THE VIEW FROM BIRMINGHAM

W. H. Auden has been described as ‘the first poet writing in English who felt at home in the twentieth century’. Certainly he is the only poet to have given his name decisively to a key epoch of that century. Despite recent revisionist attempts to rewrite the 1930s, its writers are likely to remain ‘the Auden Generation’, and the era to retain his characterization of it in ‘September 1, 1939’ as ‘a low dishonest decade’.

The autobiographical light verse of ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, a major sequence in Letters from Iceland (1937), states clearly what it was that Auden found so homely about the century:

In a nose-thumbing gesture to Wordsworthian nature mysticism, the poem also celebrated the industrial landscapes of the West Midlands in which Auden grew up, asserting that

The poem hails with heavy irony the ‘New World’ of those who love ‘antiseptic objects’, and ‘feel at home’ with Lewis Mumford's futuristic utopia of national electricity grids (a new thing in the 1930s), alloys, plate glass, chromium furniture, and Aertex underwear for boys. Auden makes clear his contempt for all these; the last seems to have a particular resonance. Throughout his life Auden saw hygiene as a repressive and faddish modern neurosis and distrusted the squeaky clean and the politically correct. In serio-comic defiance of what ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ calls the totalitarian ‘Goddess of bossy underlings, Normality… Reeking of antiseptics’, he is reported never to have worn underpants, and the sympathy proclaimed in ‘Prologue at Sixty’ for the buttons, beards and Be-ins of the 1960s Hippy generation reaffirmed a lifelong if campishly distanced affinity with bohemia.

There was always an element of nostalgia, as of grime, to Auden's sense of homeliness. His ideal scenery is modern precisely in its outdatedness, a superseded order strangely surviving into the present, littered with the debris of ‘slattern’ tenements and run-down factories from an older world.