Auden's Brief Lives

Abstract

Between 1939 and 1941, as World War Two threatened and then erupted, W. H. Auden wrote eleven brief lives in homage to famous writers, including a theologian and a psychoanalyst. Three of his cosmopolitan subjects, ranging chronologically over five centuries from Martin Luther to Ernst Toller, were German, three French, two American, two English, and one Irish. Like Auden, who’d left England for America in 1939 at a crucial moment in his life, six of the men—Voltaire, Edward Lear, Henry James, Arthur Rimbaud, Sigmund Freud, and Ernst Toller—were exiles. Like Auden—Lear and A. E. Housman, who wept bitter tears—were homosexuals; Rimbaud, who shot his lover Paul Verlaine, was bisexual; Henry James, who experienced and wrote about the unlived life, was a repressed homosexual. Auden’s poems vary from six tight sonnets to several discursive longer poems. These brief lives, which include many literary allusions and compress a great deal of biographical information, demand an extensive knowledge of his subjects’ life, works, and ideas, and need considerable explication. Though Auden had no child of his own, all the poems on exiles, whose lost childhoods were especially poignant, mention children. Nine of the eleven poems stress the Freudian importance of childhood, and portray children as Rousseauistic symbols of innocence or sacrificial victims of adult oppression. In “Luther,” the apparently safe world is “a still pond in which its children drown.” In “Montaigne,” “Love must be re-grown from the sensual child” who has not yet learned to hate. As a rebellious boy Voltaire had “led the other children in a holy war / Against the infamous grown-ups” who threaten rather than protect them: “all over Europe stood the horrible nurses / Itching to boil their children.” Voltaire had adopted a defensive and duplicitous strategy, “and, like a child, been sly / And humble when there was occasion for / The two-faced answer or the plain protective lie.”