W. H. Auden (1907–1973)

The writing is often magnificent and, really, unsurpassable, but in passages of a stanza or in groups of several lines. What use is this book as a book, as an entire statement? Because Auden certainly intended it to have a use: it's a classification, a Pilgrim's Progress, an anatomy, a taxonomy of the state of human affairs and culture after World War II. There's a wonderful introduction by Alan Jacobs (wonderful: not insistent, but not rambling), which makes it clear that Auden's show more classifications of types, journeys, and temperaments comes from Jung, the Kabbalah, and other sources. In its ambition and its reliance on mythopoetic types, the book is like a rationalist's answer to "A Vision," and now that I've belatedly read it I see its confidence in classification as a shadow on "the Changing Light in Sandover."

But what use is it, this classification of temperaments into four types, this journey into disappointment, this faint reprieve at the end granted by love and the passive acknowledgment of the impossibility of salvation? Can anyone, now, see themselves in this? Is it possible to read this as something other than a mid-century project, impelled by its author's transient constellation of literary sources and idiosyncratic poetic ambition? I don't think so. I cannot imagine a state of mind in which I would feel comforted, or feel I'd gained insight, from being told there are Four Faculties, or that we need to be "too resigned" for happiness (that's Jacobs, but it's accurate), or that the necessary journey has seven stages, or that "age softens the sense of defeat / As well as the will to success" (p. 103), or that "we are mocked by unmeaning" (p. 33), and so on... the poem is filled with quotable conclusions, as hesitant and contextual as they may be.

The passivism (as opposed to pacifism) of the book's politics has attracted the attention of some writers, and "The Age of Anxiety" has been said to be exemplary for "our" age of political skepticism. Whether or not it makes sense to say we're in such an age (and it very nearly doesn't, because the notion is so thoroughly riddled with exceptions), this is not the book to give that position to the twenty-first century. It's a book of individual, isolated passages, some of which are really magnificent (pp. 30, 32, 33, 87, 103...). show less

There are an awful lot of studies of Romanticism, and the ways in which it differed from and remained similar to what came before. Many are more comprehensive and more scholarly than The Enchafed Flood. But none, I would venture to say, are remotely as entertaining.

The Enchafed Flood does not pretend to be Abrams' The Mirror and the Lamp, for instance. It has no delusions of thoroughness. Instead, it selects two images - the Sea and the Desert (despite the title's focus on only one of them) show more - and demonstrates some of the different ways writers have employed them, and how the Romantics took these images and pushed them into entirely new directions.

Along with these images is a related discussion of some different ways to perceive heroism (because one needs a hero to go off to sea). Again, not the most thorough introduction to Romantic heroism, but thorough enough, and Auden makes apparent the distinction between Romantic ideals and pre-Romantic ideals.

What's best about The Enchafed Flood is how entertaining it is. The world of scholarship and ideas is often treated as an "important" and rarefied one; it is rarely treated as a joyous one. But in Auden's hands, it is. Anytime Baudelaire is put side by side with The Hunting of the Snark, you're in for a snarkily good time.

Some minor quibbles: translations from the French would have been nice. And Auden does know how to go off on a tangent.

Still, even though Auden is not a scholarly writer (in the sense that he is not filled with the latest jargon), he is an eminently intelligent writer, and a penetrating one at that. His insights are always thought-provoking, even when he's at his most provocative. Overall, this is not only an excellent treatise on Romanticism as a movement, but also the single best introduction to Romanticism I've ever read. show less

I’m not sure there are any gems that aren’t already well known, but it was fascinating to read these in concert with a bunch about Churchill to get the literary version of the lamps going out all over Europe—lots of poems about dread. If you want one that hits different now, right before “Musée des Beaux Arts” there’s “Gare du Midi”: A nondescript express in from the South,/Crowds round the ticket barrier, a face/To welcome which the mayor has not contrived/Bugles or braid: show more something about the mouth/Distracts the stray look with alarm and pity./Snow is falling, Clutching a little case,/He walks out briskly to infect a city/Whose terrible future may have just arrived.” show less

A rather mixed, but mostly very enjoyable late collection of shorter poems. The sequence "About the house" - a poem for each of the rooms in their home - takes up about half the book, and is the most interesting part of the collection; then there are some poems written for particular friends, and a bunch of occasional poems written to mark various events (dinners, gaudies, etc.). These last were probably very impressive if you were there when Auden read them, but fifty years later you can't show more help feeling that he might have been better advised not to let them be printed.

I particularly enjoyed some of the odder poems in the "About the House" sequence, especially of course the Enderby-esque meditation on the cultural importance of defecation with which he celebrates "the smallest room". It's worth buying the book for this alone (and for the elegant Faber cover design, of course. show less