To Read and to Live

I.

In 1956, W.H. Auden returned to an Oxford University from which he had graduated almost thirty years earlier. He was now the University’s Professor of Poetry, and in his Inaugural Lecture he spoke of an old concern of his-one that h had addressed in very different terms in 1939. In that distant age, in his famous elegy on Yeats, he had asserted that

Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still.
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper.

Is it good or bad that “poetry makes nothing happen”? Though it may be regrettable that Yeats’ poetry could not change Ireland, Auden’s sneer at “executives” suggests that poetry’s disconnection from things that happen can be a mark of distinction, a badge of honor. But by the time he got back to Oxford Auden had stopped sneering and had become rather mournful about the uselessness of poetry—though that mournfulness could often be masked by humor. At the beginning of his Inaugural Lecture he said,

"I should be feeling less uneasy at this moment than I do, if the duties of the Professor of Poetry were to produce, as occasion should demand, an epithalamium for the nuptials of a Reader in Romance Languages, an elegy on a deceased Canon of Christ Church, a May-day Masque for Somerville [College], or an election ballad for his successor."

Most of Auden’s listeners no doubt thought he was joking, but he wasn’t. By this point in his career Auden had so thoroughly repudiated the splendid isolation of poetry advocated by Romantic and modern writers alike that he had developed a genuine longing for a conception of the writer as a public servant or as an artisan: the fabricator of objects not only for pleasure but also for use.

I should note that Auden’s argument with the Romantic tradition is not the same as that of his modernist predecessors like T. S. Eliot and James Joyce. Whereas those writers chastised Romanticism for its relentless celebration of the self, its “cult of personality,” Auden frowns upon both Romantic and modern poetics for their acceptance of the autonomy of the literary imagination: for him such autonomy may more accurately be described as an enervating and ultimately deadly detachment. In the 1930s another writer, the Polish poet Oscar Milosz (older cousin of the Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz), described this isolating and aestheticizing tendency as an “unfortunate deviation” in the long history of poetry, which has “produced a schism and a misunderstanding between the poet and the great human family which has continued to the present.”

Once such a diagnosis has been made, the next question is, how may this “schism” be healed, the family restored to wholeness? What can bring the prodigal poets back into the fold? Such a task is not, we must recognize, only a matter of encouraging writers to renew their ties with their society; it also involves getting readers to unlearn the lessons of literary autonomy which they have learned better perhaps than the writers themselves. Oscar Milosz argues that such a restoration can occur only through the arrival on the scene of a great author, “a modern Homer, Shakespeare, or Dante” who will renounce “his paltry ego” and reestablish a viable connection with the people. But even a possibility as remote as that is beyond Auden’s imagination:

"The so-called fine arts have lost the social utility they once had. Since the invention of printing and the spread of literacy, verse no longer has a utility value as a mnemonic, a device by which knowledge and culture were handed on from one generation to the next, and, since the invention of the camera, the draughtsman and the painter are no longer needed to provide visual documentation; they have, consequently, become “pure” arts, that is, gratuitous activities. . . . In the purely gratuitous arts . . . our century has no need, I believe, to be ashamed of its achievements, and in its production of purely utile and functional articles . . . it surpasses every previous age. But whenever it attempts to combine the gratuitous and the utile, to fabricate something which shall be both functional and beautiful, it fails utterly."

Thus Auden has a diagnosis but no prescription for cure: he cannot envision any changes in our world that would restore the arts to the usefulness he believes they once had.

People who nowadays study literature, especially those doing it for a living as either students or teachers seem to be prone to the same kind of uneasiness that afflicted Auden and Milosz, and the doctrines of literary autonomy have had consequences not only for writers and readers, but also for teachers and students. The current ideological ferment in literary studies--the heated arguments about the political effects of literature and literary study, the increasing skepticism about the validity of purely aesthetic categories, and so on, has been generated by the same social and cultural forces that caused Auden’s nostalgia for a poetic World That Time Forgot.

But the arguments prompted by this admirable desire to reconnect the teaching, as well as the writing, of literature with “the great human family” have so far been fruitless for the most part, dominated by rhetorical posturing, name-calling, claiming of the moral high ground, and other tactics that contribute little to the potential resolution of the debate, or even to mutual comprehension by the antagonists. This fruitlessness, moreover, is inevitable--if for no other reason, because the vocabulary is so shallow and inflexible, and thus in need of replacement, or at least supplementation, by a language that is better able to account for what literature says to us and how we receive it. In short, we have been talking too much about politics and far too little about ethics.