by Stephen Spender (1974)
W. H. Auden was a Pulitzer Prize–winning British poet, widely considered one of the twentieth century’s most influential literary figures. Stephen Spender, Auden’s close friend and contemporary, was an English poet and novelist who was appointed the 17th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the United States Library of Congress. Spender delivered the following remembrance on October 2, 1974, when Auden’s name was added to the famous Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.
WYSTAN HUGH AUDEN is received within these walls, in diesen heiligen Hallen. I am sure that to him this ceremony would seem Mozartian: like being transported into the music of The Magic Flute, of which he and his friend Chester Kallmann wrote their version of the libretto. . . .
As both man and poet, for him this would seem homecoming: or perhaps I should say going home. For Auden, like Herman Melville, whom he so much admired, was one of those who arrive home by a circuitous route. As a citizen, he considered himself a New Yorker; as a colleague, his first and last home was Oxford: in early days among his fellow poets, Louis MacNeice, Cecil Day-Lewis, Rex Warner, and Sir John Betjeman, and towards the end of his life at the high table of Christ Church, his old college. As a poet whose first love, even before poetry, was music, the village of Kirchstetten near the Vienna of great composers was home. He is buried in Kirchstetten and another monument bears his name. But all these homes return to the England of the limestone Northern landscape of his childhood in the green and river-running countryside, which he always regarded as the Garden of Eden.
And his first and last home was the Church of England. He would feel the utmost fulfillment is being received within these sacred walls, the body of the English Church, for his religion was to him more important even than poetry or music. However, it is as a poet that his name is spelled out in the Poets’ Corner, here in the centre of London, where the stones and skies are mostly grey and where the pigeons outside are like grey stones flying between grey walls. I mention birds designedly because Auden’s feelings about home are made particularly vivid for me by an anecdote recorded by his friend Dr. Oliver Sacks, who recalls being with him in New York:
Once we saw a bird fly to its nest atop a sooty lamp-post in St. Mark’s Place: “Look!” exclaimed Wystan, “It’s gone home to its nest. Think how cozy it must be in its nest!”
This anecdote brings Wystan idly to me. I see him turning to his companion with that clarifying entertained sideways glance which would accompany such a very exposed comment: “just think of him flying to his nest!”
And if the recollection glashes to you a somewhat grotesque vision of Auden appearing in the precincts of Westminster or Trafalgar Square in the likeness of a somewhat bulky pigeon, flying not without difficulty and perching on a lamp-post, that is just as it should be: with him the grotesque or absurd stands close to the appropriate and serious. The shocking, the outrageous had for him an awakening touch. The joking word pointed to the highest reality was the bait that drew poetry to it, and was incongruous with his religion.
When, as happened once within these sacred walls, he preached a sermon, he usually managed to smuggle into it at least one phrase which, if it had not been partly muffled by the ambiguities of his collided Oxford and New York vowels and consonants, might have stunned some of the more conventional members of his audience. They were perhaps fortunate on such occasions to be able to go away not believing that they had heard what he had only mumbled.
Although he himself, if he were here, might feel nothing but gratitude that his poetic fame had provided him with a passport which enabled his name to become so literally a part of the body of the Abbey, it is as a poet that we think of him today. We think of his name on the stone near to those of colleagues belonging to this company of poets before he was born and near to that of one who was his contemporary—T. S. Eliot, whom he and all our generation of slightly younger poets admired this side of idolatry.
I should like then to say something about the nature of that poetry which justifies us in honouring Auden as he is now honoured.
Auden did not attach to poetry the immense pretensions which fill many poets at once with a sense of their transcendent personal superiority and with a sense of the near-unattainability of their objective aims in their work. He thought of a poem as a verbal object made by a craftsman who was to be judged to a great extent, though not entirely, by his technical competence in shaping language. At the same time he knew well that the modern poet, by taking many untamed, seemingly unpoetic, and even abstruse complex objects and naming them in diverse poetic forms, could make them familiar, accessible, capable of being handled like stones or bits of wood, could also make them, on occasion, sacred objects . . . He broke down great areas of contemporary experience into objects controlled by wit, crackling in jokes or transformed into objects of terrifying beauty. . . .
. . . He had also the strongest sense that poets should be modest in their claims on truth, that they should not indulge in the rhetorical lies which come so easily even to the greatest poets. When, with his wisdom, sense of beauty, and wit he directed his gaze upon the centre of the stage of our modern world, he was able to portray us in our situation, in poetry that combines accuracy of analysed experience with an authority of the imagination that shows our world to us as it is, while contrasting it with a vision of a life based on acceptance of a humanity which, despite its limitations, can still retain a certain innocence of nature: a glimpse of that Garden of Eden which the poet had first found in the green landscape of the England of his childhood.