The Poet in His Own Words
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
W. H. Auden (1907–1973) was one of the great poets of the twentieth century: technically dazzling, psychologically acute, and unusually quotable.
His famously furrowed face seemed almost to embody the life he had lived. Auden himself described it best:
My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.
—Quoted in Humphrey Carpenter, W. H. Auden: A Biography
Auden had the poet’s gift of compressing a large and complicated truth into a handful of words. His own definition of poetry might equally serve as a definition of his genius:
Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.
—The Poet and the City, in The Dyer’s Hand
As a young man at Oxford, he told the aspiring poet Stephen Spender:
Art is born of humiliation.
—Stephen Spender, World Within World
Humiliation may puncture our pretensions, but it also reveals us to ourselves. In The Sea and the Mirror, Auden offers two brilliantly concise injunctions:
All that we are not stares back at what we are.
Learn from your dreams what you lack.
—The Sea and the Mirror
He could be particularly sharp on reason, action, and their failure:
Those who will not reason
Perish in the act:
Those who will not act
Perish for that reason.
—Under Which Lyre
And on fame:
Fame often makes a writer vain,
But seldom makes him proud.
—Who’s Who
Auden was no less penetrating on self-deception. The person we pretend to be for ourselves, he observed, is not quite the person we pretend to be for others:
The image of myself which I try to create in my own mind in order that I may love myself is very different from the image which I try to create in the minds of others in order that they may love me.
—Hic et Ille, in The Dyer’s Hand
He was hardly more sentimental about work:
A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office every day. Not because he likes it but because he can’t think of anything else to do.
—The Table Talk of W. H. Auden, 11 December 1946
Or about relationships:
Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both partners run out of goods.
—The Poet and the City, in The Dyer’s Hand
A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime.
—Enchantment, in A Certain World
But Auden’s wit and intelligence were grounded in a profound understanding of suffering. In Musée des Beaux Arts, inspired by Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, he observes how private catastrophe unfolds amid the indifference of ordinary life:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position.
—Musée des Beaux Arts
His love poetry is no less clear-eyed. In Funeral Blues, love becomes an entire world—and grief its extinction:
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
—Funeral Blues
Yet disenchantment did not make Auden cynical. If love could be unequal, the answer was not to love less:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
—The More Loving One
Auden’s genius lay in this marriage of disenchantment and affirmation. He saw vanity in fame, self-interest in relationships, indifference around suffering, and mortality within love—but still found reasons to create, to love, and, finally, to praise:
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
—In Memory of W. B. Yeats
Diogenes of Sinope or Diogenes the Cynic was a contemporary of Socrates’ pupil Plato, whom Plato described as ‘a Socrates gone mad’. Like Socrates and, to a lesser extent, Plato, Diogenes favoured direct verbal interaction over the written account. When a man called Hegesias asked to be lent one of his writing tablets, he replied, ‘You are a simpleton, Hegesias; you do not choose painted figs, but real ones; and yet you pass over the true training and would apply yourself to written rules.’ After being exiled from his native Sinope for having defaced its coinage, Diogenes moved to Athens, took up the life of a beggar, and made it his mission to metaphorically deface the coinage of custom and convention, which, he maintained, was the false coin of morality. He disdained the need for conventional shelter or any other such ‘dainties’ and elected to live in a tub and survive on a diet of onions. He proved to the later satisfaction of the Stoics that happiness has nothing whatever to do with a person’s material circumstances, and held that human beings had much to learn from studying the simplicity and artlessness of dogs, which, unlike human beings, had not ‘complicated every simple gift of the gods’. The terms ‘cynic’ and ‘cynical’ derive from the Greek kynikos, which is the adjective of kyon or ‘dog’.
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