ANXIOUS AGES, MARGINAL GRIEFS

After going down from Oxford, Auden spent the years between 1930 and 1935 teaching at private schools in Scotland and Herefordshire. It was while he was in his first post at the Larchfield School in Helensburgh, a small ultra-middle-class town on the Clyde, that Poems (1930) was published. The hothouse atmosphere of the small private school in an inturned community is curiously fused with the obscure narrative of a politically ambiguous officers’ coup led by a mysterious Airman in that strange ‘postmodernist’ mélange adultère of prose and verse The Orators, which he wrote here in 1931. The book, ironically subtitled An English Study, looks in on Englishness from the Scottish sidelines to take as one of its themes the idea that ‘The marginal grief | Is source of life’.

Looking in from the margins was to become Auden's most characteristic stance, revealed in his frequent use of the adverb ‘between’, and accounting for his most famous motif, represented by the title of his last play, written during 1937–8, On the Frontier, but also by the opening line of his earliest published poem, written in Zagreb in 1927, ‘On the frontier at dawn getting down’. Auden later wrote that The Orators was ‘meant to be a critique of the fascist outlook but from its reception among my contemporaries and on rereading it myself, I see that it can, most of it, be interpreted as a favorable exposition’ (EA, p. xv). In the early Thirties, the first frontier he had to cross was in his own head.

The mood of Poems, already apparent in the 1928 pamphlet and accentuated by the seven poems added to the 1933 edition, is caught in the unrhymed sonnet to be found in all three volumes, later called ‘The Secret Agent’. In this poem the trained spy, alone in enemy territory, warns that trouble is coming; he knows that the key to success lies in control of the passes; he also knows that his urgent wires will be ignored and the bridges remain unbuilt, so that the final sacrifice of his life will have been useless. The effectiveness of the poem lies in the way it seamlessly fuses a vision of a social order in crisis with the delineation of a psychological state of acute anxiety and frustrated action.