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The “Grace of the Absurd”; Form and Concept in W. H. Auden's For the Time Being
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 June 2011
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In the world of English Christian poetry the co-ordinates by which we usually map our position are Dante and Milton. Any serious, inclusive religious poem, that is, one in which the Christian matter is presented in devotional mode with prophetic intent, will, ultimately, exhibit a more significant inherent relationship either to the Divine Comedy or to Paradise Lost. T. S. Eliot, clearly, was Dantesque, and though the story of his ambivalent Miltonism is no longer even a smouldering issue, it still speaks cogently to the point of his anti-Miltonic sensibility. Auden, however, was atypical in that though he talked much about Dante, when it came down to cases he wrote more like Milton. And in For the Time Being he faced a problem very similar to the one Milton faced in Paradise Lost. What Puritanism was to Paradise Lost, Existentialism was to For the Time Being, enormously complicating the devotionalism, but simultaneously dramatizing and humanizing it.
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- Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1974
References
1 This definition is to be explained and justified at some length in a forthcoming work by the author. Auden's devotionalism, however, is more complex than has generally been perceived. It is not only that “The real world for Auden is an allegorical text and the intellectual constructs that can be placed upon it are paramount,” as Ohmann, Richard says (Auden's Sacred Awe in Auden: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Spears, Monroe K., Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Spectrum Books, 1964, p. 178)Google Scholar, but that the real world for Auden, at least in For the Time Being, is an allegorical reality, in which the real fact of the Nativity once took place. This is what Auden means when he says that “Christ is in no sense a symbol.” But this in no sense nullifies the Kierkegaardian categories at work in the poem, though it seems to me that these categories—of the esthetic, the ethical, and the religious—yield at significant points in the poem to the sensus spirituales (within which framework I have here examined the poem).
2 For most stringent criticism of Auden's religious poetry (and belief, for that matter), see: Fraser, G. S., The Career of W. H. Auden, in Auden: A Collection of Critical Essays, 81–104Google Scholar; Fraser's, essay appeared originally in his Vision and Rhetoric: Studies in Modern Poetry (London, Faber and Faber, 1959), 149–78.Google Scholar An even more unsympathetic view was presented by Jarrell, Randall in From Freud to Paul: The Stages of Auden's Ideology, Partisan Review 12 (1945), 437–57.Google Scholar For a more temperate approach, see Ohmann, , Auden's Sacred Awe, in Auden: A Collection, 172–78.Google Scholar
3 The New Voice, Religion, Literature, Hermeneutics (New York, Herder and Herder, 1969), 22.Google Scholar
4 Ohmann, , Auden's Sacred Awe, in Auden: A Collection, 177.Google Scholar
5 For Auden's statements on the relationship of art and belief in this period, see particularly his: Postscript: Christianity and Art, in The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays (New York, Random House, 1948), 456–61Google Scholar; and Mimesis and Allegory, in The English Institute Annual (New York, 1941), 18–19.Google Scholar
6 As Professor Spears, Monroe K. sees the interplay of chorus and Narrator, “The chorus express collective feelings and attitudes in a formal, often exalted manner, while the narrator, voluble, articulate, and thoroughly modern, expresses the other side of the contemporary consciousness. Together, they mediate between the audience and the action more effectively than any of Auden's previous choruses or announcers” (The Poetry of W. H. Auden, The Disenchanted Island [New York, Oxford University Press, 1963], 205).Google Scholar Though Professor Spears' analysis of For the Time Being is extremely sensitive to Auden's modern sensibilities, by rather scanting some of the realities of traditional devotional poetry, he seems to me to tidy up some of Auden's allegorical confusions.
7 Prof. Spears (The Poetry of W. H. Anden, 211) interprets two of these seven kingdoms somewhat more circumstantially than I do. He interprets Auden's “Organic Giants” and “Organic Dwarfs” as machines and drugs, respectively, whereas I see them as technology and medicine. The difference is scarcely crucial but it seems to me that Auden is here trying to set the hierarchy of Modern learning in order to satirize its vices and follies, rather than picking on individual targets.
8 Auden, Postscript: Christianity and Art, 458. See also Auden's statement in Making, Knowing and Judging, in The Dyer's Hand, 57: “The impulse to create a work of art is felt when, in certain persons, the passive awe provoked by sacred beings or events is transformed into a desire to express that awe in a rite of worship or homage, and to be fit homage, this rite must be beautiful. This rite has no magical or idolatrous intention; nothing is expected in return. Nor is it, in a Christian sense, an act of devotion. If it praises the Creator, it does so indirectly by praising His creatures—among which may be human notions of the Divine Nature. With God as Redemer, it has, so far as I can see, little if anything to do.
In poetry the rite is verbal; it pays homage by naming.” Auden's strictures against devotional poetry are curious. They seem more accurately directed against a mystical kind of devotion in which the experience and the poem work at cross purposes, but they scarcely seem to apply to the more discursive and affective kinds of devotional poetry, as his own practice brilliantly illustrates.
9 Although the best criticism of For the Time Being still continues to be that of Prof. Spears, Monroe K. (The Poetry of W. H. Auden, 205–18Google Scholar), the following are also of interest: Greenberg, Herbert, The Quest for the Necessary, W. H. Auden and the Dilemma of Divided Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1968), 142–53;CrossRefGoogle ScholarBahlke, George W., The Later Auden: From “New Year Letter” to About the House (Rutgers, N.J., State University Press, 1970), 117–32.Google Scholar
With generalized objections such as those of Wright, George T. that For the Time Being is primitive, childish, and offensive to the Christian sensibility (W. H. Auden, [New York, Twayne, 1969], 124–28)Google Scholar, or that the poem's “lack [of] an indefinable quality” makes it a “failure … full of noble beginnings which fall just short of their appointed ends…” (Duchène, François, The Case of the Helmeted Airman, A Study of W. H. Auden's Poetry [Totowa, N.J., Rowman and Littlefield, 1972], 137–38).Google Scholar I have little sympathy.
The chief weakness of For the Time Being criticism, it seems to me, is the failure of critics to reckon with the poem's kind.
10 Fraser, , The Career of W. H. Auden, in Auden: A Collection, 103.Google Scholar
11 See Fraser: “He [Auden] was not, I think, fundamentally a religious poet, any more than Milton was” (ibid.), and again on p. 96, n.i: “Neither Auden nor Milton seem to be gripped and held. They choose, rather, to grip and hold. They could let go.” Frasers's insight is better, I think, than his explanation of it; he seems to see devotion and social eschatology as mutually exclusive, and to conceive of devotion in terms of high Catholic affection. But in this he is exactly like Auden.
12 I find it extremely interesting that Auden should have cited Langland as a major formative influence upon his work, one of the three greatest, as a matter of fact, the others being Dante and Pope (Spears, The Poetry of Auden, 21), since it seems to me that there is a historic as well as formal relationship between such poems as Piers Plowman and For the Time Being.