Ask the Auden Expert

FOR A CERTAIN KIND OF PERSON WHO CAME OF age in the 1930s, the English poet W.H. Auden played a role similar to the one Bob Dylan would play in the 1960s, if for a far smaller audience. Which is to say, he was not just "the voice of a generation," he was someone whose words lodged themselves in the heads of his contemporaries like shrapnel and remained there for decades afterward.

The parallels are striking. Each man enjoyed a period of furious creativity in his 20s, only to be dismissed by many as a has-been by the time he was 35. Each began by espousing a leftist political line, and infuriated his fans when he abandoned it for a more religious one. Each had an ability to sum up a generation's mood, and each suffered critically once his generation's moment had passed. Perhaps it's just a coincidence, but when Auden finally left New York in 1972 (he would die a year later, aged 66, in Austria), the first thing his apartment's new occupant did was put up a giant poster of Bob Dylan.

In most ways, though, the comparison falls flat. Dylan is the bard of an oral culture, rough-hewn and instinctive, whereas Auden was a hyperliterate poet whose command of the language, not to mention breadth of knowledge, far exceeded Dylan's or just about anyone else's. (According to one Weeklystaffer, who claims to have heard him speak the words, the poet considered Dylan "a dreadful fraud.") Auden is, surely, the most quotable English-language poet of the century, and probably the most intelligent. I first started reading him when working as a foot messenger in New York. I'd borrowed a Selected Poemsfrom a friend and carried it around with me as I traipsed through midtown Manhattan in melting summer heat, not reading the poems so much as memorizing them so I wouldn't crash into people. "Yes, these are the dog-days, Fortunatus . . . ," I'd recite to myself:

The heather lies limp and dead On the mountain, the baltering torrent Shrunk to a soodling thread; Rusty the spears of the legion, unshaven its captain, Vacant the scholar's brain Under his great hat, Drug though She may, the Sybil utters A gush of table-chat.  

I got hooked on the voice, basically, a combination of lyricism and almost omniscient intelligence. It was pure pleasure, an unexpected discovery far from the classroom and in the midst of life -- just where a poet should be.

Something similar must have happened to Edward Mendelson in the mid-'60s, when he was still in his teens. In 1972, Auden, then 65, named Mendelson as his literary executor. ("He knows more about me than I do," Auden explained to a friend.) In the years since, Mendelson has edited various editions of Auden's work in exemplary fashion and written two major critical studies. Early Auden, published in 1981, covers the 1930s, when Auden was the leading voice of a group of British writers that included Christopher Isherwood and Louis MacNeice. Later Auden, which has just been published, covers the years 1939­1973, after Auden moved to the U.S. and became an American citizen. Mendelson, who is a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, believes that Auden did much of his greatest work after he left England. He spoke to the Weekly by phone from New York.

What attracted you most in Auden's poetry when you first read it?

My first impression was of an extraordinary evocative rhythmical power that seemed to promise deep meanings that I didn't fully understand, but which seemed worth pursuing. Then, as I began to understand him better, I was struck by a number of things. One was that he seemed to be describing reality better than any other 20th-century writer. Another was that I had been taught by the culture that cynicism was an essential part of intelligence, and here was someone who was infinitely more intelligent than I was, who had no conventional illusions, but who was not cynical in the least.

How did you meet him?

I had heard that you could look him up in the Manhattan phone book and invite yourself over to talk to him at his apartment on St. Mark's Place. And at the age of 19, I did exactly that. He had a kind of office hour from 5 to 6, and so I went and nervously tried to make conversation with the great man. Auden told me anecdotes, and I realized I'd heard some of them before, but he was very generous about putting the visitor at ease. And at precisely 6, I was politely ushered out.

One always thinks of Auden as a "spokesperson for his generation" in the '30s, something we can hardly imagine a poet as now. Was he really that influential?

In terms of the larger population, no one had heard of him. But in literary circles, in that small group of a few thousand people who were reading poetry and plays, he was regarded as the most impressive new voice in decades, someone with a political edge, a sense of sheer pleasure and audacity, unlike anything else.