Auden, whose name is invoked on numerous occasions and whose poem September 1st, 1939 made the rounds on the internet almost immediately following 9/11, is taken for granted by many to be a role model against anything conservative. What is not fully understood by the poets on the Left is his concern for Western civilization, which the Left seems to desire the destruction of. In his poem The Fall of Rome he laments this possibility. It was composed during the Cold War and alludes to the threat of the overthrow of a government by “an unimportant clerk” and his co-conspirators who would have filled the role of Marxists. Rome is viewed as the height of Western civilization and its foundations are threatened by internal corruption and a coup. In the end, Auden knew that “Poetry makes nothing happen.” It cannot perform the miraculous and unrealistic change within a man’s heart and his society into the utopia that the Left dreams of and tries to employ government to establish. The nothing that poetry makes happen is something that is more subtle and less and more realistically ambitious, Auden would say. He laughed off Shelley’s statement.
What Auden thought of art can be gleaned in the following quote from his lecture/essay Words and the Word, “The world about us is, as it always has been, full of gross evils and appalling misery, but it is a fatal delusion and shocking overestimation of the importance of the artist in the world, to suppose that, by making works of art, we can do anything to eradicate the one or alleviate the other. The political and social history of Europe would be what it has been if Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Titian, Mozart, Beethoven, et al., had never existed. Where social evils are concerned, the only effective weapons are two, political action and straight reporting of the facts, journalism in the good sense. Art is important. The utmost an artist can hope to do for his contemporary readers is, as Dr. Johnson said, to enable them a little better to enjoy life or a little better to ensure it. Further, let us remember that, though the great artists of the past could not change the course of history, it is only through their work that we are able to break bread with the dead, and without communion with the dead a fully human life is impossible.[1]”
I remember during another class meeting by Derek Walcott, we were reading and discussing Auden’s poem The Shield of Achilles. The poem refers to Book 18 of The Iliad by Homer in which Thetis, the goddess-mother of Achilles, persuades Hephaestus, the god of fire, to create new armor for her son. In Homer’s poem, the shield is illustrated with images of past victories and Edenic bliss. Auden turns this around and makes Hephaestus depict the brutality of war and suffering in general. One of the stanzas reads
Out of the air a voice without a face
Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry as dust and level as the place:
No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.
The voice in these lines is one that lacks any sense of urgency and carries a news broadcaster’s tone of distance and disattachment - a lack of compassion - to the current crisis he witnesses. Talking about the tone of these lines, Walcott instantly remarked, “Doesn’t Colin Powell suffer?” alluding to the former Secretary of State’s stance on the Iraq War. Auden acknowledged the sin that resides in the hearts of men and knew that positivism and legislation could not fix it.
I think Auden would not have agreed with Askold Malnyczuk’s introduction to the 30th anniversary of the literary journal Agni. This piece of rambling is dated 9/12/02 and in it, Mr. Malnyczuk describes America as a “frequently ruthless and breathtakingly greedy empire, currently run by a family of warlords named Bush[.]” Obviously he did not agree with our response to 9/11. One has to ask Mr. Malnyczuk if he does not care about the poets suffering in Afghanistan. And Mr. Malnyczuk has overlooked the fact that this so-called greedy empire allows him and his friends on the Left to operate their journal without reprisal from the government and that because of capitalism, our free market economy affords them the funds to produce Agni.
The exact criticism that has been leveled at Wordsworth and the poetry of his later years has been aimed at Coleridge. The main argument today’s poets have against Coleridge is his belief in Christianity and his maturing in thought to be an avid opponent against the philosophy of Utilitarianism. Coleridge wrote prolifically and intelligently in support of the conservatism of Edmund Burke that sought to preserve English society, and therefore, English civilization in the long run. He warned against the Reform Bill of 1832 and the virulence of those who supported it and their lack of moral imagination and respect for tradition in civilization. As well, these similar arguments are employed against Eliot’s later years and his essays about Christianity and culture.
It is virtually impossible to attend a reading today by anyone and not have to endure, however patiently, the ranting of many of today’s poets and fiction writers also. The poet Philip Levine gave a reading last fall at Harvard and compared, in his in-between-poems banter, the president to Benito Mussolini and said that at least Mussolini could speak Italian. The audience laughed in approval and some of my classmates looked at me to see what my reaction would be. I sat calmly. Yet one must point out the hollowness of such a statement, along with the viciousness and utter close-mindedness, and arrogance that accompanies these comments. Out of one side of their mouths they speak of love and peace and caring for humanity, and then out of the other side emanates such hatred and contradictory, inflammatory remarks. It is so symptomatic of the virulence that has come to dominate the Left. As writer Mark Goldblatt observed in an article about a friend’s reading he attended, that the accepted kind of conversation that is welcomed in contemporary poetry cliques (for that is what it has come to be) today is one that reviles George W. Bush and that views all religious conservatives as ignorant, bigoted hate-mongerers who are attempting to impose their religion on the nation and rule by theocracy.
Another manner in which the Left dominates contemporary is that most of the awards handed out each year are given by organizations and/or journals whose politics are biased against anything conservative. One of the most sought after awards is The Nation/Discovery award and the journal that is held to be of estimable value is Poetry. On the cover of the March 2005 issue, there was a black and white photo of protesters in Manhattan supposedly being huddled by police officers on horseback during the Republican National Convention. Its message obviously implies that we are living in a police state that suppresses all dissent.
I am not calling for poetry to be submissive to whoever is president and whichever party is in the majority, but poetry that respectfully challenges and engages contemporary culture. When poetry consciously attempts to be political, it is the worst kind and it is used like a hammer to hit the reader over the head with, insulting the reader and his intelligence. For poetry to be relevant again, it must challenge society with a moral imagination. In the same way that liberal politicians demand that voters leave important questions of morality and foreign policy at home when going to the ballot booth, these poets of the Left expect, or rather demand that readers put aside their moral imaginations. And that would only end in cultural suicide.
[1] An artist becomes a political figure only when he has communicated a moral truth which the newspapers have, either deliberately or because of censorship and governmental control, not reported a fact, and this the artist has taken the chance to do. Of course the artist has a role in society, to contribute to culture and civilization as a whole; and a Christian artist has the extra command to redeem culture for Christ Who is the creator of culture, partaking in Kingdom work. It is also incumbent upon the Church to assist in the alleviation of evil in the world. The link with the past echoes Edmund Burke’s affirmation that all generations are linked and we must retain contact with the past in order to survive.
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