3

Song of My Selves

I was of three minds,

Like a tree

In which there are three blackbirds.

—WALLACE STEVENS, “THIRTEEN
WAYS OF LOOKING AT A BLACKBIRD”

“A TRUE FIRST person plural is an impossibility,” wrote Franz Boas, “because there can never be more than one self.”1 But he could as easily have asked, “How can there be only one self?” Whitman’s “I am large, I contain multitudes”² has been taken up as a common theme of recent cognitive and behavioral psychology.³ We think of the inward-looking poet as antagonistic to the social order, but the pluralized self may be the beginning of the lyric’s ability to imagine community. The poet’s communing with himself may create a foundation for imagining other minds. Forms of the pluralized self that might seem to be distinct—such as self-dialogue, narcissism, aristocratic elevation, empathy—overlap and pull against each other in the poet’s interaction with the world. Instances of what linguists call “nosism”—the use of “we” when “I” is implied—have a surprising persistence in poetry.

Rather than suggesting inner plurality and psychological or cognitive enlargement, the majestic we is most often associated with imperiousness, distance, and public presentation of the self’s authority—hardly the prelude to democratic sociality.⁴ King Lear preempts the speech of others with a “we” that doubles back on itself in self-circulating love: “which of you shall we say doth love us most?”⁵ Is his “shall” marking a possibility, a prediction, or a command? That deontic “shall” slips from invitation to decree. Shakespeare’s royal we is rarely mere convention; it is an opportunity for dramatic character development. In poetry the majestic we has sometimes been reconstructed as a metaphor for the aristocracy of the imagination. Emily Dickinson makes prolific use of the royal we. “And now We roam in Sovereign Woods”; “We—would rather / From Our Garret go / White—Unto the White Creator—/ Than invest—Our Snow—.”6 This “royal air” is not only imperial, however. It also registers the plurality of the self as fundamental. We hear Dickinson’s royal we, her sense of the difficult aristocracy of the poetic imagination, in many contemporary poets, from John Berryman (“we cry oursel’s awake”) to Kay Ryan (“The Test We Set Ourself”). We are accustomed to thinking about duality and conflict rather than plurality and expansion within the self. Modernism often emphasized the divided self—tensions between public and private, ego and id, self and soul, mind and body. Matthew Arnold anticipated this theme in his preface of 1853: “The calm, the cheerfulness, the disinterested objectivity have disappeared: the dialogue of the mind with itself has commenced.” That dialogue has a tragic aspect for him: “We hear already the doubts, we witness the discouragement, of Hamlet and of Faust.”⁷ But must the self be unified, suppressing competing thoughts and impulses? Many writers have treated the self as a manifold rather than a monarchy, with equilibrium and liminal being rather than opposition or final synthesis as the desired states. “Do I contradict myself?” asks Whitman. He’s not troubled by it. “Very well, then, I contradict myself.”⁸ The imperial aspect of the American self has ever been connected to the idea of self-improvement. The majestic we can serve this motive as we imagine an alternative version of our being. This is what Stanley Cavell calls “nextness.”⁹ He means “next” in the sense of beside ourselves, different from ourselves, a plural self, and “next” also as in the temporality of a self that would move forward in vision and being, without a particular goal, to perfection. Contemporary psychology is also catching up to Whitman. Paul Bloom has observed that “the capacity to spawn multiple selves is central to pleasure” and that literature contributes to that capacity, allowing us to entertain imaginatively potentialities that we can’t live out but that enrich our well-being.¹⁰ The modernist use of personae is an obvious example of this spawning, though its affect may be agitation more than pleasure. Contemporary poetry has extended this technique with a proliferation of portraits of the self “as” another, often removing the anguish and pathology of self-division and seeing plurality as health.¹¹

But the plurality of the self is not only a matter of private well-being. The capacity to expand or transform the self through imagination is also directly linked, according to philosopher Ted Cohen in Thinking of Others, to our ethical development and the capacity for empathy. (The doctor’s “we,” often associated with condescension, has more to do with compassion, this capacity to understand another’s pain.) To imaginatively become another is for Cohen a metaphoric act. Literature, which enhances our inherently double, metaphoric thinking and our ability to entertain other selves, thus plays an important role in moral development. And like metaphor, these acts of imagining oneself as another through literature do not simply reflect antecedent similarities but spawn and establish connections, again linking literature to potential community. While Paul Bloom’s work is focused on expanding the self and Ted Cohen’s on imagining the other, their arguments overlap in how we might understand the capacity of an “I” to thrive in plurality. The openness to being what Auden called a “double man” can involve a greater facility for interpersonal awareness. To see “oneself as oneself” is already a primary metaphoric act (italics mine).12 Works of art can also “teach me something about myself, or allow me to discover something about myself.”¹³ The sense of potential in imagining oneself as another, or allowing difference within the self, has temporal as well as social implications. “To gain a sense of oneself at a future time” is for Cohen another metaphoric act that depends on the capacity of the imagination, enhanced in literature, to pluralize identity. Self-reflection and acknowledgment of the other are, then, related and mutually supporting metaphoric acts.

The plurality of the self is now often viewed as health rather than pathology. But it was not always so. Whitman aside, in a great deal of modern literature the mind’s dialogue with itself represented inner crisis in need of structured opposition or final synthesis. We think of people who talk to themselves in the plural as lonely, solipsistic, or insane. (E. A. Robinson’s Old Eben Flood in “Mr. Flood’s Party” would serve as an example.) But Eliot’s interiorized, forestalled love song might point to a more meaningful communication than Prufrock finds in the available scenes of social life. True recognition and fostering of plurality within the self, rather than turning us away from others, can be a way to strengthen social and ethical relations. Thought and speech fundamentally orient themselves in dialogue between a self and another who is not “I.” Plato clearly understood that cognition depends on the mind’s dialogue with itself, and later philosophers have shown that such dialogue both reflects and opens the mind to others. Heidegger’s “existential solipsism,” for instance, interacts with the “being-with” of Dasein in a way that allows one to truly care for others rather than appeasing others in an inauthentic way through “talkative fraternizing.”¹⁴ Stanley Cavell recognized that “Understanding how we form a community with the other is . . . akin to understanding how we form it with ourselves.”¹⁵ Poetry often operates in a liminal space in which these poles are made flexible and productive. Something of this may be heard in Yeats’s “Dialogue of Self and Soul,” in which the self has the last word but chooses the first-person plural, “we must laugh and we must sing.”¹⁶ Yeats’s poem evokes an imperial scene, suggesting a royal we. But it is ambiguous whether this is a chorus of self and soul, emerging from the dialogue, or an inclusive human imperative, uttered by the self in alliance with the soul. Poetry has given form to the way we encounter our secret lives, the selves that lie “incognito.” It is in the nature of human consciousness to form a sense of separateness within the world, and a plurality in the inner life can be a kind of empowerment as well as expansion. At the same time, the plurality within our sense of ourselves opens us to instability, and this too poets explore.

The mature Auden would increasingly see the plurality of the self as an inevitable condition of being and consciousness, and a check to narrow subjectivity and repressive will, rather than a flaw to be overcome. The Double Man (1941) does not decide questions but poses them. Its major poem, “New Year Letter,” offers a dialogue between poetry and prose and between his own words and those he has read (presented in “Notes”). The epigraph cites Montaigne (by way of Charles Williams): “We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn.”17 Auden would go on to write a sonnet on Montaigne and include many quotations from him in his Aphorisms. Indeed, Auden is in many ways a modern-day Montaigne, looking at his society by engaging in a dialogue with and about himself—not in the form of idealizing self-love, but rather humble and skeptical self-regard, “Our faith well balanced by our doubt” (CP 222). “Human personality in its full depth, its inner dialectic, is self-disclosure and self-concealment,” he would write in 1954 in “Balaam and His Ass” (DH 110). Yet the self-dialogue and multivocality within the community of one is not always a withdrawal from social life, as Auden reveals. It may be a prelude to or precondition of social being. “Man is a creature who is capable of entering into Thou-Thou relationships with God and with his neighbors because he has a Thou-Thou relationship with himself” (DH 109). Narcissism in this context wears a new, perhaps a nicer face.¹⁸

The Orators: Auden as Narcissus

“Ariel’s other name is Narcissus,” Auden wrote in an essay on Robert Frost (DH 340). The Orators opens on an image of a narcissist, aware of his attractiveness to others, perhaps, but fully absorbed in solitary echoic contemplation, “Bending a beautiful head, worshipping not lying, / ‘Dear’ the dear beak in the dear concha crying” (EA 61). If the bent head indicates worship, it certainly also, since this is a “swan,” marks narcissistic self-reflection and romantic self-communing. Yeats’s “Song of the Happy Shepherd” comes to mind: “Go gather by the humming sea / Some twisted, echo-harbouring shell, / And to its lips thy story tell / And they thy comforters will be.”¹⁹

Auden’s lifelong argument with romanticism surely derives in part from his recognition of its tendencies in his own early thought and art. Though he disdained the elevation of the self to godlike stature and disavowed any magical powers of the poetic imagination, he was certainly fascinated by the hero as a type and by the romantic figure of the alienated artist. The element of “self-regard” is a particular habit of mind that Auden seems at once to advance and despise. He saw the glorification and consequent solipsism of the romantic hero as a major cause of contemporary inertia, a mutually defeating co-dependency with a passive public. The romantic hero becomes, in turn, dictatorial and alienated. The Orators is built around a tension between the solitary hero’s self-regard and the proper formation of the group. Yet Auden also saw introspection and self-dialogue as crucial to art and even to the ability to imagine change. In The Orators, this ambivalence plays out in the poet-protagonist’s quarrel with himself, a quarrel that manifests not only thematically but also formally and rhetorically. In his 1968 book on Auden, Quest for the Necessary, Herbert Greenberg argued that “Divided consciousness . . . is the principal subject matter of his poetry, and it provides the conceptual foundation for his way of looking at things.”20 Mendelson’s reading of The Orators also emphasizes division, less as foundation than as discovery: “Its bafflingly elusive tone emerged from the divisions Auden recognized in himself only while he was writing it.” The Orators is not only social analysis; it is also “expressionist autobiography” and “self-analysis.”²¹ Auden often saw self-division as a troubling conflict, related to the breakdown of the relation of the individual to the group. Yet in many ways The Orators works against this diagnosis. While the tensions between self-regard and cultural imperatives may appear as a sickness, inner and outer divisions also become parallel and interrelated problems in The Orators and may be linked in a process. Seen this way The Orators offers more than a portrait of futility. By allowing conflict full expression and ordering it for the imagination, Auden points to a direction of civic health that he may not have recognized, especially later when he distanced himself from his early poetry.

The Orators describes the failure of both the hero’s independence and the group’s cohesion and momentum. It portrays the perversion of the group through the work of quasifascist orators. But in the last section, the odes, the work develops an internalized rhythm of assertion and doubt that directs the audience against authoritarian voices and the crises that come from violent opposition. Mendelson argues that the odes “are not sure whether they celebrate or parody the positions they take. . . . Auden’s abandoned 1932 preface called them personal reflections on the question of leadership in our time. The question remains open.”²² But is this a problem, or is openness precisely their poetic and civic virtue? Auden’s “self-analysis” as he works through his ambivalence about the relations between groups and individuals points away from hierarchical and adversarial social forms toward a dialectical civic order. This alternative structure is glimpsed in the work more at the level of linguistic and formal innovation than representation or statement. The form points where the characters cannot yet go. In The Orators’ difficult, polyphonic, experimental styles, Auden gives voice to contending selves and searches for a poetic-language alternative to violent public rhetoric and oratory. He creates a language that allows for divisions within the mind and tensions between belief and doubt, civil and hermetic impulses. Self-dialogue and self-regard are not simply insular; they acknowledge ambivalence and make a step toward absorbing difference into a richer and more complex relation to the other. By making the quarrel within a principle of composition, Auden also provides an antidote to the repressive and monolithic oratory that is built on exclusions and entertains no doubts or differences. Auden’s text is constantly answering back to its orators through irony, shifts of style and perspective, questions, paradoxes, opacities, and other counterpoints to “argument[s].” Auden moves from an inward-turning, crisis-driven meditation in “Letter to a Wound” to a choral voice that absorbs modernist tensions and paradoxes while overcoming alienation; he moves, that is, from paralyzing division to productive pluralism.

The Orators is “an English study,” mimicking a variety of English oratorical and poetic styles (some classical in origin), and exploring a range of group formations, from close friendships and kinships to national identity. The quarrel is within English culture. But it is also Auden’s “song of myself,” just as Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” with its many, often contradictory styles and selves, offers an American study. Private and public, self and community influence each other and merge in Auden’s poetic imagination, for the tensions in Auden’s environment are also within him. The anxious, self-regarding mirror of Narcissus, with its effects of doubling and division and its prompts to self-dialogue, provides a crucial stage, even a threshold, in the poet’s search for a fresh, creative relation to the world.

From his early days as a writer Auden associated his craft with the archetype of Narcissus and with the self-division central to that figure’s story. Auden’s “Well of Narcissus” is an inkwell. The “we” in his youthful poem “Narcissus” is explicitly the pluralized self of self-regard: “The words we stuck together on the nursery floor / Broke in our jammy fingers. We rose as the clock struck, / Our tongues ashamed, deceived by a shake of the hand.”23 The image here is of childhood masturbation, and an alliance of the body and the will. The self-doubling “we” becomes, as the poem continues, an ontological as much as a physical phenomenon, and very much a linguistic matter, connecting writing to narcissistic urges. Language both structures and pluralizes being: “We meet at last, this film between us, / Between the perception and the noun / The desire, and the assurance, I and AM.” The emergent poet exists in this liminal film. Language marks the division of the self as the threshold and also the promise of union in the plural first person. But it remains a comical and unconsummated union, marked by betrayal and shame as well as self-deception. Auden later emphasizes the frustrations of Narcissus rather than his secret meeting. In “Balaam and His Ass,” Auden focuses on the paradoxes and inversions of master/slave relations, even those that occur within the double man: “Narcissus falls in love with his reflection; he wishes to become its servant, but instead his reflection insists upon being his slave” (DH 115). Narcissus is increasingly a double figure in Auden, rather than merely a self-absorbed one. Auden’s own double nature involves not just his life on two continents, or the tensions of his private and public self, but also the scope of his will in relation to his bodily being. “What we call the ‘I,’ in fact, is the area over which our will is immediately operative. Thus, if we have a toothache, we seem to be two people, the suffering ‘I’ and the hostile outer world of the tooth. His penis never fully belongs to a man” (EA 394). Many of Auden’s late poems (e.g., “Loneliness,” “Talking to Myself,” “You,” “Profile”) are “tête à têtes” with himself in which the “we” is a conversation between his sense of a higher consciousness and his attachment to the body, not always a comfortable conversation. “Our marriage is a drama.” The quarrel with the self has eased with age. “Bound to ourselves for life, / we must learn how to / put up with each other” (CP 887). These internal conversations have become tolerant and amused, but they are also a point of return and a check on oratory.24

Our double nature and self-regard are often a problem for Auden, but at the same time they can be a source of dynamic creativity. The issue arises in Auden’s earliest work. The Oxford poems are rife with pronoun trouble. They shift from You to He to a “two-faced,” dreaming “I” or avoid grammatical subjects altogether. Part of what makes the early poetry so difficult is the deferral of agency that comes with the expression of inner conflict. Pronoun subjects don’t emerge until late in sentences and seldom have noun antecedents. This is particularly true of the “Megalopsych” sonnet sequence in Poems (1928). There is little evidence of the strong, expansive spirit Aristotle imagined as the “megalopsych,” though it is not entirely clear that Auden’s proposed title is ironic. Out of the disintegrated experience of self, some kind of wisdom is emerging. The ability to destroy the creations of the self may not be ultimately self-destructive; such ability may instead be part of new wisdom and strength.

In a lyric sequence originally titled “1929” (EA 37–40), Auden proceeds in this autobiographical narrative of death and rebirth on the “track which is himself.” The poem opens with a straightforward narration and an “I” that has been absent from Auden’s previous poetry: “It was Easter as I walked in the public gardens.” But if the poem offers a sense of renewed life with others (“altering speech for altering things”), this “I” is also a retrospective and reminiscing figure, lingering around weaker selves, and especially around the site of Narcissus (“the pond”). The figure of a “solitary man” is ugly as “embryo chicken”—not mature and not human, but Narcissus is not wholly banished. In section 2 the self is constituted of imperfect verbs, suggesting a being and consciousness that is emergent and potential rather than complete or coherent: “Coming out of me living is always thinking / Thinking changing and changing living, / Am feeling as it was seeing.” The lines describe not static or stunted self-regard but a lively self-consciousness associated with growth. Auden in “1929” may be imitating Anglo-Saxon grammar and syntax as he drops noun and pronoun subjects and articles, but this also recalls the language of Gertrude Stein, and it explores Stein’s notions of the self, loosened from fixed identity. Auden avoids the subject here, replacing personhood with gerunds like “living” and “feeling,” “me” as their mere site of origin. The sequence offers a growing social awareness and sense not only of “mother” but also of “the other.” Near the end of section 2 Auden incorporates a dialogue that may be internal and is certainly critical. He shifts from self-presentation of a first-person “I” to an impersonal third-person “he” who says “We” but is “unforgiving” and incapable of meaningful love of another. In section 3 (“Order to stewards and the study of time”), the third person is an abstraction, “the frightened soul,” likely a version of the self that is contemplated from a reflective distance. As he meditates on the conditions necessary for “independent delight” of the maturing soul, Auden uses a social image of plurality and procreation and calls for a new language of being: “as foreign settlers to a strange country come, / By mispronunciation of native words / And by intermarriage create a new race / And a new language, so may the soul / Be weaned at last to independent delight”—“independent,” that is, of old forms and social expectations, and of the limits of the embryonic state of solitude. The new “I” has the aspect of a megalopsych in Aristotle’s sense of expansive being, capable of ethical action. This new self arises, if we follow the metaphor, out of intermarriage with its strangeness, its otherness. Having released the soul from its dependencies, the speaker turns in section 4 to another, a “You whom I gladly walk with” in the present tense, the pronouns foregrounded, the thought united: “We know it, we know that love . . . / Needs death,” death of the old self and its complacent, retentive self-confidence. Yet the last lines suggest how difficult this liberation is. The poem ends with a scene of Narcissus gazing at his image, “deep in the clear lake / The lolling bridegroom, beautiful, there.” Does Auden mean that the reflection of Narcissus has receded into the unconscious, leaving the conscious mind “clear” of his image? Or is this unconsummated love still lingering in the newly formed self? He is not done with Narcissus, it would seem, even if his mirror-love is one that detains him from love’s work in the world.

There is an element of resignation in this sense of inner dualities, and certainly in The Orators the problem of competing selves and consequent inertia remains unresolved. Yet the condition of the double man is not decisively a lamentable condition; nor does doubleness inevitably produce either sterile repetition or paralyzing dualism. It is the precondition of writing, as Auden would indicate years later in “Nones”: poetry leads back “to a room, / Lit by one weak bulb, where our Double sits / Writing and does not look up” (CP 634). True, narcissism is not dialogical; on the contrary, it involves repetition and self-circulation. As Jacques Derrida put it, “Narcissism has no contrary, no other side, no beyond, and love for the other, respect for the other, the self-denial in favor of the other do not interrupt any narcissistic movement.”25 Neither does self-regard foreclose acknowledgment of another, nor dialogue with the self preclude dialogue with another. Indeed, these acknowledgments are mutually supportive. Self-circulating as it is, narcissism, as a form of self-address, does include an absurd kind of dialogue. In the spirit of a stand-up comic, Auden creates portraits of Narcissus that remind us of the dialogical element of self-regard: “Narcissus (drunk): ‘I shouldn’t look at me like that, if I were you. I suppose you think you know who I am. Well, let me tell you, my dear, that one of these days you are going to get a very big surprise indeed!’” (DH 94). In a more sober mood Auden links the origin of language to self-regard: “only man has a language by means of which he can disclose himself to his neighbor, which he could not do and could not want to do if he did not first possess the capacity and the need to disclose himself to himself. . . . But subjective communication demands dialogue and dialogue demands a real language” (DH 109).

For later Auden, then, Everyman is Narcissus, to whose well he returns often and to whom he devotes an entire section in The Dyer’s Hand. “Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow” (DH 93). “We shall be judged, not by the kind of mirror found on us, but by the use we have made of it, by our riposte to our reflection” (DH 94). Poetry itself is a kind of mirror, and one that has special advantages over social interaction: “Like an image in a mirror, a poem is a pseudo-person, i.e. it has uniqueness and addresses the reader face to face or person to person, but, like all natural beings and unlike historical beings, it cannot lie” (Prose IV 64). The double man of belief and skepticism is deeply related to this archetypal mirror man, for it is through introspection, as Montaigne revealed while looking “outside his library window,” that skepticism first arises (CP 299).

Auden introduces the mirror often in his poetry, and it is sometimes a prelude to the window. One must confront the self and make a riposte to its image before one can properly look out at the world of others and offer correction. In “As I Walked Out One Evening,” the speaker has judged the world without self-knowledge. The clocks tell him to turn toward the image of the self, confronting its conflicts and limits, as a prelude to brotherly love. “O look, look in the mirror,” they say, but they demand a two-way gaze: “look in your distress” but also “stand, stand at the window,” and “love your crooked neighbor / With your crooked heart” (SP 67).

The turn from mirror to window is already implicit in The Orators. One of the best uses of the mirror, one of the best ripostes, is self-questioning and humility, the lover’s quarrel with himself. Narcissus, even as he turns away from community, is in this sense an ally to the civil poet, potentially a defense against both the hollow man and the tyrant. Self-consciousness inoculates against the hubris of the orator who consolidates his image by subjugating others to his point of view. The double man creates productive skepticism within his point of view.

The Orators: An English Study, a modernist, genre-bending work, marks a threshold in Auden’s career as a poet concerned with diagnosing his society, its institutions and its leadership, and with the individual as he relates to social groups. But this “English Study” is also a self-study, or a study of selfhood, in which the poet takes stock of his own troubled motivations and actions, and those of his friends, as they live and reflect within a culture that is “ill.” External battles form an allegorical map of a self in conflict and crisis. Stephen Spender recognized this double function early on, and other critics have echoed his view: “The struggle in fact while existing externally is also taking place within the poet himself.”26 The heterogeneous language of the work reflects this double function, at once oratorical and meditative, satiric and earnest. At times the language imitates, in order to expose, familiar rhetorical situations and voices of public authority; at other times it ruptures or strains language to undermine this discourse, expose its dangerous logic, and explore new meanings. But the aim is as much to encounter and explore the plurality of the self as to defeat and expel “the enemy within.”

“We make of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”²⁷ Yeats’s remark is often quoted, but what does he mean by “ourselves”? The pronoun is intrasubjective, but does “ourselves” evoke a personal or collective first person? Does poetry come from a local culture’s internal debates or from individual struggle and self-scrutiny? Once we recognize the ambiguity of the first-person plural here, the distinction between rhetoric and poetry similarly becomes difficult to maintain. How easily may we distinguish between the private place of the self and the public space of others? It is likely that Auden was familiar with Yeats’s remark, given the affinities between Yeats’s “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” and Auden’s “Journal of an Airman” at the center of The Orators. Auden’s poem makes ample use of the first-person plural, sometimes arising from a group, at other times arising from the counsel with himself. In any case, it is possible to see the mixed language of The Orators not only as a convergence or coexistence of these two “quarrels” but as an extension of the long battle between rhetoric and poetry.28 For all the oppositional “us vs. them” polemics of The Orators, its poetry emerges from recognizing multiple points of view in disequilibrium and from looking for open and flexible community beyond the norms of the broken system or the solipsistic view of the alienated self. Auden’s sense of himself at this point in his career was certainly conflicted and his position liminal. He was still not far from his student days and identified in many ways with his students. At the same time, as a teacher he participated in an institution devoted, among other things, to the continuity of a culture about which he was critical but not detached. The Orators does not resolve this conflict. The student/teacher overlap is but one of many such tensions, sometimes painful, but also, as they are acknowledged, brought into creative equilibrium through poetic language and form.

In celebrating the early Auden of radical technique and “special language” over rhetoric, Randall Jarrell admired the poet’s nondidactic quarrel with himself. Charles Altieri, by contrast, admires Auden’s “return to rhetoric,” which shows him conscious of the limits of discourse and the artifice of shared forms, but also of the possibilities of forging values and engaging community through language. For Altieri, as for many others, The Orators represents Auden’s impasse, for while he takes his private anxieties for a measure of public crisis, he retreats from creative agency, collapsing back into the alienated modernist poetic stances he would surpass, rather than imagining a new order for the times. For Altieri, the Auden of The Orators offers no options for civil discourse, only “Eliot’s alternatives—a cry and a prayer.”²⁹ But as Eliot himself anticipates in “Rhetoric and Poetic Drama,” the distinction between rhetoric and poetry remains an unstable and relative one. Perhaps this is what Stan Smith means when he argues that Auden offers “a rhetorical attempt to wring the neck of rhetoric.”³⁰

The verse passages of The Orators have received relatively little attention, at least in terms of their genre distinction. Yet in these passages, which increase as the work progresses, we see the push-pull of internal and external quarrels taking place and the external battle increasingly absorbed into a pattern of creative disruption rather than violence and crisis. The epigraph to The Orators, “Private faces in public places / Are wiser and nicer / Than public faces in private places,” establishes a chiasm rather than a gap of alienation or a strict dichotomy of realms (EA 59). When the “private face” of poetry (the quarrel with ourselves) enters the “public place” of oratory and social address (the quarrel with others), it brings its inner dialogue, and imagination of the other, with it.

Justin Replogle’s early study, Auden’s Poetry, caught one aspect of the doubleness in Auden’s voice as he navigates between rhetoric and poetry, between high and low tones, and between lyricality and quotidian speech. His argument provides particular insight into The Orators. In his chapter “Pattern of Personae,” Replogle identified interplay between “Poet” and “Antipoet,” and we might extend this dichotomy to “orator” and “antiorator.” “The danger of the Poet lies mainly in his pomposity, that of the Antipoet in his crudeness.”31 It is wrong, Replogle argues, to imagine that the antipoet is the real poet; in successful poems they are joined. “Apart they just contradict each other.” Replogle wants this to become a stable, integrated relation yielding a unitary authorial voice, what Stan Smith claims The Orators strategically refuses: “a meaning and a meaningful person with whom to associate.”³² But even if we disagree with his evaluation, Replogle’s remark is useful: “Poems that explode and collapse under pressure from the incompatible parts of Auden’s temperament are the most striking features of his early work and the seed ground for later growth.”³³ We can read The Orators as a dramatic record of a divided mind and plural selfhood, always permeable and subject to social forms, working through mixed impulses as it seeks agency in the public realm. As the two quarrels, external and internal, coexist within the work, they keep up a dialectic between rhetoric and poetry, turning the us vs. them logic of the first into an internal dynamic and pushing the hermetic impulses of the latter back into social relevance.

This would not be the only time Auden would relate internal with social pluralities, or see the “verbal system” of a poem in relation to the social order, which the feeling individual internally contends with in order to write. “The final poetic order of a poem is the outcome of a dialectical struggle between the feeling and the verbal system . . . every feeling competes with every other, demanding inclusion and a dominant position. . . . To the degree that a poem is successful, society and community form one common order, and the system may justly love itself because the feelings which it embodies form a true community loving each other” (DH 68). While at first the struggle seems to be between some authentic sense of personal feeling and imposed social order represented by writing, by the end of the passage it is clear that feelings themselves are multiple and that writing has more to do with establishing equilibrium within that plurality. Auden’s description of the poem here fits well with the kinds of problems that arise in reading The Orators, and that likely arose in writing it. Notably, this is a productive tension and struggle and an inevitable part of poetry for Auden, not something to be fixed or repressed. I will focus on the poetry in section 3 of The Orators in the latter part of this chapter, but first I want to situate it in the book as a whole.

Among the many illnesses explored in The Orators, “self-regard” comes up most often, and most ambivalently. Auden introduces the theme of narcissism in a sympathetic third-person voice in “Prologue” and again through the unsympathetic voice of an orator in “Address for a Prize-Day” (EA 61–64) who warns against “excessive lovers of self.” His portrait implicitly condemns poets among others, those “habituees [sic] of the mirror” who pursue orphic ambitions in “diaries full of incomprehensible jottings,” an allusion, perhaps, to “Journal of an Airman” in section 2. As readers have noted, the creator of this disdainful portrait is himself morally dubious and sadistic.34 The haranguing address here makes the reader wish to defend these purgatorial beings. The speaker’s use of first-person plural is coercive and tolerates no dialogue or internal doubt or reflection, no free will or individuality on the part of the audience. He voices the culture’s imperatives, indoctrinating the listeners not in terms of I and We but Us vs. Them. The questions that begin the speech are rhetorical and do not await answers: “Commemoration. . . . What does it mean to us, here and now?” Indoctrination, not dialogue, is the goal: “Let’s try putting it in another way.” The speaker invokes “you” (“imagine to yourselves”) only as a directive toward “our type of thinking.” Having established this coercive, imperative “we” lets the speaker go on to create exclusions by enumerating Dantesque circles of perversion. “They” threaten the values shared by “us.” He is the admiral, and the audience must all be onboard, or overboard: “We can’t afford skrimshankers [shirkers] or passengers.” The momentum of the speech is toward single-minded consolidation of troops set for unreflective action based on tradition. What becomes clear in “Address for a Prize-Day” is that any form of inward reflection, any questioning of the system and its axioms, is viewed as illness, and those who pause and think for themselves are “excessive lovers of self.”

Auden obviously does not share the Prize-Day orator’s desire to isolate and exclude the impulse of introspection. By changing the point of view (and revising “self-love” to “self-regard”), Auden garners sympathy for self-regarders even if he portrays them as ultimately stymied by their self-circulation. The scorn of “Address for a Prize-Day” contrasts with the more sympathetic, first-person image of self-regard (and self-pity) presented in “Letter to a Wound,” where the self-regarder entertains doubt, struggles with conflicted feelings, and speaks for himself of feelings he fears to make public. But by the time we reach “Journal of an Airman,” the middle section of The Orators, self-regard has become hermetic and solipsistic.

“Letter to a Wound” (EA 71–73) makes use of the first-person plural in self-address but offers a riposte to the coercive “we” of the Prize-Day orator. “Letter to a Wound” appears after a gradual transformation of the voice of book 1 in which parodies of oratory and responsive readings become more and more obscure and delirious. The poem moves from familiar public rhetoric to Gertrude Stein–like opacity in “Statement,” in which the dominant pronoun is “one,” marking fragmentation as well as impersonality. The letter genre itself makes the argument, replacing intimidating propaganda with intimate conversation. Although this is a relatively short passage, it is given prominence as the closing words of book 1. “Letter to a Wound” anticipates the airman’s journal, and “the wound” returns frequently as an unspecified figure throughout the volume (EA 68, 90, 95, 100). In “Letter to a Wound,” the quality of self-regard is suffering, not erotic pleasure, though of course these are intertwined. Instead of the juvenile Narcissus who hovers at the threshold of being and identity, the speaker of “Letter to a Wound” reflects a later stage, the internalized conflict between private and public versions of the self. The “Letter to a Wound” is not oratory, not public speech—quite the opposite: “Better burn this.” Yet the letter’s overstatement may not be entirely ironic in its claim that self-regard leads to knowledge beyond the self: “Thanks to you, I have come to see profound significance in relations I never dreamt of considering before.”

In many ways “Letter to a Wound” is a fictional rendition of Auden’s Berlin journal of 1929, a unique and expansive document in Auden’s archive, in which he recorded his erotic experiences as well as his philosophical reflections. Auden’s early understanding of the importance of plurality in the self can be seen in this journal, though he understands the plurality not in terms of multiple selves but in modified Cartesian dualities: “Body and Soul (not-Me and Me) can have no independent existence, yet they are distinct, and any attempt to make one into the other destroys” (EA 297). Berlin was the “strange country” where Auden put aside the forms and obligations of his family and culture—“took down all those photographs from my mantelpiece”—and turned to pursue his private desires. “Mr. Gangle” the surgeon (Mendelson sees him as a figure for Auden’s own brain, hence another figure of self-division) is “afraid,” but the speaker’s dialogue with the wound has overcome his sense of failure and formed a new communion with his suffering. The double man was a hollow man in consort with himself, but he becomes a loving pair in the first-person plural: “I saw nothing, walked, not daring to think,” he writes, as if describing one of Eliot’s living dead. “And now, here we are together, intimate, mature.” Of course this is not maturity but a stage, short-circuiting sociality in self-absorption: “Once I carved on a seat in the park ‘We have sat here. You’d better not.’” But in the course of his “year” of intimacy with the wound, he has outgrown alienation and developed a conscience. Indeed, the wound has in some ways improved his manners, is “making [itself] felt whenever I had been particularly rude or insincere.” The speaker of “Letter to a Wound” wears a private face, but he will need to bring it into public places.

“Letter to a Wound” is central, pivotal, and paradigmatic as we experience the contradictions and ambiguities of The Orators. Most readers of The Orators find either that the work falls short because its meaning and politics are confused in the recourse to varied and contradictory models, or that the point of the work is purely negative, to expose the treachery of public speech and the inability of language itself to convey a truth. Auden himself found the work confusing. His many explanations to correspondents (Mitchison, Parkes) are inconsistent. And he famously stated in his preface to the 1966 edition: “my name on the title page seems a pseudonym for someone else.”35 He is appalled by the protofascist tendencies he finds in the work. But less often cited are the remarks Auden makes next in the preface, remarks that reveal a division not just between the younger, more mature, and politically correct self but within the creation itself. “My guess to-day is that my unconscious motive in writing it was therapeutic, to exorcise certain tendencies in myself by allowing them to run riot in phantasy. . . . I realise that it is precisely the schoolboy atmosphere and diction which act as a moral criticism of the rather ugly emotions and ideas they are employed to express.”³⁶ Here is the strategy of the double man who wishes to vent certain feelings and at the same time condemn them and distance himself through antirhetorical “antics.” He does not stand outside these discourses, emotions, and ideas of the orators, commenting on them from a purer position; he is participant and critic at once. But the poem in its linguistic innovations may be wiser than its later poet, or those seeking a coherent statement. The poem refuses to reduce its meanings to a unified ideology or discursive claim; it gives vent to Auden’s quarrel with himself even if that should be an impediment to the didactic function. Irony in The Orators is not produced from a single satiric position in which an “us” of reader and writer might form an alliance against a “them” of satirized stances.³⁷

After the grotesque procession of fragmented, hateful multitudes of “ourselves” in “Statement,” it is no wonder that an “I” figure turns to make company with himself in “Letter to a Wound.” Here at least there is a kind of community as Auden absorbs the condition of the double man. His plurality becomes a poetic strategy. The poet himself is the focus of struggle, not just its diagnostician. The speaker addresses his wound: “Do you realize we have been together now for almost a year?” The first-person plural continues to the end: “we know what to expect, don’t we? . . . Nothing will ever part us.” Auden satirizes this self-love that hugs its wounds, but he does not condemn it. If “Letter to a Wound” is a contraction and withdrawal into self-regard, it is not without awareness of the social world. The preoccupation with doors, first passed through in adventure, then closed in fear and suspicion, modifies to thresholds here and to a liminal state of mind. The writer’s self-absorption is interrupted and the letter restarts. “Later.” He brings his social interactions back into the private reflections. John Boly sees only contradiction between the letter writer as either an “unhealthy,” “solipsist” or “honest,” “unillusioned” speaker; Auden’s irony is momentarily out of control. “Probably this is because Auden began his literary career as a late twenties aesthete, and only gradually came to accept a qualified notion of the poet’s social responsibility. In ‘Letter to a Wound’ it is possible to see Auden struggling to reconcile two contradictory impulses within his own literary identity.”38 But must the writer reconcile contradictory impulses? And is that Auden’s goal? Poet-critic David Lehman offers a somewhat more positive analysis of the divisions in tone and attitude in “Letter to a Wound.”

“Letter to a Wound” . . . is a poignantly ironic description of the salutary effects of disease. “You” throughout refers to the wound, with which the writer lives in a state of intimacy, like a spouse. . . . The letter writer is guilty of the excessive love of self that culminates in perversity if not perversion, yet the wry note Auden strikes makes us regard the letter as a parabolic description of the modern artist, at odds with himself, yet deriving inspiration from this division and from the incessant dialogue, like ongoing peace negotiations, between stalemated factions.³⁹

In “Journal of an Airman,” the middle book of The Orators, self-dialogue collapses into hermeticism and solipsism, and “the enemy” is again external. The airman’s obscurity is appropriate to the private nature of the journal as a form, even compared with the more liminal “Letter to a Wound.” The airman is “the agent” of a transcendent “central awareness,” an awareness that would foster “love” and “sympathy” (he may be modeled on John Layard) rather than “partial priority” (the enemy’s struggle for domination) (EA 75). But there is a paradox in the very way he presents his “central awareness.” A narrative secrecy concerning retribution and espionage forms the drama of the journal, rather than any dialogue or “interdependence.” He is above dialogue. As an airman, often enclosed in a cockpit thousands of miles above the earth, he is a figure of the isolated individual, though in an obscurely indicated plotline he has recruited a small band of forces to defeat “the Enemy” who has falsely accused his uncle, presumably a rival to the patriarchal line that dominates society. There is little point in trying to sort out these cryptographs, especially since the coding of alphabetical tags—A, B, E—suggests they are abstract counters in a war game more than real people, and indeed the boundary of the real is continually “crossed” into fantasy. The sense of plots, of things happening, of preparations and execution of plans, of allies and enemies overrides any particular historical context. This very elusiveness of external reference also gives the airman’s battle between “Us” and “Them” a psychological turn. “The Enemy” for the airman is repression and domination, just as it is deviance for the speaker of “Address for a Prize-Day.” They form a pair. Randall Jarrell read early Auden entirely within this schema of Us against Them.⁴⁰ Jarrell prefers earlier works such as Poems and Paid on Both Sides in which a more searching and experimental stance is apparent, but he fails to recognize how that stance informs The Orators despite the hard lines of its speakers. While Auden’s sympathies may lie with the exile, the airman and the Prize-Day speaker resemble each other precisely in the Us vs. Them logic they employ. The Us and Them groups are each so heterogeneous that they collapse into one another. The airman resists the dominant system, but he has a system of his own and considers himself “the agent of this central awareness.”

The airman of book 2, though he writes mostly in prose and charts, is the first versifier among the orators, if we exclude the prologue. In allowing him verse, Auden marks him as a figure of imagination and a thinker more inclined to see recursive pattern than dialectic or linear narrative. The airman’s poetry is notable for his virtuosity and mastery of elaborate, fixed forms that predict the poem’s course. He is in this sense the descendant of Yeats’s Irish airman. His formalism is consistent with his worldview: “the system organizes itself,” as if he could stand outside the system and observe it as a poet might his form; “the enemy” is any force that would intervene to determine the course of “the system” through social coercion. There is no internal quarrel going on in the airman’s forms—his rhyme royal and sestinas, alphabetical and other systems, removed from sense and feeling, are consistent with his diagrams, formulas, and genetic algorithms.

The airman’s first poem, “After the death of their proud master” (EA 75), is blank verse, fairly strict in meter and without enjambment after the first line. The voice is that of the antipoet who uses slang and crude imagery: “Beethameer, Beethameer, bully of Britain” with blunt rhymes of “bum “and “dumb.” The narrative of “After the death” follows a thermodynamic “law” of the degeneration of the hero, of disparagement and betrayal of the dead, followed by the subsequent death of the disaffected. The airman’s next poem, a sestina, is the narrative of a single figure positioned either as savior or scapegoat (the one become the other) against the group. The airman does not include himself in the poem though he may be telling his own story. The first “we” is also a “they” in his narrative. “We have brought you, they said, a map of the country.” If the speaker is the airman, whom “they” address as “you,” he quickly becomes an impersonal figure, a “he” of sacrifice and crucifixion. The sestina’s permutations of repeated nouns enhance this detached perspective. But the shifts of orientation in the poem anticipate the more fluent structures of the odes. As often with the sestina form, the poem tells a story of leakage and disintegration of the distinct categories it sets up, one displacing another: the hero is handed a map of the country, but the experience that follows deviates completely from the dictates of those who send the hero out. The opposition of authorized “bay” and forbidden “wood” collapses, through pun and repetition, in the closing three-line envoi: “Sees water in the wood and trees by the bay.” But the airman is not writing from inside this story of reversals—he tells it fatalistically, dispassionately, from a point of view after events.

In the next verse passage the airman organizes experience into other impersonal systems—an alphabet (ace to zero), a division by three, and a calendar countdown. The airman often writes in mnemonic couplets (“Last day but ten / It’s moving again. / Last day but nine / I’ve forgotten the sign . . .”). Lines that are not in strict form sound like impersonal prose or aphoristic jotting. Though he is writing a “journal,” the airman hovers above experience, locked in his thoughts, trying to master a spatial reality with formulas and abstractions. In his physical stance, then, he embodies the vertical structure of the heroic ideal that The Orators calls into question. The airman’s abstract notation is not an answer to the stresses of plurality and choice that history presents.

The mix of genres and modes in the airman’s journal typifies modernist heterogeneity. But what the airman does not write is odes. Auden labels all of book 3 “odes,” and the generic distinction deserves attention. Odes are certainly associated with oratory, public ceremony, and the celebration of the heroic individual. Auden’s precursor here is Pindar, who readily used the first-person plural, and perhaps also Laurence Binyon, who in 1914 used the Pindaric ode to exalt the sacrifice of soldiers going to World War I. But the odes of book 3, many written in first-person plural, do not come from a commanding or firm epideictic oratorical voice. They contain romantic turmoil and create a rhythm of merging voices and shifting points of view that suggests a more horizontal and vibrant potential order. Auden in book 3 turns from the airman’s solipsistic height to a dramatic quarrel without and within. While the poems upset the confidence of the Pindaric originals, these are not anti-odes, exactly. Rather, they employ the language of private faces in public places—oratory in which the inner struggles and conflicts of the speaker are made part of the turn to the civic sphere.

To write civil poetry is at some level to be an orator, and for Auden this means entering the purgatory of language, the struggle between rhetoric and poetry. The Orators has, until book 3, presented two kinds of linguistic purgatory—the one of cynical lies and repression, and the other of modernist opacity. If private faces must ultimately enter public places and speak a language that communicates in more than secret codes, how are they to avoid the distorting lies and incitements to paranoia and crucifixion that have characterized the romance narratives of Western culture and supported so much recent folly? In The Orators, Auden worries over this question rather than answering it.

Why does Auden devote book 3 of The Orators entirely to “Six Odes,” highlighting the genre in the section title and setting it beside “Address,” “Argument,” “Statement,” “Letter,” and “Journal” as alternative rhetorical forms? Surprisingly, no critic has investigated the meaning of genre as such in The Orators. The odes section counterbalances the exclusively prose dimension of book 1 and the genre mixing of book 2. But what values or stances are associated for Auden in the prose/poetry distinction? In book 3, Auden gathers up a series of group portraits under a formal rubric. Is he simply undermining the classical public ode with the doubts and anxieties of romantic division and uncertainty? Or is he finding a language for the double man in his purgatorial state, turning rhetoric to poetry? We can read The Orators not only as diagnosis of postwar culture but also as a search for the artist’s function in that culture as someone who reflects and redirects its language and thought. The odes suggest that Auden is trying to unite the self-reflective and the civil impulses of the writer.

The structure of The Orators reveals a changing relationship of the group to the individual. A sinister orator inculcates youth with a system of exclusions; a disconsolate and fragmented populace longs for deliverance from a catalog of woes; a search for new initiatives and leadership begins, accompanied by anxieties and suspicions; a single figure withdraws into self-address. In book 3, “Six Odes,” the individual is returned to the group, however problematically. Conqueror and conquered exchange places often as each of the odes struggles with the question of leadership and the search for new order. They express the suffering of a collapsed society and its call for a “savior.”41 The concentration and compression of poetry brings the cyclical condition of the violence into relief for the reader, while the point of view remains invested in the scenes of action. The alternating rhythm of rallies and routs creates a new kind of consciousness in which skepticism is gradually seeping into oratory so that poetry can “illumine, and not kill” (EA 110). The odes internalize oppositional struggle as each position implies and mirrors the other; “us” and “them” are predicated on one another until the distinctions are hard to maintain. The book remains purgatorial, however, presenting triumph and loss as one cyclical movement, still without a direction out of this pattern.

While each ode of book 3 is formally and tonally distinct, together they create a different kind of poetry from the airman’s: less inane, less abstract, more emotional, and more dramatic and unpredictable, with greater metrical variety. The voices in the odes (whether of individuals or groups) are often divided from within, creating a rhythm of assurance and doubt that is marked earlier only by opposition. Here, then, we have “continuity and discontinuity” that the airman, from his height, could see but not feel. The speakers of book 3 frequently employ the first-person plural, indicating a relation to others, but the poems are not fully choral until the end. They are often interrupted by moments of deliberation that produce a dialogical tension. The shifts from confidence to desolation convert hubris and self-pity into a compassionate mirror. The groups do not consolidate interests but have in common a purgatorial history of struggle and conflict, hoping and doubting, searching for a form of expression other than lies or madness. In comparison to the Prize-Day speaker’s harangue or the airman’s poetic stunts, this is a poetry where impassioned rhythms and assertions are constantly qualified and undercut. Ultimately, in the sixth ode, the alternating moods and stances become a choral prayer that, rather than silencing negations, incorporates them in a searching, ambiguous music.

While the imagery of opposing teams and the longing for heroic rescue continue, these odes are characterized by digression and leakage more than antagonism and antithesis. Oratory has led to deceptions, expulsions, crucifixions, and bloody conflict. What kind of dialectical energies might be engaged in poetic form to provide an alternative that comes closer to generating peace without subjugation? The compression of poetry, which increases with each poem in book 3, converts crises into a rhythm of assertion and doubt, confidence and discouragement, elegiac but also anticipatory. The patterning of the poems exposes a cycle that, once internalized, might condition the mind for openness to knowledge and growth rather than violence and suppression. This is not the only way to read these poems, but it is in line with the language of warning and hope that would characterize Auden’s work just a few years later in poems like “Hearing of Harvests” and “Out on the Lawn.” Only through close reading and attention to the form can we appreciate the work that poetry does in channeling the quarrel with ourselves into a new relation to others.

In ode 1 (EA 94–96), we see most clearly how Auden imagines a first-person plural that is ambiguously internal and communal. The first ode follows directly from “Journal of an Airman,” as if the speaker had just descended from his height. The speaker’s liminal state, between waking and dreaming, blurs the distinction of self and others, past and present, local and global awareness. The poem begins awake. The point of view is different from the airman’s distant and singular perspective; here the “I” speaker is pluralized, “watching in three planes from a room overlooking the courtyard.” Wordplay disorients us. “Three planes” seems to multiply the perspective of the airman’s plane and bring it closer to the ground, though still elevated, transforming, perhaps, into a three-paned bay window. The “three planes” also connect Auden to a trio, later identified as “Wystan, Stephen, Christopher, all of you,” who hold distinct but conjoined points of view. This initially pronoun-less, wakeful “watching” of the past “year decaying” turns to recall the previous night and its dream, which is a kind of assessment of the year. An “I” emerges to tell the dream, but the consciousness is again permeable, not contained in the isolated cockpit of the airman. A disembodied, prophetic “voice” speaks to the three friends, calling them to “read your losses,” and as the poem goes on other voices intercept the ode. Setting and time are indeterminate and disjunctive, a jumble of personal memories cast in archetypal, biblical contours, perhaps in imitation of The Waste Land. These young poet-philosophers have put forth various ineffectual utopian plans, but they confront a society still caught in “fatal error.” The speaker presents himself as “a spectator,” but he is also one of the sufferers hoping for rescue. “‘Save me!’ the voice commanded” in the penultimate stanza, but it may be his own voice, for while he is “spectator” to the sick society, he is tapped by one of the “captains” and asked, “‘How did you fall, sir?’” The speaker’s Icarus-like “fall” from the airman’s height is complete by the end of the ode, when we are removed from the dream space to a beggar’s grounded plea for rescue. The vertical ideal of the hero has collapsed. Auden reinforces the sense of a Dantesque purgatorial space by employing the medieval dream allegory: “Lo, a dream met me in middle night, I saw a vision.” The form perhaps exposes the archaic nature of the fallen order, but the Anglo-Saxon idiom of dropped subjects or verb/subject inversions (“shaped me a Lent scene”; “came summer like a flood”) also enhances the strange sense of spectatorship of one’s life.

As the poem goes on, from Lent to New Year, other voices become embedded within this dream voice—a troop of healers offers competing diagnoses and cures for a sick society. But the speaker of ode 1 witnesses rather than acts: “I saw,” “I paused, hesitant,” “I stood spectator.” He sees the “general sorrow,” perpetuated in a self-defeating adversarial culture: “the brain-track perfected, laid for conveying / The fatal error.” The unspecified “voice” of the dream is not an oratorical voice exhorting or lamenting, nor a frightened voice of hound or hare. The voice comes from within, calling the group to confront not only its “losses” but also its fatal errors. The “losses” of course refer to the events of the past year, but there is also the sense of self-reckoning and awareness that the utopian “cures” proposed by the friends are the wrong track. There is little Pindaric celebration or steady resolve in this inward-turning, self-reckoning ode, but neither does it express solipsism or paralysis.

Throughout the odes, the language of sleep and awakening recurs. The recruiters promise “the right sleep” of untroubled, confident victors sure of their righteousness (EA 98), but the poems testify to uneasy dreams and wakefulness of inner doubt. Ode 1 reinforces this uneasiness in its mix of anapests and trochees, its long and pulled-in lines, giving the feeling of sweeping movement of events and the halting, anxious consciousness that observes them. While line length is predictable within the eight-line stanza, rhyme is not; it is sometimes exact, sometimes barely audible. Verbs and gerunds loosed or severed from subjects complicate the syntax to convey an unsettled awareness.

Ode 2 (EA 96–98) does not answer the beggar’s questions on the state of Eastern Europe that arise in ode 1, and it is probably wrong to view the odes as a narrative sequence. Instead, the second ode shifts to another scene altogether. It returns us to the boarding school environment with which The Orators began and reminds us that the “brain-track” that leads to “fatal error” is “initiated” in this place of youthful study. The scene of ode 2 is a rally suggesting the Olympian games in Pindar, and the rousing rhetoric lurches us out of the dreamy divagation of ode 1. The “we” here is raising team morale.

After ode 1, The Orators is set in Helensburgh, Scotland, where Auden was a teacher at the Larchfield school, though he continually reminds us of events in the wider world that are relevant for contemporary Europe. This off-center northern school setting allows Auden to look awry on the “English” culture he is examining and to imagine community in a way that the larger scope of the nation obscured. It also allows Auden to move out from the solipsism of the airman. Saying “we” within small communities remains a strong value throughout Auden’s work, though such communities must be mindful of the suffering and instability that surround them. Helensburgh suggests a place where community can go on even as the larger culture repeats its destructive patterns—but this pastoral setting must ultimately remind us of that darker and larger world. Like a poem, a small marginal community becomes both a space in which to diagnose the larger mainstream culture and a space in which a community of alternative values and ordering principles can be conceived. We are reminded continually that the boarding school is the place of initiation into the codes and values of the dominant culture, and the scene of the playing field often morphs into a theater of war, exposing the dangerous logic of indoctrination. As instructor, Auden is necessarily a participant in and an agent of that process, even as he might, as a recent graduate and writer, both identify with the students and wish to “study” that cultural initiation. This double role, and the conflicts that arise from it, are central to the tone and style of The Orators, especially in book 3.

While ode 1 expresses uncertainty, ode 2 returns to overreaching confidence and hubris: “Walk on air do we? And how!” As with all the odes, this boast incorporates its opposite. Here, the dismissal of fears merely points to them: “Not, as the desperate need to, do we clutch at arm, / . . . we to the right sleep come.” This denial looks back to the uneasy dreams of the first ode and anticipates the death-shadowed state of ode 3. In ode 2, Auden works with a pattern of off rhymes and line length variation typical of the rhapsodic form and with Hopkins-like alliteration and sprung rhythms, enhanced by hyphenations, rhetorical questions, and exclamations. These effects bolster the excitement of the game, but there is something of the mock-heroic in their application to a high school sporting event. Auden apparently decided early that this ode was unsuccessful since he left it out of the second printing of The Orators. However, the omission of this ode breaks the symmetry of the sequence, which alternates stances of acknowledged loss and anticipated success.

Ode 3 (EA 98–101) retains the school setting by its dedication (“to Edward Upward, Schoolmaster”), but the “we” group now is more generic; Auden would later retitle the poem “The Exiles.” The effect of ode 2 was expansive, and the alternate rhymes propel us forward, as if the single pulled-in line was the speaker catching his breath. In the third ode the form has the opposite effect; the two unrhymed tetrameter lines break in half with caesurae and with pauses, as in old English. The constrictions of off-rhyme dimeter couplets recall some of Wilfred Owen’s uneasy lines in “Futility.” The weary weight and sorrow, the enervated trudge of the routed, are established in alliterative mass, evoking medieval laments. The landscape is frozen again and language ineffectual: “vows have no virtue,” “voice is in vain.” Instead of “the right sleep” we feel “the touch” of the “old wound.” These purgatorial “ghouls” form a bond in discouragement, but it’s a soulless and passive community with no direction or purpose, no deliberative capacity. This would seem to be the choral lyric in its negative form, not the voice of community in all its diversity, with an “I” speaking to “you,” but a uniform voice of weakness and hopelessness, speaking to itself or nobody. Yet this is not another subjugated elegy such as “Argument” in book 1. If this group is incapable of imagining a different future, it is also removed from fear and violence, “in groups forgetting the gun in the drawer.” The implication is mixed: both suicide and murder have been contemplated but also suspended through group association.

Ode 4 (EA 101–6) jolts us out of despair with a “birthday” ode. A piece of light verse heraldry announces a nativity after the near death knell of ode 3. The variance in line lengths, overriding the heroic couplets (eventually breaking into alternate rhymes), underscores the impromptu, occasional air. The pattern is repeating itself in a scrambling of Latin declension, “a birth / On English earth / Restores, restore will, has restored,” and concludes in an echo of Wilfred Owen: “To English story / The directed calm, the actual glory.” The first-person plural includes the celebrants as family members and friends in hyperbolic praise of their newborn as the savior. The satire here is convivial, though the betrayal of the adolescent in the prologue to The Orators haunts this celebration of “youth.” The ode stands somewhere between repetition and a pastoral parody of the old heroic narrative.

The envoi to ode 4 (EA 106) reminds us that we are still in the borderlands of Helensburgh, not in the more troubling heart of culture. The atmosphere suggests the classical refrain: Et in arcadia ego. As a pastoral incorporates loss and death into natural cycles, so here too the mood modulates, though without a sense of crisis. The poem checks the hyperbolic hopes and weighs both the value of local community and the uncontrollable forces of nature in the calculation of redemption. The last section of 4 is a send-off, invoking seasonal cycles rather than cycles of human history. Its advance knowledge of darkness, the speaker reminds us, is not a premonition of doom—“I’m going to sleep, not going to be dead.” The birthday poem ends in the dark but reminds us that history and nature are not the same. The next ode may not be intended as a continuation of this story, but in shifting from the family birthday party to the boarding school setting, Auden again maps out the stages of education and the doubts and betrayals that inevitably follow hyperbolic hopes.

Ode 5 (EA 106–9) is one of the few parts of The Orators that Auden retained for his Collected Poems, yet it has seemed to many critics among the most confused sections of the work. Justin Replogle says it may be “a consistent poem whose consistency fails to be clear.”42 But is this very ambiguity one of the reasons Auden valued it? In dedicating the fifth ode “To My Pupils,” Auden provides a strong contrast to the peroration, “Address for a Prize-Day.” In later titling the ode “Which side am I supposed to be on?” Auden questions the idea of taking sides and makes betweenness the substance of the poem. As instructor, he is an agent of the system that initiates young men into English hierarchy and nationalism, but he also imagines this system from the point of view of the questioning youth, for whom the heroic legacy is only lore. The “we” of this poem makes the speaker one of the troops rather than its commander, someone “alert to obey orders” rather than a top gun, someone who has been initiated into the code but is conscious of its cracks. The poem recognizes the role of hubris and fear rather than courage in the enforcement of the old repressive code. “We must stop the leakage,” declares the speaker in a moment of bad faith, ventriloquizing official authority. But his poetry—full of qualification, countering voices, and border crossings—has registered that leakage. The speaker of 5 is the double man rather than the double agent; he is “watching with binoculars.”

In this ode Auden uses form and syntax to enhance this feeling of ambivalence and inner division, assertion and doubt; he is an insider into whose awareness outliers have entered. Qualifying clauses crowd out the main clause on either side.

Though aware of our rank and alert to obey orders,

Watching with binoculars the movement of the grass for an ambush,

The pistol cocked, the code-word committed to memory;

The youngest drummer

Knows all the peace-time stories like the oldest soldier,

Though frontier-conscious,

About the tall white gods who landed from their open boat,

Skilled in the working of copper, appointing our feast-days,

Before the islands were submerged, when the weather was calm,

The maned lion common,

An open wishing-well in every garden;

When love came easy. (EA 106–7)

This first long sentence encapsulates all the paradoxes of the paranoiac code that violently defends a nostalgic ideal, “When love was easy.” This indoctrination into cultural myth binds young and old. The first qualifying clause undermines “rank” even as it invokes it, the youngest drummer supplanting the oldest soldier. “Frontier-conscious” in anticipation of ambush, they yet pledge to a primitive myth of founders as “tall as white gods.” They seem unable to inhabit the present or imagine the future as other than repetition. The lack of rhyme and the variability of line length over long sentences add to this uneasy, unsettled feeling.

Stanza 3 proceeds in a similar way, impacting assertions with qualifiers and syntactic ambiguity, pulling away from a propositional thrust that the speaker mouths without faith: “Perfectly certain, all of us, but not . . .” introduces doubt in the same breath as confidence, and all the evidence is on the side of doubt as various “agents.” Messengers appear to bring news of defeat, pulling away from the consensus of “all of us.” Stanza 4’s “yes” thus quickly shifts to a “yes, but,” and stories of defeat seep further into the collective conscience, which has now divided as the lines become more dialogical, enfolding dissonant voices, the “recruit” wanting more information from the messenger, the “veteran” attempting to silence all skepticism, as if “the right sleep” were still possible. The voice of the poem describes the code into which the youths are indoctrinated and the obligations that are part of that code, but it’s the voice of a double man, undermining the code behind the “very full programme” it oversees and exposing the anxiety beneath the bravura version of history that supports it. Irony replaces qualification here as “you” replaces “we.” Auden adopts the voice of authority sardonically, imitating a superior addressing young recruits and informing them of their duties. The “us vs. them” mentality dominates as the speaker returns to the first-person plural in stanzas 8 and 9. But these stanzas form a kind of chiasm; “we” and “they” exchange places. The patriotic pageantry of a “we” in stanza 8 gives way to the rising challenge of “them” in stanza 9, who in turn describe the flourishing band of stanza 8 as “they.” Stanza 10 suggests this emboldened group of stanza 9 is a projection of the fears of those in stanza 8: “What have we all been doing to have made from Fear / That laconic war bitten captain addressing them now.” This paranoiac description of the enemy incites mutiny. The irony of stanza 10 is that the image of a mighty enemy as a projection from our fear produces an echo of the hubris of those readying for ambush. Auden reinforces this mirror/echo effect by using the first-person plural in quotations as he imagines an enemy leader exhorting his own troops.

The enemy is us, or provoked by us; that we “have caused their shout” is nothing to celebrate. This becomes clear with the roll call of the deadly sins—Wrath, Envy, Greed, Lust, etc.—the sins that perpetuate the code of murder and martyrdom. The idea of sin is of course part of the code of repression. But for the poet these behaviors and attitudes that perpetuate the cycle of provocation and violence are the real source of evil. The ode imagines facing the invisible enemy (who is felt to be lying in ambush), loving them even while strangling them, “put our arms round their necks and looked in their eyes.” Increasingly with the turn in “we were unlucky,” the poem opens the “we” to imagine the “frontier” outside official report. “They are brave, yes, though our newspapers mention their bravery / in inverted commas.” But by stanza 16 the imagination is pulled “back to our lines” and censorship and caution return, hatred once again overtaking the dream of human fellowship. Evoking the Christmas truce of the First World War, Auden imagines what the official voice cannot: human connection that could collapse the system of winners and losers. The ventriloquizing voice of authority is challenged between the lines: “you’re holding us up.”

The last two stanzas of ode 5 amplify the divided voice that has been building throughout the poem. The ode has moved from a defensive to an offensive position as the “enemy” looms larger. Ode 5 goes from protection of the homeland to maneuvers of attack at the frontier. What is the speaker’s position in this process? Auden seems unsure of how to situate his voice; he sometimes quotes or mimics the official authority, addressing youth; but at other times he seems on the receiving end of oratory, part of a “we” that hears the bravura skeptically, noting its contradictions.

Whose is the voice of the final stanza of ode 5? Not the orator who puts up “the bunting” but someone alienated from a system that dooms us to attack. The bunting celebrates the retreat into the shelter of nationalism and old values, “Indoors before it is too late.” The language of necessity in this stanza is instructive: “we must say goodbye,” “we’re doomed to attack.” But it is already too late; the final words are uttered by another voice, one without quotations, that will find no shelter in a cultural code that dooms it: “We shall lie out there,” says the outlier, and the pun cancels all the lies of authority. The power of this ode comes less from an alienated voice in mockery of the official culture than from one who is inside, willing to doubt, and to imagine another point of view than the official one.

The sequence’s closing sixth ode (EA 109–10) is what is called in Anglican tradition a “collect.” It turns oratory to its root meaning of prayer and its association with a religious society of secular priests. It is voiced in first-person plural, suggesting a church chorus. As Auden would later write, a community comes into being by expressive gathering (DH 64). While this prayer looks superficially like a conventional appeal to God to take sides, its peculiar language creates ambiguities to suggest a different, more internal struggle, for spiritual transformation and an end to violent oppositional ways. A close reading of this poem reveals some writing between the lines and grammar-undermining rhetoric. This final choral poem is not a pathetic lament from the passive crowd but an expression of supplication and hope such as Auden will use to close many of the long poems and plays he writes after 1936.

Given the emphasis on groups throughout The Orators, it is easy to imagine this as a scene in a local chapel, especially as the Scottish metered psalm, the model for ode 6, emphasizes the regional locale of Helensburgh. Ode 6 has abandoned hero worship for communal expression of yearning and hope. It brings the reader back to the beginning of The Orators, in a spirit of second thoughts rather than plot fulfillment. In the second stanza of the prologue, antecedent to the betrayal of the hero, there were echoes of Psalm 23: “among green pastures straying he walks by still waters.”43 The image of the swanlike hero in the prologue, head bent, “worshipping, not lying,” has been contradicted by the many lies and self-aggrandizements that follow in the book. The waters of The Orators have not been still, nor have the pastures been green. But in returning to the psalms in the sixth ode, Auden offers an image of community reconciled in defeat, now truly “worshipping, not lying.” This final ode also recalls the second section of “Argument” in book 1, with its responsive readings in first-person plural (“O Four Just Men, spare us,” “O Dixon Hawke, deliver us,” etc.). But that earlier prayer is utterly sardonic and secular, whereas ode 6, the closing prayer of book 3, suggests a struggle between grammar and rhetoric that might break through to salutary speech.

Many readers have understood this final ode negatively, as another in the sequence of failures, mocking the conventions of an archaic institution and pointing to the hollowness of traditions. But Auden found in the linguistic errors of the Scottish renditions of the Psalms a space for modernist indeterminacy of meaning, “like Mallarmé.”⁴⁴ How can one worship and not lie in the tainted medium of language? Only by a language of errancy. Within this community of prayer, some articulation of truth may occur, some performance of language that can “illumine and not kill.” Here is the Lord’s Prayer from the Scottish book of the Psalms, Auden’s source for ode 6:

The Lord’s my shepherd, I’ll not want.

He makes me down to lie

In pastures green: he leadeth me

the quiet waters by.

My soul he doth restore again;

and me to walk doth make

Within the paths of righteousness,

ev’n for his own name’s sake.

Given this quaint antecedent, it would be easy to dismiss ode 6 as a piece of light verse, more “school boy antics.” But the placement and matter of this ode give it gravitas and respectful humility. Gone are the uncertain, expanding and contracting lines of the ode. Here is a hymn stanza and a scene of prayer, the “narrow strictness” that will characterize the next volume of poetry he writes. Indeed, the form seems associated with the divine “organised blockade” of stanza 5. Auden has transferred the military imagery from a struggle with an “enemy” to a “necessary defeat” that becomes a precondition to illumination rather than violence. But this is not the partisan God quoted in stanza 8 of ode 5. Indeed, the poem maintains skepticism even in its gesture of prayer, for surely Auden knew, in his peculiar word order, that an address to “Not, Father” was a modernist wager of the double man, embedding skepticism in belief; later in the poem he appeals to this not-Father to “be not another than our hope.” That Auden intended some reverence in this awkward syntax is evident from another source, Baudelaire’s Intimate Journals, which opens: “Even though God did not exist, Religion would be none the less holy and divine.”45

Auden uses the awkward Scottish translation to create ambiguity in the location of divinity:

Against your direct light, displayed,

Regardant, absolute,

In person stubborn and oblique

Our maddened set we foot.

These nissen-huts if hiding could

Your eye inseeing from

Firm fenders were, but look! To us

Your loosened angers come. (EA 109–10)

The language of the gaze pervades these stanzas, and again the distorted syntax collapses boundaries of inner and outer exposure. The warped sentences break open language to admit “direct light” against the “nissen huts” of prefabricated rhetoric. Here is Hopkins’s “inseeing” and an invitation to “Look!” at defeat rather than hide or counterattack. The adjectives of stanza 2 hang between object and subject. “Displayed” ambiguously modifies both the “direct light” and the “stubborn and oblique” persons it reveals; “regardant” suggests the backward, nostalgic consciousness of the supplicants, who can only think of the present and future in terms of the past. But the words also, through their punning, suggest the divine “regard” that turns them from that retreat and false shelter of retrograde thinking. The ambiguous language creates a reciprocal relation between supplicant and “father.” The poem seeks direction and authority but posits it from within and without. Self-regard and divine regard come together.

The last line of stanza 2 of ode 6 has given critics the most trouble. “Our maddened set we foot,” makes “set” and “foot” both nouns and verbs, and thus makes “maddened” a modifier for both “foot” and “set.” Presumably the anger and derangement of the deluded culture causes them, they confess, to stand obliquely and stubbornly (and perversely and futilely) against the clear light of truth. Stanza 4 describes the failure of that obliquity. It exposes the false protections of wit and magic such as we find in the airman’s illusory world of “magical countersigns” and “airy sacrifice.” But there is perhaps a positive connotation here too: the maddened foot of the metrical line deranges syntax and forces familiar rhetoric into unfamiliar shapes. But in doing so it may open the thought to what language usually covers up. If poets “set foot” against the light, if they (and their maddened set) hold their failures against the light, turning them to poetry, they expose them rather than disguise them. Thus turning “against” might become a turning “toward,” as something held against the light reveals what might not be visible in the shadows.

This modernist punning and ambiguity offer a different way toward the life of the double man than the oppositional cycles of assertion and defeat, violence and suffering, that have characterized other sections of The Orators. Ode 6 surrenders without fear and without a division of “us” and “them.” Only here does the poem expect “peace” and evoke illumination rather than violence. A community expressing itself in the first-person plural, “We routed,” stands in an attitude of anticipation and prayer. But the ambiguity of the syntax allows the speakers to be the agents of their own redemption. The line “Be not another than our hope” implores the “Not, Father” to present himself in the image of their hopes, not the image of their fears; yet it also suggests that this power is itself an inward one. The final verbs of the poem, “disarm . . . illumine . . . and not kill” are applied to the “Father,” presumably, but might also be actions of the “routed” themselves, empowered by their hope; they might not only passively “expect” some future state but work to achieve this potentiality by laying down arms and taking up the language of illumination. There is no enemy outsider here, no autonomous hero. It is not a call to arms but a call to disarm and to end the bloody cycle. This ambiguity of language, in the manner of Mallarmé, is one way not to “lie.” It is not the way Auden will choose to pursue his truth in the thirties.

The epilogue to The Orators (EA 110) exits from the cycle of victory and defeat. Is this the end of the story begun in the prologue, with the hero now abandoning his suffering culture, betraying it as he was betrayed? Perhaps it is, but the auditory link of “reader and rider,” “hearer and horror,” “fearer and farer” suggests they are doubles, not antagonists but siblings, an internal pair. The romantic hero abandons his dependents, but perhaps a more collaborative, horizontal relation can now take place without him.

Auden’s poetry would not in fact retreat. A year later he is still writing from the Helensburgh school, calling on the “Lords of Limit” to “look leniently upon us all to-night” (CP 63). His use of the first-person plural in this poem (“we know you there / Whose sleepless presences endear / Our peace to us with a perpetual threat” [CP 64]) speaks from within the community, not as an airman, antagonist, or outlier.