23 W. H. Auden & Stephen Spender

Dr. Sushil Kumar

Author and his major Contributions 

Wystan Hugh Auden (image 1) was born on February 21,1907 at York in a professional middle class family. (image 2)He was the third son of George Augustins and Constance Rosallo.

Auden was sent to St.Edmund’s school, where he acquired the friendship of Christopher Isherwood(image 4). He visited Berlin in 1928 and was influenced by German poetry. In 1929 Isherwood abandoned his medical profession and joined Auden in Berlin In 1935, he collaborated with Christopher Isherwood on a play with the title The Dog Beneath the Skin. Auden married Erika Mann, daughter of German novelist Thomas Mann, in 1935. In 1937 he visited Spain during the civil war and served as an ambulance driver on the Republican side. In 1938, he visited China with Isherwood. In 1938 Auden became a U.S. citizen and in 1948, he received the Pulitzer Prize for the work The Age of Anxiety. Auden was one of three candidates recommended by the Nobel Committee to the Swedish Academy for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1963.

It was at Oxford that Auden became the pivotal member of a group of writers called the “Oxford Group” or the “Auden Generation.” He along with Louise MacNeice, Stephen Spender and C. Day Lewis shared the name ‘Pink Poets’ and the ‘Poets of 1930’s. They are lumped together as a complete figure and called MacSpaunday in the acronym used to designate these four poets.

Sir Stephen Harold Spender (1909-1995), first came to prominence as a poet of social protest in the 1930s.He is one among the “four musketeers of the Oxford Movement”, a member of the generation of British poets who came to prominence in the 1930s.

They together share some characteristics:

• Their thematic content contained marks of innovation and experimental modernness.
• They had more intellectual and less emotional appeal.
• Their political involvement with communism was born out of a sense of guilt and involvement.
• Sigmund Freud also influenced these poets.
• Their common identity was reflected in their cynicism and satire.
• Their poetic technique was greatly influenced by Imagism, French Symbolism and Hopkins-Eliot innovations.

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, Wilfred Owen, and Edward Thomas. Stylistically, his poems are fragmentary and terse, relying on concrete images and colloquial language to convey Auden’s political and psychological concerns. Marxism was the dominating influence on Auden’s poetry. Auden’s poems, published in the thirties of the twentieth century, a turbulent period in the history, show the shallowness of the disintegrating post war civilization.

Poems (1930), The Orators (1932) and The Dance of Death (1933) show the influence of both Freud and Marx and express contemporary political tensions, social and economic unrest.

Auden’s themes in his shorter poems include the fragility and transience of personal love (“Danse Macabre”, “The Dream”, “Lay your sleeping head). In 1938 he wrote a series of dark, ironic ballads about individual failure (“Miss Gee”, “James Honeyman”, “Victor”). All these together with other famous poems such as “Dover”, “As He Is”, and “Musée des Beaux Arts” ,”In Memory of W. B. Yeats”, “The Unknown Citizen”, “Law Like Love”, “September 1, 1939”, and “In Memory of Sigmund Freud” appeared in his collection, Another Time (1940). The volume also contains elegies to poets A. E. Housman, Matthew Arnold, and William Butler Yeats.

From 1942 through 1947 he worked mostly on three long poems in dramatic form, each different from the others in form and content. Auden’s next major  work, Nones, includes another widely anthologized piece, “In Praise of Limestone,” which asserts a powerful connection between the landscape depicted and the psychology of Auden’s characters. His prose book The Dyer’s Hand (1962) gathered many of the lectures he gave in Oxford as Professor of Poetry in 1956–61, together with revised versions of essays and notes written since the mid- 1940s.

His later poetry consists of The Shield of Achilles (1955) City Without Walls (1969), Epistle to a Godson(1972) and the unfinished Thank You, Fog (1974) ) include reflective poems about language (“Natural Linguistics”) and about his own ageing (“A New Year Greeting”, “Talking to Myself”, “A Lullaby” “The din of work is subdued”). His last completed poem, in haiku form, was “Archeology”, about ritual and timelessness, two recurring themes in his later years.

T he German-Soviet pact disillusioned him and shook his faith in Communism. As a result he abandoned Communism and took metaphysical and religious faith. Auden died in Vienna, Austria, on September 29, 1973.

Stephen Harold Spender met the poets W.H. Auden and C. Day-Lewis, and during 1930–33. He spent many months in Germany with the writer Christopher Isherwood. His early volumes, Poems (1933), Vienna(1934), Trial  of  a  Judge,  a  verse  play  (1938),  and The  Still   Centre (1939)—were influenced by the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke and Federico García Lorca. Above all, his poems expressed a self-critical, compassionate personality. In the following decades Spender, in some ways a more personal poet than his early associates, became increasingly more autobiographical, turning his gaze from the external topical situation to the subjective experience. His reputation for humanism and honesty is fully vindicated in subsequent volumes—Ruins   and   Visions (1942), Poems   of    Dedication (1947), The    Edge    of Being (1949), Collected Poems (1955), Selected Poems (1965), The Generous Days (1971), and Dolphins(1994).

At the end of the 1930s, when the nature of Stalinist rule had become more evident—especially after the Stalin-Hitler pact of 1939—Spender became disillusioned with Russian Communism. Especially eloquent testimony of this disenchantment with Communism can be found in Spender’s essay in The God That Failed (1949).

From the 1940s Spender was better known for his perceptive criticism and his editorial association with the influential reviews Horizon (1940–41) and Encounter (1953–67) than he was as  a  poet.  Spender’s  prose  works  include  short  stories  (The  Burning  Cactus,  1936), a novel (The Backward Son, 1940), literary criticism (The Destructive Element, 1935; The Creative Element, 1953; The Making of a Poem, 1955; The Struggle of the Modern, 1963), an autobiography (World Within World, 1951; reissued 1994), and uncollected essays with new commentary (The Thirties and After, 1978). He died in London on July 17, 1995.

Poetic Characteristics

Though intellectual and unemotional, his poetry shows a deep empathy with the essential human condition. What distinguishes Spender’s poetry is the combination of his commitment to the left wing political ideology with his own personal feelings and emotions. He also composed highly moving poems on war. He beautifully expressed his personal emotions in short lyrics. Spender was an accomplished poetic artist who used exact words. In his best poems every word has its value for sound as well as sense.

Themes in Auden

In an age as confusing and volatile as the interwar period, it was natural that the main themes in literature among young writers and poets would be the social, political and the economic malaise of the period. Auden was not an exception. His works are noted for its stylistic and technical achievements, its engagement with moral and political issues, and its variety of tone, form and content. He was known as the spiritual physician of his generation. The central themes of his poetry are love, politics and citizenship, religion and morals, and the relationship between unique human beings and the anonymous, impersonal world of nature. Auden’s early works are noted for the themes like love, politics, peace, neurosis, death fear, and character.

Many of his poems, like “As I Walked Out One Evening,” “Lullaby,” and “O Tell Me  the Truth About Love,” are the finest love poems, and “Funeral Blues” features a man deeply in love with another. But at the same time he is deeply concerned with the transience of love in modern world. Almost all of these poems have a sobering undercurrent of sorrow, or of the desire to remind readers that life, and love, are short and are affected by the vicissitudes of existence like sickness and time. Love is sweet, but it does not exist in a universe devoid of suffering, waning of affection or, of course, death.

Auden’s poetry is sometimes cerebral, sometimes brutally honest and evocative of the historical context in which he is writing. He is renowned for addressing the issues of his day in a moving and relevant manner. The horrors of the modern world do not escape his incisive pen; he deals with the dictators and their mad quest for world domination, the fall of the masses under their leaders’ spell, the stultifying bureaucratic state, the Spanish Civil War, the bleakness and perhaps impossibility of the future, the psychic side of warfare, the bleak landscape, the martyrdom of heroes and the death of poets, the unthinking use of modern tools, and the bludgeoning of the human spirit through the great weight of history. Through all this, though, Auden retains some hope for the future, pointing out the freedom that comes from recognizing our  true  condition  whatever  our  circumstances.

Auden’s work is noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with moral and political issues, and its variety in tone, form and content. The central themes of his poetry are love, politics and citizenship, religion and morals, and the relationship between unique human beings and the anonymous, impersonal world of nature. His poetry is considered versatile and inventive, ranging from the tersely epigrammatic to book-length verse, and incorporating a vast range of scientific knowledge.

Spender’s Poetry

Nine Experiments (1928) and Oxford Poetry (1930) struggle to achieve effective forms to explore issues of self and value. Twenty Poems (1930) and Poems (1933) that concentrate on the themes of love and friendship and the pressure on the poet of the contemporary political scene belong to the first phase of his poetic career. In this first phase or the Marxist phase, he was acutely sensitive to the social and political problems of his time.

The long poem, “Vienna” (1934), owes its origin to the infamous attack on the Viennese workers in their own quarters (May, 1934) by the Government of Austria under Dolfuss. Here Spender had avoided all conceits, fables and symbols. This evidently put a greater strain on his thought and language. This poem gave rise to a misinterpretation of Spender’s political and social faith.

The sympathetic tone of Spender can be seen in the lines: “The voice of the poor, like birds/that thud against a sullen pane, / Have worn my heart, in the poem “Appeal”

The collection Twenty Poems of 1930 shows the typical Spendarian conflict between his basic romanticism and his strong understanding of the harsh realities of society. This distinct duality emerged from the centre of his self. He shows his resolution to overcome the romantic relapses by avoiding his fascination for the past and the future in the Poem “Always Between Hope and Fear “contained in Twenty Poems:

Cancel that heaven and abyss

Whose blues and reds roar back to madness,

Avoid these chasms and steep gaps in space

Sense should grope on all fours…

The Still Centre (1939) is another collection of Spender’s poems where the poet consciously resists all attempts, as he states in the Preface, “to dwarf the experience of the individual….For this reason, in my most recent poems, I have deliberately turned back to a kind of writing which is more personal, and I have included within my subjects weakness and fantasy and illusion”. Most of the poems here refer to the Spanish Civil War, and the outlook represented therein is thus explained by Spender himself: “As I have decidedly supported one side–the Republican–in that conflict (Spanish Civil War), perhaps I should explain why I do not strike a more  heroic  note.  My  reason  is  that  a  poet  can  only  write  about  what  is  true  to his   own experience….Poetry does not state truth, it states the conditions within which something felt is true.” It is therefore evident that Spender could not avoid a defeatist outlook which hovers round his Spanish poems.

The lyrical effusion has expressed in many poems. One such poem is on “An Elementary School Class-Room in a Slum”:

“All of their time and space are foggy slum

So blot their maps with slums as big as doom.

Unless, governor, teacher, inspector, visitor,

This map becomes their window and these windows

That open on their lives like crouching tombs

Break, O break open, till they break the town

And show the children to the fields and all their world

Azure on their sands, to let their tongues

Run naked into books, the white and green leaves open

The history theirs whose language is the sun.”

In the Second phase he made a kind of retreating journey into a self sufficient poetic world of truth and peace. The poetic output of this time was devoid of propagandist vein, and filled with the themes of love, self, the horror of war, and pity and personal sorrow with imagery. Important volumes in this phase include Ruins and Visions(1942),Poems of dedication(1947), the Edge of Being(1949), Collected poems(1955),Selected Poems(1964),the Generous Days(1969),recent Poems(1978) and Collected Poems(1986).

As a poet Spender emerges more as a socially committed and less as an innovator of modern technique. However he handles words, images and rhythms when engulfed with emotional fervor and social propaganda. It was through this powerful imagery that he had given utterance to the complex experiences of war and life.

Analysis of Spender’s poems 

[Stephen Spender, “The Truly Great” from Collected Poems 1928-1953. Copyright © 1955 by Stephen Spender. Reprinted by permission of Ed Victor Ltd. Source: Collected Poems 1928-1953 (Random House Inc., 1955)]

“I think continually of those who were truly great” is an untitled poem that first appeared in New Signatures, a collection of poetry selected by Michael Roberts to offer an imaginative and intellectual blend that would deal positively with the problems of the twentieth century.

The poet pays a posthumous tribute to great men like ancient historians, artists or poets. The poem is an attempt to depict what makes a person truly great.

“I think continually of those who were truly great” is written in free verse with three stanzas containing eight, seven, and eight lines, respectively. The meter of the poem is highly varied, containing fine examples of most meters used in English poetry. While this poem settles into no regular meter, line length, or rhyme scheme, it is, nonetheless, highly musical with its syncopated rhythms and sharp images.

An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum 

“An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum” was first published in 1964 in Stephen Spender’s Selected Poems. The poem has since appeared in several collections, including Collected Poems 1928-1985, published in 1985. “An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum” is perhaps the best example of Spender’s political voice resonating throughout a poem. In this poem, Spender expresses his ideological positions on government, economics, and education. The students in this classroom are underprivileged and malnourished. The capitalistic government is supposed to supply equal opportunity for education, but the classroom in the slum offers little hope for change or progress for its lower-class students. This poem, written during the time of the Civil Rights movement in the United States, is fitting both in its commentary about race issues in American education and as a Socialist proclamation against capitalism and social injustice in general. Although Spender was British, his extreme left-leaning political ideologies were in response to the global question concerning social injustice.

The theme of poverty is principal to the poem “An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum.” Spender creates a crisp image of children in poverty through his descriptions of dire situations and mal-nourished students, revealing a sad, hidden segment of society that was prevalent throughout the world. He is not commenting directly on any particular nation in his poem; instead, he exposes the widespread neglect of children of all nationalities, races, and ethnicities. It is poverty that has caused the students in “An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum” to be “weighed-down,” “paper-seeming,” diseased, and “twisted.” Spender believes this poverty is created through the oppressive power of capitalism.

This poem was written during the American Civil Rights movement, and although Spender was British, the injustice that occurred in the United States was a global issue that affected the entire world, especially close English-speaking allies like Britain. Spender was affected by the struggles for equality in the United States because of his staunch dedication to social and political reforms. Although this poem was written during this time of oppressive racial injustice in America, Spender does not directly focus on a select group of underprivileged children, based on race, religion, or creed. Instead, he hones the content of his poem and remarks about the social injustice imposed upon all children, making it much more difficult to ignore. When the spotlight is cast upon a select group of individuals, certain members of particular groups are able to shrug their shoulders or cast a doubtful eye at the authenticity of the group’s plight. However, when the spotlight is cast upon children writ large, no one can turn a blind eye. Regardless of their upbringing, history, race, or ethnicity, children are innocent beings dependent on the helping hands of humanity. Without aid, children are effectively left to die, and adults who do not help are left with an undeniable sense of guilt and worthlessness. Spender cultivates these emotions in his poem and uses them to his advantage, delivering a powerful message about poverty, its effect on children, and the oppressive power of money.

The Pylons

The installation s of the modern technological world and their consequences on the sleepy countryside form the theme of The Pylons. When it first appeared, it was hailed as a typical of spender and his associates and the term ‘Pylon School’ or ‘Pylon poets’ has often been used to describe them.

The literal meaning of pylon points to tall metallic post that hold electric wires. In the poem Spender feels that they are an intrusion to the peaceful country life.

In the first stanza gives a detailed picture of the beautiful village with a rural background. the hills are full of stories,and the cottages in the hills are made of stones. the roads which were broken reached villages which the poet refers as ‘hidden villages’

The poet laments that on these hills that ‘pylons’ that has electric wires have been built. He compares these pillars to giant naked girls. Then he contrasted the past county side, full of green chestnut with the present ‘dry brook’.

The pylons which carry the energy for building the cities of the future destroy the calm, serenity and beauty of Briton’s unspoilt countryside’s. What is striking about the poem is the poet’s love for the virgin village and the relentless admiration for the inventions of the modern science and technology. It expresses with equal delicacy the poet’s ambivalent attitude. The pylons stand out against the sky like ‘whips of anger while the villages harbor the hidden sources of power and strength.

Throughout his poetic career the element of social consciousness remains palpable either in the early poetry of social concern or in the later poetry of introspection. Though he was profoundly influenced by the age of science and technology, he didn’t over rule his concern for the social reality around him. In this way he strongly survives as a major poetic voice in the history of 20th century British literature.

Reference

• Boly, John R. Reading Auden: The Returns of Caliban. London: Cornell University Press, 1991.Print.
• …Ed.W.H. Auden Collected Poems. London :Faber and Faber,1994.Print. Mendelson, Edward. Early Auden. London: Faber and Faber, 1981.Print.
• Quinn, Patrick J., ed. Recharting the Thirties. London: Associated University Presses, 1996. Print.
• Replogle, Justin. Auden’s Poetry. London:Methuen, 1969. Print.
• Ricks, Christopher. The Oxford Book of English Verse. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Print .