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New Light on Auden's the Orators

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

W. H. Sellers
W. H. Sellers*
Affiliation:
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B. C
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Extract

“ … I cannot throw away The Orators as worthless bosh,” wrote Alan Pryce-Jones. “It appears to be the work of a sane imagination without a mind—a far more complicated state than the paranoiac's working on fragments of knowledge and experience.” Such exasperation typifies the reaction of the vast majority of critics to the appearance of Auden's second book. Even the sympathetic G. W. Stonier had to confess that “With so much in this book that is fine and original, one hesitates to ask the author for more explanation. Yet that is what is needed. He works so intimately, but at such a distance. One hopes that time will bridge the gap, and that we will get nearer to him or he to us.” Unfortunately, however, since 1932 the gap between The Orators and the critic has more often widened than narrowed, critics preferring to speak vaguely about the work's significance rather than to grapple with its complex details. Richard Hoggart in 1951 and J. W. Beach in 1957 shed light on some of these details, but not until the last few years, in the writings of Justin Replogle and Monroe K. Spears, have serious attempts been made to deal with The Orators as a meaningful whole. Yet, of his own interpretation, Spears has to confess: “We can be sure that enough dark corners will remain, even if we succeed in casting light on a considerable part of its territory.”By probing some of these remaining “dark corners,” I hope to cast yet further light on Auden's most puzzling work.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 82 , Issue 5 , October 1967 , pp. 455 - 464
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1967

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References

Note 1 in page 455 The London Mercury, xxvi (May 1932), 171.

Note 2 in page 455 The New Statesman and Nation, N. S. iii (28 May 1932), 711.

Note 3 in page 455 The Poetry of W. H. Auden: The Disenchanted Castle (New York, 1963), p. 46.

Note 4 in page 455 Vision and Rhetoric (London, 1959), p. 150. One might add that Auden's subsequent editing of the text created further problems. In all editions after 1932 and up to 1966, besides changing some of the diction and correcting misprints, he has not only omitted two complete poems, one brief prose passage, and an entire stanza from one of the odes, but he has also changed the sex of the character E in “Journal of an Airman” from female to male except for an apparent oversight on p. 61: “What would E say if she knew? Dare I tell her?”

Note 5 in page 455 In The Arts To-day, ed. Geoffrey Grigson (London, 1935), pp. 18–20.

Note 6 in page 455 In this essay all quotations from The Orators are from the first edition, London, 1932.

Note 7 in page 456 Replogle's three articles, “Social Philosophy in Auden's Early Poetry,” Criticism, ii (Fall 1960), 351–361, “The Gang Myth in Auden's Early Poetry,” JEGP, lxi (July 1962), 481–495, and “The Auden Group,” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, v (Summer 1964), 133–150, offer valuable leads, as does the chapter “The Airman, Politics and Psycho-analysis” in Spender's The Destructive Element (London, 1935).

Note 8 in page 456 Lions and Shadows (Norfolk, Conn., [1947]), pp. 207–208.

Note 9 in page 457 Although it has a Marxist ring, this passage more probably derives from Oliver Turton's remarks near the end of Lawrence's play Touch and Go (1919).

Note 10 in page 457 Cf. Ch. xii of Fantasia of the Unconscious.

Note 11 in page 459 Number xxix of Poems (1930) gives a more direct account of the method and effects of this “supreme Antagonist” of man.

Note 12 in page 460 Ch. xiv of Fantasia is helpful here.

Note 13 in page 460 J. W. Beach, The Making of the Auden Canon (Minneapolis, Minn., 1957), p. 19, discusses whether this symbolizes homosexuality. I prefer to regard it more generally as a sign of unmanliness.

Note 14 in page 461 A Hope for Poetry (Oxford, 1934), p. 4.

Note 15 in page 463 In his seventh chapter Beach discusses the poems in The Orators and in particular this ode. After trying various interpretations (p. 96), he concludes that its theme concerns “brave men banded together in secret in a crusade that requires them to work underground until the day of open conflict, and who must be in perfect training to meet the attack of an Enemy that is not to be despised or trusted.”

Note 16 in page 464 “New Year Letter,” The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden (New York, 1945), p. 315. Mr. Sellers died on 22 November 1966.