The Magic in W.H. Auden’s Work

W.H. Auden is a poet who was very complex when it came to his writing. He would contradict himself a lot when criticizing others’ work and sometimes to himself. He created a new definition for the word magic so it would be an umbrella term for everything he didn’t like poetry. He came up with claims about his own work that contradicted what he wrote. Auden had said and done a lot over his lifetime that make him a very hard poet to read. Hopefully this essay can clear some of that confusion.

At first glance, Auden’s work is sort of confusing. When I was first introduced to Auden’s work it was in my Modern Poetry class and I did like his work. The bad part was that when we started to get into how he wrote his poetry and other pieces. That is when I was introduced to Auden’s version of magic. I thought Auden’s version of magic was the feeling you get during/after reading his poetry that makes the poem feel magical. After reading a couple of his poems I felt that his poetry had that feeling of mystical aura that I just described. His evening going on and critiquing Yeats and talking about how Yeats wasn’t such a great poet like we say he is. Auden was about the intelligence part of poetry which is something I don’t entirely get because I am more involved or in touch with. He didn’t like magic or at least his version of magic because he saw it as something that was born out of oppression and sadness. He wants to go away from that and be more intellectual with poetry and other arts. This is what I wanted to make this essay about and try to disprove Auden’s statements of saying his poems do not have magic. To me, his poems have that sense of magic in the lines but yet he says his poetry never had that. I analyzed so much of his poems by myself to just prove my point and every time I concluded it was always there is a sense of magic in his work. For example, in his poem “The Lunar Beauty” some of the lines give this mystical feeling. Lines like “This lunar beauty / Has no history” and “This like a dream / Keeps other time” carry the feeling of a mystical voice booming overhead. So I assured myself that W.H. Auden did not know his work but after some research, I was proven wrong, or at least partly.

To outline W.H. Auden’s thoughts on poetry this paragraph will go into depths about it before talking about what others saw in his views. Auden saw poetry as something that disenchants or disillusioned around the poet. In his own words “Poetry is not magic. In so far as poetry, or any other of the arts, can be said to have an ulterior purpose, it is, by telling the truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate” (Auden 1010) Auden saw poetry’s only purpose is to disenchant or lift the curtain that everything has. He does expand that and just says the Arts’ purpose is to disenchant the world. What he means by the Arts or our main topic Poetry’ is to disenchant is to show what is not explicitly there. So, like how bad the society is which is something Auden showed in his poem “The Unknown Citizen”. The poem highlights how a citizen died and the government deemed their life a good one since they bought all of the Modern Man “necessary”, had a family, was insured and wanted to fight for his country. That is what Auden saw what the Arts’ purpose was. He didn’t like how poets would add magic to their poems and what he meant about magic is different from what you and I would think about magic. His magic was characterized by a lot of things since he used magic as an umbrella term to incorporate tons of ideas. Matthew Mutter laid out Auden’s version of magic in a list in his essay “The Power to Enchant That Comes from Disillusion": W.H. Auden's Criticism of Magical Poetics” the list goes as:

“1) a response to the alienation of self from material life, including one's own body; 2) an attempt to overcome the ontological dualisms and contradictions (infinitude/finitude, soul/body, history/ nature, speech/event) inherent in human existence, which often takes on, especially in modernity, the character of alienation; 3) a desire to absorb, and thus a refusal to acknowledge, the otherness of the world, because otherness is mistaken for alienation; 4) a technique for mitigating the ego's inability to abide the realities of human finitude, contingency and the opposing desires of other egos; 5) a desire to make language mystically efficacious in the material world and a belief that poetic speech reveals the true, mystical order of things; and 6) a form of resistance to the instrumentalism of secular imperialism.” (59)

W.H Auden didn’t mean poetry that talked about magic explicitly but more of this mystical way of talking about one’s relation to the world for either going against or can’t fit in the world. Auden didn’t like how poets of his time were including ideas like occultism, mysticism, etc. to and talk about one’s alienation or dualism. He wanted other poets to talk about the real-world issues that plagued their time. He wanted people to understand magical thinking as he called it as the denying of the narrative of progression from magic to religion and deny the sciences as the supreme framework for understanding the world. Funny enough Auden was very versed in the unconventional works during his time like occultism and mysticism because he was influenced by poets who were into those ideals. So, he knew what he was talking about when it came to the discussion of the idea of magic, but he just went down a different avenue when it came to defining the word. Without knowing what W.H. Auden talked about with is his idea of magic caused some readers and other poets to question what he is talking about.

Even though Auden didn’t like magic in his work he did know how to use it when it came to his writing. His style was very unique to him. He captured the making of a world in his poetry and not the world appearing around the words on the page. That is where the beauty of his work comes from. Even though poets around Auden started to mimic “tones of weary futility (Eliot), threatening obscurity (Pound), or embittered rage (Yeats)” (Boly 43) Auden did not do that, he wanted to make his own style and create his own poetry. He recognized the previous poets as good writers but also saw them as the past. He wanted to break the mold of those poets by breaking some of the rules that have been placed on poetry. One like the speaker of the poem assumes direct control over the reader and shows the reader exactly what the speaker wants them to see. One of Auden’s first poems “This Lunar Beauty” had this asserting speaker. In the first stanza it shows off this voice:

“This lunar beauty

Has no history

Is complete and early;

If beauty later

Bear any feature

It had a lover

And is another.” (Auden 787)

So right off the bat, the first two lines have already told the reader this thing the speaker is talking about has no history. Then the last lines of the stanza talk about how if lunar beauty had any beauty, it would be a lover. Auden didn’t beat around the bush when talking about this lunar beauty in the poem. He is direct in the first stanza and continued it in the rest of the poem. Auden didn’t just write the poem with six stanzas talking about how the big and over spoken topics of love and loss of that love. He wrote a poem about how this is love and the loss of that love. He didn’t make a poem that tries to say “love is like this… and this” he made a poem about what love and loss off love…that being lunar beauty. That assertiveness causes the reader to see what Auden wanted the reader to see but also made his poems feel stiff. If you read his poem in the view of you not understanding what is going on in the poem it is easy to misinterpret the poem as I did.

Auden had a very distinct way of approaching things and it showed within his work. Auden had a very academic mind when it came to poetry. He was known for his systemic way of criticism of other poets and the magical thinking that came with them. That way of thinking confuses people to this day with Auden and his work. Since he was so systemic about his criticism, he talked about things in great depth, but that great depth had contradictions laced within. The biggest one that people know is that W.H. Auden was well versed in many different subjects. Some of his big influences were T.S. Eliot, Rainer Maria Rilke, and W.B. Yeats. Even though Rilke and Yeats are poets who fall under the definition of magic that W.H. Auden disliked in poetry. Another one of his influences was D.H. Lawrence who was a person who practiced neo-pagan blood mysticism which also falls under Auden’s definition, so Auden disliked him as well even though he was a great influencer. In an interview with The American Scholar in 1967, Auden tells the interviewer “We all owe a great deal to Eliot” (Auden 267) who was a poet that was very down to Earth. Eliot spoke a lot about society or humanity type of topics and that is what Auden wanted to do in his work but with a twist. Eliot did what most poets do and that is making the reader put the pieces of the image or message in the poem together themselves. Auden didn’t do that as mentioned in the paragraph above. Auden was very assertive in his work which contradicts his message. Another issue was that since one of Auden’s influences was Yeats, he fixated on him when talking about magic. As mentioned before Auden read a lot on occultism and other mystical/ontological ideas, so Auden knew a lot about Yeats and his work. Yeats is the one poet who Auden mentions a lot of his time of being alive. Talking about how much Yeats was a good teacher to learn from but also someone who we shouldn’t learn from due to the magic (the magic that Auden defined) that Yeats has in his work. Auden hated Yeats but also wanted us to learn from him. Auden has a lot of contradictions in his life and the aspects of his work. It’s hard to understand where Auden got his influence to write since he has said so much and done so much. This does make Auden a very confused man to read about and to know his work.

In the Norton Anthology Of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Volume 1 it mentions in Auden’s biography that Auden separated his work from the other poets of his time. He saw the other poets as: “preened themselves too much in being poets and who touted poetry as revelation” (Ramazani 784) which yes Auden did do in his work did reflect that. What he called his work less ambitiously, but he also wanted to write in an “in the old grand manner, / Out of a resonant heart” (Ramazani 784). How Auden wanted to write is how older poets wrote and not like how the more contemporary poets of his time wrote like. Auden wanted to go against what the other writers of his time wanted to do but he was forced to write in a “subdued, ironic voice” (Ramazani 784) but yet wrote all his poems in such great ways. Auden wanted to write in a way that some could call intellectual-focused. He didn’t think about the emotions within poetry or that personal connection that you can get when writing a poem. Auden was more focused on making poems that make you think about the world we live in and not what we do now and partly back then which is either expressing an emotion or trying to make the reader feel an emotion. Even outside poetry, Auden cared about being intellectual and not an emotionally driven person. In that interview with him by American Scholar, he tells the interviewer “I like being in a German-speaking country. German is a marvelous language. It requires being spoken by an educated tongue” (Auden 269) Auden said after being asked what made him choose his home that he was currently living in

Auden spoke a lot about how poetry is made to disillusion the world and not the personal issues or have magic in them. Auden doesn’t do this for a lot of his work. Some of his first poems were about love or the death of a real person which none of these poems disillusioned anything, they only showed passion and emotions that were put into creating those words on the page. To use one of Auden’s poems “Lullaby” is one of his works that the overall topic (if you want to call it that) is about love. Like I mentioned before Auden was very direct with his writing so again like “The Lunar Beauty” in the first stanza of “Lullaby” does Auden sets what is going on in the poem. The first stanza is about the speaker requesting his lover to sleep in his arms and forget everything. The line “Time and fevers burn away” is the speaker telling their lover to let it go so the lover can focus on the moment right now in the speaker’s arm. Lines four to six “Individual beauty from / Thoughtful children, and the grave / Proves the child ephemeral:” (Auden) talk about how the lover should forget about time and death and again focus on this one moment in time. Forget about the youth that is around them or the inevitable death that comes to aging what the speaker wanted to tell his lover. “Let the living creature lie, / Mortal, guilty, but to me / The entirely beautiful” (Auden) These are the closing lines for stanza one and they are the speaker telling their lover that let all of the woes of living lie in sleep and he’ll think of them as the lover sleeps. The first stanza doesn’t disillusion anything, and you would think it should since Auden calls his writing direct and assertive yet in this first stanza it flows gracefully without being tugged along like other poems. All he is doing is telling his lover to just let it the mortal plain and just stay in the now and sleep. He isn’t making some power statement to disillusioned, he is just making a love poem that is emotionally charged talking to a lover of his. Which could be considered to fall under the big umbrella term “magic” that Auden loved to use about other poets. His other poems like “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” and “In Memory of W.B. Sigmund Freud” are just long sectioned elegies and no shroud is being lifted from them. They are just poems about people who he looked up to except for Yeats being the person who he kept saying was not as good as we think he is. Auden’s idea of poetry being used for disenchanting, and it does not include magic is something that makes his work very problematic. In the 1930s he would say some of his poems that were about disenchanting society had now place in the social or political spheres which is also another contradiction he had.

Auden would be considered a troubled but smart man if he was alive today. On the surface, his poetry still is great works of literature, but when you look into his work it becomes confusing. He made many contradictions over his time of being alive. He would make a claim about someone else’s work but have the same thing in his own work. He would say one thing about his work and it not making sense or being true. Also, his new version of magic is something that goes against something that poetry was working towards and he wanted that to stop. He wanted poetry to be intellectually and disenchanting focused gearing poetry away from the emotionally driven parts that brought poetry to popularity. Now Auden can be seen as a complex but great poet who deserves some more attention.