The Age of Auden (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Age of Auden Michael Clune The Age of Auden. Aidan Wasley. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. Pp. xix + 258. $35.00 (cloth). In his new book, Aidan Wasley attempts to tell the story of postwar American poetry through the optic of W. H. Auden's ubiquitous presence as example, friend, judge, and teacher. Wasley develops this aim through two related theses. The first is that Auden's impact consists in large measure of the dissemination of a happy model of poetic influence that is free of anxiety. The second is that understanding the ways such major poets as John Ashbery and Adrianne Rich respond to Auden will illuminate their poetry in startling new ways. [End Page 205] Wasley argues that Auden, in his poetry, criticism, lectures, and conversation, shows American poets how to achieve an "unanxious assimilation of influences" (74). "It is an idea of influence based on acknowledgement, emulation, and creative utility" (55). Here he contrasts Auden's with two competing models. The first is Harold Bloom's vision of poetic affiliation in terms of the Freudian family romance, with son struggling to subdue the father and claim his own voice. The second is T. S. Eliot's vision of poetic impersonality as submission to the tradition. In contrast to both, Auden teaches young poets to see the tradition as a menu of options for constructing and enhancing the poetic voice. In part, this model of self-fashioning is a function of the poet's homosexuality. Auden's queerness, for Wasley, is utterly free of the violence and anti-social impulses that animate homosexual relations for a critic like Leo Bersani. Rather, the family romance is replaced by a benign erotics that promiscuously pursues unshadowed connections. These connections are unburdened by any sense of responsibility to the integrity of the whole that the poet's borrowings and graftings might add up to. The young poet under Auden's tutelage follows what he or she likes without worrying too much about what this says about his or her identity. Above all, this means that poets under Auden's influence don't need to worry about whether Rimbaud and Pound and Auden are appropriate materials for an American poetry. "To be an 'American' poet after Auden was to be . . . unfettered (or unassisted) by notions of native authenticity" (74). Auden offers America the "paradigm of the modern professional poet" (94). A polite, deracinated professionalism replaces anxious supplication and aggression. Auden's way of enacting and theorizing the poet's relation to the poetic tradition is itself an artifact of a thoroughly commercial concept of public and private life, and Wasley brings this out in contrasting Auden with Eliot. Both agree in attacking the straw man of a supposed romantic commitment to the self-authorizing creative self and in seeing the poet as composed of borrowed materials. What Auden adds to Eliot is that preeminent postwar civic and commercial value: choice (96). Eliot imagines that the tradition is singular and monolithic. Auden thinks that it is constituted by the free choice of the poet, browsing the bookstores of the world. Wasley develops the commercial dimension of Auden's influence in the book's most successful chapter, which describes James Merrill's absorption of that influence in his composition of The Changing Light at Sandhover. "The mystery of selfhood's debt to inheritance is perhaps the central theme of Merrill's life and his work," Wasley suggests (81). He cites the following, extraordinary lines of Merrill's to illustrate the extent to which the poet's career consists of a search to make others feel at home in his voice: "Young chameleon, I used to / Ask how on earth one got sufficiently / Imbued with otherness. And now I see" (90). But what, one might wonder, does Auden add to Merrill's séance-assisted quest for inspiration that Yeats couldn't have taught him? Wasley examines the terms by which Merrill solicits his ghosts, the curious bureaucratic structure of the afterlife that Ephraim and the others reveal, and the many-voiced entity that the poet "imbued with otherness" finally becomes. The mature Merrill, Walsey concludes, "is the poetic tradition incorporated" (92...