the poem are able to coexist without impeding or contradicting one another. By setting up a historical scenario and then commenting on societal errors, Auden is able to effectively shift tones without harshly criticizing the audience on social injustices.
- In 1939, Auden made a major move to America in order to alter his lifestyle and explore new horizons. Soon after he arrived, a major event happened in his life. While attending an event organized by the League of American Writers, Auden met a young man named Chester Kallman (Osborne 190). Auden and Kallman started a relationship soon after, and became friends and lovers until his death (Osborne 192). Though in 1935, Auden married a woman named Erika Mann, this was primarily a act of kindness to allow Mann to escape from the Nazi’s in Germany (Osborne 105). Auden lived most of his life with Kallman and Mann, and continued his relationship with Kallman. Auden’s love for Kallman was extremely strong and it would be unrealistic to think that Auden’s love life would not affect the subject matter of his poetry.
The Buggery Act - 1533 : I have put the link about the Buggery Act - 1533 above in the introductory part of this blog. But here the controversy of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. The grassroot struggle intiated by AIDS Bhedbhav Virodhi Andolan in 1991 in India and has come to abrogation in 2018 act of LGBT Rights.
Conclusion : At the point of conclusion, the main objective of the blog was to bring about the reflection of the studies done in the classroom and - in my humble opinion - the secondary aim focuses on how the language and the truth of a poet remain everlasting and pertinent to every occurence of every age if done by the perspective of Reader-Response Theory, from decades to decades, centuries to centuries, that is why it would be of prudence to say that poet never dies, for poet lives in the works he/she has contributed in the form of writings and literature.
Thank You!
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