Cultural Cohesion Read Online Free

been seen. Auden’s poetry possessed the quality which Pasternak so admired in Pushkin—it was full of things . And yet in an epoch when homosexuality was still a crime, this talent was the very one which could not be used unguarded to speak of love.
    For that, he was forced from the concrete to the abstract, and so moved from the easy (for him) to the difficult. As Gianfranco Contini definitively said when talking of Dante’s dedication to the rhyme, the departure point for inspiration is the obstacle. The need to find an acceptable expression for his homosexuality was the first technical obstacle to check the torrential course of Auden’s unprecedented facility. A born master of directness was obliged to find a language for indirection, thus becoming immediately involved with the drama that was to continue for the rest of his life—a drama in which the living presence of technique is the antagonist.
    Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle.
    Upon what man it fall
    In spring, day-wishing flowers appearing,
    Avalanche sliding, white snow from rock-face,
    That he should leave his house,
    No cloud-soft hand can hold him, restraint by women;
    But ever that man goes
    Through place-keepers, through forest trees,
    A stranger to strangers over undried sea,
    Houses for fishes, suffocating water,
    Or lonely on fell as chat,
    By pot-holed becks
    A bird stone-haunting, an unquiet bird.
    In this first stanza of Poem II in Poems (it was entitled “The Wanderer” only later, in Collected Shorter Poems 1930–1944 ), the idea of the homosexual’s enforced exile is strongly present, although never explicit: the theme lies hidden and the imagery is explicit instead, thereby reversing the priorities of the traditional lyric, and bodying forth an elliptical suggestiveness which rapidly established itself as the new lyricism of an era. But already we are given a foretaste of the voyage that came to an end in Oxford forty years later—a wanderer’s return to the Oxford of Another Time , the centre of anger which is the only place that is out of danger. Auden never looked for cloistered safety until very late on the last day. The danger and fatigue of his journey were too much of an inspiration.
    There head falls forward, fatigued at evening
    And dreams of home,
    Waving from window, spread of welcome,
    Kissing of wife under single sheet;
    But waking sees
    Birds-flocks nameless to him, through doorway voices
    Of new men making another love.
    Only tiredness could make the doomed traveller dream the banalities of hearth and wife: awake, he is once again involved with real love. And real love is a new love, with all political overtones fully intended. Auden’s radicalism, such as it was, was at one with his sexuality, with the piquant result that he spent the 1930s experiencing communism as sensual and sex as political.
    .    .    .
    As Brecht found his politicized lyricism in sophistication ( In der Asphaltstadt bin ich daheim ), Auden found his in innocence: masturbation in the dormitory, languishing looks between prefects and blond new boys, intimate teas and impassioned lollings on grassy hillsides. The armies and the political parties of the 1930s were the thrillingly robust continuation of school rugger and cricket teams, being likewise composed of stubborn athletes and prize competitors. Bands apart, they were all-male and Hellenic—and the neo-Hellenism of the 1930s was all Teutonic. Auden’s political and intellectual spectrum in the 1930s is mainly German, and it’s harder than the gullible might think to pick his emotional allegiance between the two sets of muscle-packed shorts, Communist or Nazi. Intellectually, of course, he didn’t fool with Fascism for a moment; but to his sexual proclivities the blond Northern hero made an appeal which only a poetic embodiment could resolve—it took pearl to silence the irritation set up by those vicious