Caliban to the Audience: Auden's Revision of Wordsworth's Sublime

Abstract

--A wish was now ingender'd in my fear / To cleave unto this Man --Wordsworth STRIDING UP TO HIM IN FURY, YOU GLARE INTO HIS UNBLINKING EYES and stop dead, transfixed with horror at seeing reflected there, not what you had always expected to see, conqueror smiling at conqueror, both promising mountains and marvels, but gibbering fist-clenched creature with which you are all too unfamiliar the only subject that you have the all too flesh you must acknowledge as your own. (1) In the middle of W. H. Auden's mid-career prose poem, to the Audience, Caliban describes what happens when, looking for Ariel, the imagination, the audience finds Caliban instead, disturbing reminder of the begged question of its existence: solid flesh, as it were, mysteriously linked to the less-than-solid imagination. Like Ariel, Caliban is ubiquitous presence who refuses to go away. As he reminds the audience at the very beginning of his address, even when it seeks the good, so great, so dead author to stand before the finally lowered curtain it is I who will always loom thus wretchedly into your confused picture ... (CP 422). Auden's poem circles around this begged question of existence as Caliban takes his audience through an impossibly circular, tripartite structure that adroitly performs the same begged question. address thus proceeds with recursively interwoven echo and apostrophe: in dense style of hyperbole and convoluted sentence structure. From the time it was published, the elaborate of the address suggested--and continues to suggest--to that the poem is about the ultimate and collapse of poetry, especially the imagination required to produce it. As such, and as the last section of Auden's long poem, The Sea and Mirror, A Commentary on Shakespeare's Tempest, Caliban's address does what many argue of Shakespeare's Tempest: it exposes its art as mere This way of thinking lends itself well to support the view of those who see Auden becoming anti-Romantic at mid-career, turning his genius to undermining poetry and serving as licensed jester. This way of thinking, however, ignores Auden's genius in using to expose and undermine the anti-Romantic (and anti-aesthetic) style of thinking characterizing Caliban's audience--and Auden's. It ignores Auden's central explanation of the piece, not in terms of what it attempts to represent but in terms of its unusual style performed by an inarticulate creature, Caliban, who speaks by borrowing from Ariel the most artificial style possible: that of the imagination. (2) Speaking the real Word, Caliban gets at the ineffable truth of human existence, the existence of born actors (CP 444). As Edward Mendelson observes, Caliban, in fact, is an artifice that embodies everything that is not an artifice. (3) Like the imagination for which he speaks, Caliban is an irritating, irrefutable, aesthetic entity impossible to deny or silence. In all of these respects, finally, Caliban plays highly Romantic role performing, rather than attempting to represent, the sublime, role this paper will investigate in three, interwoven venues as evidence of Auden's revision of the Romantic sublime. To begin with, as Auden defines it in his study of Romanticism, Enchafed Flood, the ultimate focus of the Romantic poet, who serves as the subject of his poetry, is his journey into himself. Here he finds an unsolved problem, perpetually both a stating and solving of the problem. (4) He finds the begged question of identity inherent in being human, the indeterminate identity there within the poet's consciousness, privy to his thoughts and feelings. discontinuity and dialectical tension that mark Caliban's observations in these ways, align him with what M. H. Abrams defines as the silent human in the greater Romantic lyric. In the tripartite form, that moves from outer to inner and back to outer landscapes, this auditor appears in the inner landscape, the landscape of the poet's thoughts and feelings. …