Free from Fetters of Self: Revision in W. H.

Auden

By Tom Schultz

The Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley characterized poetry as “a mirror which

makes beautiful that which is distorted,” articulating the generally Romantic idea that

poetry is meant to inspire and compel the reader. This view has persisted reliably into the

modern era; E. L. Doctorow, for instance, posits that “good writing is supposed to evoke

sensation in the reader,” reaffirming the notion that poetry‟s aim is to inspire.

W. H. Auden is somewhat unique among poets and literary scholars in that he

disagrees with this conception of poetry. He acknowledges but does not endorse in his

essay Against Romanticism that “the general public still thinks of poetry as something

vague and uplifting, and that true poets look like Shelley” 1. Auden rejects the premise

that poetry‟s worth is measured by its effectiveness and that evocation is the primary goal

of the poet. He asserts instead that “in so far as poetry, or any of the arts, can be said to

have an ulterior purpose, it is, by telling the truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate” 2. The

distinction between truth and effectiveness is an important one for Auden, who was

extremely careful in his poetry not to lapse into aphorism or to romanticize fact. Auden‟s

argument that the goal of poetry is truth also carries important implication with regard to

Auden‟s means and goals of revision. While most authors conceive of revision as a

means to elucidate the meaning of a work, Auden revised his poems because he

“distrusted their power in convincing his readers that they were on the right side of the

great struggles of the age” 3. In his poetry, Auden placed a higher premium on arriving at

a real, complex truth than on compelling his readers. Thus, Auden utilized revision not as

a means of clarifying or empowering a work but as a means of repressing his own power
of compulsion in order to explore the complexities of reality rather than merely its

romantic aspects. It is pertinent, in scruitinizing Auden‟s methods and goals of revision,

to examine the poem “Spain 1937” as it represents one of Auden‟s most overtly political

poems and was repressed at various times by the author himself.

It is also useful, before studying the Auden‟s poetry, to examine the historical and

political context surrounding Auden and its potential effects on his personal ethos.

Auden‟s formative years, both poetically and politically, came during the depressions and

fascist movements of the 1930‟s. Auden recognized during this time both the false

promise of fascist movements and the threat they posed to liberal democracy. He writes

in 1938 that fascism “induces [good people] to swallow something that purports to be real

justice… [it] is the most important problem of the countries of the world to-day” 4. The

effect of fascist demagogues like Hitler and Franco influenced Auden greatly, exposing

to him the real power and danger of uncontrolled pathos which he strived to eliminate

from his poetry.

Conversely, Auden maintains that the success of fascism is due to the utter

failures of Liberal Democracy, whose results “have been social inequality, class war, lack

of social conscience, lack of social cohesion, lack of sociality” 4. Fascism has succeeded,

writes Auden, because Liberal Democracy “has made people feel that freedom is not

worth while” 4. These political attitudes indicate, if anything, a Marxist slant. However, it

would be oversimplistic to ascribe to Auden a strong commitment to Marxism or to

include him in the intellectual Marxist movements of the time, movements that included

Auden contemporaries Stephen Spencer and C. Day Lewis. Auden wrote retrospectively

that “the interest in Marx taken by myself and my friends… was more psychological than
political; we were interested in Marx in the same way that we were interested in Freud, as

a technique of unmasking middle class ideologies, not with the intention of repudiating

our class, but with the hope of becoming better bourgeois” 5. Auden is thus better

characterized as an observer and articulator of Marxist thought, rather than as a strict

proponent of it, not because he did not agree principally with Marxist tenets but because

Auden “clearly never believed that political values were ultimate, transcending moral and

religious ones;” 6 That Auden subjugated political allegiances to moral and religious ones

is central to his attitudes towards revision in that he cared more about a poem‟s honesty

than he did about its politics. Unlike many poets, therefore, Auden did not revise his

poems because of political changes of heart. He simply did not place an important

emphasis on the political elements, Marxist or otherwise, of his poetry.

Regardless of Auden‟s personal commitment to the philosophies of his

intellectual faction, however, his poetry of the time can be explained and interpreted in

these political contexts. Auden was committed to the fight against fascism, and his poems

reflect this antagonism. His poem “Spain, 1937,” first published in a five-page pamphlet

and then included, heavily revised, in a later edition of his poetry, is a reflection of

Auden‟s personal experiences in Spain serving in the Republican forces as an ambulance

driver. Auden‟s time in Spain was, to say the least, disenchanting. He wrote in 1955 that

“no one I knew who went to Spain during the Civil War who was not a dyed-in-wool

Stalinist came back with his illusions intact” 5. Rather than cementing Auden‟s alignment

with Marxism, however, the Spanish Civil War revealed to Auden the dangers of any

utopian concept of government. Though Franco‟s fascism differed from Hitler‟s in that it

was reactionary instead of professedly socialist, it still carried with it the promise and
appeal of paradise, something that Auden distrusted greatly and recognized as a central

part of Marxist propaganda. While “Spain 1937” includes some vaguely Marxist

imagery, such as the anti-capitalist lines “our faces, the institute-face, the chain-store, the

ruin / Are projecting their greed as the firing squad and the bomb” 7 and the repeated

mention of “the struggle,” the poem in its entirety is better read as a rejection of fascism

rather than a propagation of Marxism.

Nevertheless, Auden‟s claims in “Spain 1937” are drastic. In the 24th stanza, he

seems to earnestly support “To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death, / The

conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder; / To-day that expending of powers

/ On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting” 7. In this passage, Auden

displays the same commitment to “just war” that is championed by the revolutionaries

and radical movement of the time, overtly rallying the reader against fascism and

possibly against the decaying capitalist structures mentioned elsewhere in the poem (“the

installation of dynamos and turbines, / the construction of railways in the colonial desert”
7
).

The poem was widely heralded as a revolutionary work by many contemporary

critics. Richard Goodman, reviewing the poem for the “Daily Worker,” called the poem

“the only poem by an Englishman anywhere near being a real revolutionary poem” 9, and

Cyril Connolly wrote in “The New Statesman and Nation” that “The Marxian theory of

history does not go very happily into verse, but the conclusion is very fine” 10.

The poem was also heavily criticized for its idealism. George Orwell, referring to

Auden‟s support for “just war” and revolutionary causes, wrote in “Inside the Whale”

that “Mr. Auden‟s brand of amoralism is only possible if you are the kind of person who
is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled… So much of left-wing thought is a

kind of playing with fire by people who don‟t even know that fire is hot” 11. The poem

was viewed by many, including Orwell, merely as a romantic Marxist treatise.

Auden took Orwell‟s criticisms into account in revising Spain. But what

concerned him more in the revision process was not the actual political ideologies of his

poem but the idealistic and propagandistic tone it utilized. Auden was no stranger to

propaganda, both from his experiences in fascist Spain and in dealing with his Marxist

contemporaries, and he recognized the danger it posed, especially when allowed to

masquerade as literature in poetic form. He wrote in 1939 that “one of the best reasons I

have for knowing that Fascism is bogus is that it is too much like the kinds of Utopias

artists plan over café tables very late at night” 12. Auden realized the power his poetry

possessed over readers, and his revisions reflected his fear that effectiveness in his poem

had superseded truth.

Thus, Auden‟s revisions of “Spain 1937” include the elimination and mitigation

of some of the most powerful and overtly political stanzas of the poem. The elimination

of the lines:

“For the fears which made us respond

To the medicine ad. And the brochure of winter cruises
Have become invading battalions;
And our faces, the institute face, the chain-store, the ruin

Are projecting their greed as the firing squad and the bomb.
Madrid is the heart. Our moments of tenderness blossom
As the ambulance and the sandbag
Our hours of friendship into a people‟s army

serves to renounce by increment the strident anti-capitalist tone of the poem. This is

perhaps a response to the coloring of the poem by critics as a revolutionary piece.

Perhaps more significantly, however, is Auden‟s amendment of his Orwell-criticized

support of “just war.” He defended the passage from Orwell‟s criticism, reflecting in

1963 that “I was not excusing totalitarian crimes but only trying to say what, surely,

every decent person thinks if he finds himself unable to adopt to the absolute pacifist

position” 13 Nonetheless, Auden revised the line “To-day the deliberate increase in the

chances of death, / The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder,” changing

the phrase “deliberate increase” to “inevitable increase” and the phrase “necessary

murder” to “the fact of murder.”

These changes are small but significant. In changing “deliberate” to “inevitable,”

Auden moves away from a revolutionary tilt; a deliberate increase in the chances of death

implies a willing sacrifice made towards the attainment of some goal, in this case

referring to the revolution against fascism and perhaps decadent capitalism. Inevitable,

however, implies an unwillingness to fight that characterizes the Republicans of Spain as

defendants against fascist invaders rather than as arbiters of a revolution. The change

from a willing sacrifice to a necessary one removes the component of the line that directs

the reader to action, and in doing so abides by Auden‟s assertion that “Poetry is not

concerned with telling people what to do, but with extending our knowledge of good and

evil, perhaps making the necessity for action more urgent and its nature more clear, but

only leading us to the point where it is possible for us to make a rational and moral

choice” 14. The change of “necessary murder” to “the fact of murder” has the same

mitigating effect as the other revision in this stanza, removing the implied edict of the

line; “necessary murder” denotes an unfortunate means to an end. “The fact of murder,”

on the other hand, implies that murder has been thrust upon one‟s self by uncontrollable
forces; it is a fact of life. The appeal for action that existed in the first version of the

stanza is thus eliminated, effectively diminishing much of the poem‟s fervor and

vehemence.

Much has been made over the reasons for Auden‟s revisions of this poem. Some

critics have suggested that the reason for Auden‟s revision is merely in response to

George Orwell‟s criticism. However, Auden himself admitted that “these lines troubled

[him] almost immediately, for he referred to them obliquely a few months after the

poem‟s publication in his lecture „The Craft of Poetry,‟ given at Queen Mary Hall on 5

November 1937” 13. The exact text of this speech was not recorded, but Kathleen

Isherwood, who was in attendance, noted in her diary that Auden “maintained that poetry

could never be taken quite seriously thought it reflects on human behaviour or it can tell a

story” 14. Auden also refers to murder in this speech, relating it to his thesis that poetry is

metaphoric rather than literal. This speech was given more than two years before the

publication of Orwell‟s “Inside the Whale” and indicates that Auden‟s revision of the

poem had more to do with his own reservations than with Orwell‟s, and that Orwell‟s

criticism was, if anything, merely the straw that broke the camel‟s back.

Other critics have claimed that Auden revised “Spain” because of a political

change of heart. However, as was discussed earlier, Auden was never a true-blooded

Marxist, and “the degree of Auden‟s early political commitment has been exaggerated by

critics who wish to abuse him as a turncoat and backslider for his presumed desertion” 6.

Auden was not a Marxist at the time of the poem‟s publication, nor did he place much

stock in petty politics, and a shift in his political sympathies is thus hard-pressed to

explain the revisions in the poem.

 A much more plausible reason for these revisions relates to Auden‟s assertion that

poetry‟s goal is to “disenchant and disintoxicate” and his distinction between truth and

effectiveness. Auden‟s removal of a directive from the 24th stanza of “Spain” essentially

eliminates his argument in the poem for a “just war.” This is in keeping with his

statement that poetry is not meant to express literal truths or to “[tell] people what to do.”

Additionally, his elimination of an entire stanza shifts the focus of the poem from the

internal decay of a nation to the external invasion of it. The eliminated stanza is different

from the rest of the poem in its blatant nature. The line “yesterday the abolition of fairies

and giants / The fortress like a motionless eagle eyeing the valley,” for instance, vaguely

outlines the ills facing society but does not place a value judgment on them. The contrast

between this line and the eliminated line “and our faces, the institute face, the chain-store,

the ruin / Are projecting their greed as the firing squad and the bomb” is striking; the

eliminated line derides the decadent state of capitalism; the included line only mentions

it. The effect of this, rather than to add power to a poem‟s message and clear up unclear

passages, is to back away from compulsion, in doing so revealing a truth without

necessarily exhorting the reader to take a position on it. One might argue that Auden

simply wanted to tone down his poem, and in many ways this assertion is correct. But in

doing so, Auden did not simply make the poem more subtle. Instead, he attempted to

arrive at a certain truth without judging that truth, a feat much harder to accomplish than

it seems.

What is perhaps most telling about “Spain,” however, is that Auden later censored

it completely from his canon. He speaks very little of the poem in his later essays, and

even then only in regret. Specifically, Auden lamented the final lines of the poem:
 time is short, and
History to the defeated
May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.

He wrote in 1968 that “It would have been bad enough if I had ever held this wicked

doctrine, but that I should have stated it simply because it sounded to me rhetorically

effective is quite inexcusable” 13. Indeed, Auden seemed to conclude that Spain was a

poem unsalvageable in its taste for rhetoric over truth. The exhortations inherent in the

poem—the use of “Yesterday,” “Today,” and “Tomorrow,” for instance—seem almost

akin to political slogans. As an example, the line “To-morrow the bicycle races / Through

the suburbs of on summer evenings / But to-day the struggle,” might evoke the image of

a politician‟s promise. Auden knew first-hand via his experiences in fascist Spain the

dangerous falsehoods of demagogues, and as these lines form the backbone of the poem,

Auden may have simply deemed the poem unable to be saved through simple revision,

leaving him with little option but to leave it out of his canon.

It is clear in examining Auden‟s poetry and experiences that the modern fascist

movements had an indelible effect on his psyche and attitudes towards communication

and the written word. He rejected that poetry should be cathartic and moving to the

reader, a concept as old as Aristotle; “Orpheus,” wrote Auden in 1962, “is the archetype,

not of the poet, but of Goebbels” 15. Auden‟s assertions about revision are certainly

unique, but what is perhaps most interesting about his theory is the historical

circumstances under which it was articulated. Auden lived at a time when, almost more

than ever, the moral world was painted in black and white. Democracy clearly held the

moral high ground, and fascism was undeniably and terribly evil. Propaganda was a
readily accepted form of communication and political exigency (on the democratic side)

was thought to justify deception.

This is starkly not the case in Auden‟s mind. Though he strongly supported

liberalism and despised fascism, his poetry exhibits a complete reluctance to inspire any

kind of passion in the reader, and his revision ensures this. Auden‟s reaction to fascism is

clearly unique; rather than a renewed sense of democratic morality, Auden‟s lesson is that

propaganda is a dangerous and unnecessary tool, in any form.

This leads to a final question, that of Auden‟s response to traditional poets who

claim, like Vladimir Nabokov does, that poetry is an “intricate game of enchantment and

deception” 16. That is, is compulsion not inherent in poetry? In expressing any truth, does

one not influence the reader?

The answer, according to Auden, is that compulsion is not something to eliminate

entirely but rather something that must be dealt with carefully, by both readers and

writers. Auden does not deny compulsion‟s inherency in expression, but he asserts that

there is a point at which influencing the reader supersedes the quest for truth. Perhaps the

clearest expression of this is a couplet Auden wrote shortly before his death, in 1970:

Blessed be all metrical rules that forbid automatic responses,

Force us to have second thoughts, free from fetters of Self.
 References

1. Auden, W. H. “Against Romanticism” Modern Poetry and the Tradition. Ed. Cleanth

Brooks. North Carolina: North Carolina UP, 1940

2. Auden, W. H. “Writing” The Complete Works of W. H. Auden. Ed. Edward

Mendelson. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1996

3. Mendelson, Edward. “Revision and Power: The Case of W. H. Auden” Yale French

Studies 98.1 (1996)

4. Auden, W. H. “Democracy‟s Reply to the Challenge of Dictators” The Complete

Works of W. H. Auden. Ed. Edward Mendelson. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1996

5. Auden, W. H. “Authority in America” The Griffin, March 1955

6. Spears, Monroe K. The Poetry of W. H. Auden: The Disenchanted Island. New York:

Oxford UP, 1963.

7. Auden, W. H. “Spain” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. Stephen

Greenblatt. New York: Norton, 2006

8. Auden, W. H. Recorded conversation with Stephen Spender.

9. Goodman, Richard. “Richard Goodman foresees true revolutionary poetry” The Daily

Worker. June 1937.

10. Connolly, Cyril. “From To-day the Struggle” The New Statesman and Nation. June

1937

11. Orwell, George. “Inside the Whale” george-orwell.org, 2003

12. Auden, W. H. “The prolific and the Devourer” New jersey: Ecco Press, 1993.

13. Richard Davenport-Hines Auden. New York: Pantheon books, 1995

14. Kathleen Isherwood diary entry, 5 November 1937

15. Auden, W. H. “The Dyer‟s Hand” The Complete Works of W. H. Auden. Ed. Edward

Mendelson. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1996

16. Nabokov, Vladimir. “Conclusive Evidence” New York: Harper, 1951