Content area
Full Text
AUDEN'S POETRY of the thirties is suffused by a sense of diffuse crisis, or crises-economic, social, military-so there is no clear line of demarcation separating peace and war in his poetry. In fact, there is very little represented peace in the early poems; moments of refuge are always shadowed by the sense of what they defend against. Early on, Auden tries to imagine the role of poetry during revolution, or in a postrevolutionary society. This is the plot of "A Summer Night," written in 1933. By the end of the decade, however, revolution has given way to war and the concept of a social avant-garde seems already to belong to an unrecognizable past. Auden's journeys to the various sites of wars in Spain and China are balanced by his journeys away from these hot spots-to Iceland and New York. In any event, the journey often seems more important than the destination. Although it inhabits so many named places of contention, his poetry nonetheless seldom seems topical, except perhaps for the masterful Letter to Lord Byron, whose satirical brio feeds on direct hits. The common reader in all of us latches onto those titles and poems where the reference to historical time and place is most recognizable-"Spain 1937," "September 1, 1939"-which might be one reason for Auden's disavowal of them. But it is more characteristic of Auden to blur spatial and temporal markers. He assigns and disperses blame and guilt, equates and differentiates nations. Stances, attitudes, are identified as inimical to "our" health, but who exactly the enemy is remains unclear, nor can we easily identify who "we" are. The aggressor may not be identified, but the burden of the victim is clear, as in "Refugee Blues," where Auden brilliantly uses the literal "burden" of the ballad, its tailing refrain, to accentuate the lament of the refugee and his lack of a responsive audience: "But they weren't German Jews, my dear, but they weren't German Jews."
The sonnet sequence "In Time of War," later titled "Sonnets from China"-though apparently only one of the poems was actually written in China-plays as many variations upon the dialectic of topicality and distancing as one might imagine. First published in the Isherwood/Auden volume Journey to a War (1939), an account...