22 pages • 44 minutes read
Wystan Hugh AudenIn Memory of W. B. Yeats
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1939A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Auden’s Ambivalence About Yeats
When he started out on his career, Auden greatly admired Yeats and was indebted to his work. However, during the 1930s, Auden became critical of the older poet. His stance on Yeats was therefore contradictory for most of his career; he both admired him and censured him. In a 1948 essay in Kenyon Review titled “Yeats as an Example,” Auden wrote that Yeats produced “some of the most beautiful poetry” of modern times. However, Auden did not care for Yeats’s esoteric beliefs, his romanticism, his tendency to embrace antidemocratic views, or his hobnobbing with the aristocracy. In 1964, Auden wrote to the poet Stephen Spender (in a letter quoted by James Fenton in a 2007 article in the Guardian) that Yeats “has become for me a symbol […] of everything I must try to eliminate from my own poetry, false emotion, inflated rhetoric, empty sonorities,” although Auden added that none of that was Yeats’s fault (Fenton, James. “A Voice of His Own.” The Guardian, 2007).
Auden’s elegy for Yeats reveals this double perspective. In the spring of 1939, just a few weeks after he wrote the elegy, Auden published “The Public v. the Late Mr. William Butler Yeats,” an essay in Partisan Review evaluating Yeats’s status as a poet. In it, Auden lays out his arguments in the form of a trial, with the prosecutor and the defense attorney putting their respective cases for and against the proposition that Yeats was a great poet.
The prosecutor argues that Yeats fell short of poetic greatness in three ways. First, he did not have a gift for “memorable language.” Second, Yeats did not understand the age in which he lived. He possessed a “feudal mentality,” admiring the Irish peasantry but believing the poor should remain in their place and instead feeling comfortable in “the world of noble houses […] inhabited by the rich and the decorative” (The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose, Volume II, 1939-1948. Edited by Edward Mendelson. Princeton University Press, 2002, pp 3-7). Yeats was thus hostile to the “struggle […] to create a juster social order.” Third, a great poet should have a “sympathetic attitude towards the most progressive thought of his time” (The Complete Works of W.H. Auden). Yeats, on the contrary, was inimical to the scientific method and the “steady conquest of irrational superstition” (The Complete Works of W.H. Auden). He believed in fairies and wrote of “legends of barbaric heroes”— youthful “silliness” that he did not grow out of—and in the 1930s was deeply involved in “the mumbo-jumbo of magic and the nonsense of India” (The Complete Works of W.H. Auden). Thus, Yeats “rejected social reason and justice” (The Complete Works of W.H. Auden).
The defense attorney then puts the case for Yeats. Much of the argument resembles Sections 2 and 3 of the elegy. The real question is the test of time. In 200 years, no one will be interested in whether he was correct about the Irish Question or the “transmigration of souls” (The Complete Works of W.H. Auden). Whether Yeats supported the right causes is irrelevant:
The case for the prosecution rests on the fallacious belief that art ever makes anything happen, whereas the honest truth, gentlemen, is that, if not a poem had been written, not a picture painted, not a bar of music composed, the history of man would be materially unchanged (The Complete Works of W.H. Auden).
This is exactly the point makes in the elegy: “[P]oetry makes nothing happen” (Line 36). However, centuries in the future, people will still respond to Yeats because his poetry will continue to excite his readers, even though their “circumstances and beliefs” may be very different from his (The Complete Works of W.H. Auden). This is because Yeats himself continued all his life to be “excited emotionally and intellectually by his social and material environment” and he poured this into his poetry. His “capacity for excitement not only remained with him to the end, but actually increased” (The Complete Works of W.H. Auden). Furthermore, just as Section 3 of the elegy lauds those who are masters of language, so too “there is one field in which the poet is a man of action, the field of language, and it is precisely in this that the greatness of the deceased is most obviously shown” (The Complete Works of W.H. Auden).
Literary Context: Auden and the Elegy
The elegy as a poetic form goes back to ancient Greek and Roman literature, but it was only in the 17th century that it acquired its modern usage, as a lament for the death of a friend or important person. Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850), in which the poet mourned the death of his friend Arthur Hallam, is a notable example.
A subcategory is the pastoral elegy, which goes back to the ancient Greek poet Theocritus, who wrote about the life of shepherds in Sicily in the third century BC. Pastoral elegies often present the poet himself as well as the one who is mourned as though they were shepherds; include descriptions of nature that employ the pathetic fallacy (the attribution of human emotions to nature), in which nature shares in the grief at the loss of the friend; and offer the hope of immortality or other consolation for the dead man. One of the best-known pastoral elegies is John Milton’s “Lycidas” (1638), which commemorates Edward King, Milton’s fellow student at Cambridge, who drowned. Matthew Arnold’s “Thyrisis” (1866), which commemorated Arnold’s friend, the poet Arthur Hugh Clough, is another notable pastoral elegy.
Auden was obviously aware of the traditions of the pastoral elegy, but “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” marks out new territory more appropriate for the time in which Auden lived. The imagery is mostly urban rather than pastoral, nature is indifferent to Yeats’s death, and there is no suggestion of immortality. The elegy is neither an expression of personal grief nor a paean of praise to the poet. Colored by Auden’s own views and preferences, it is a realistic assessment of the role of poetry in the mid-20th century.
In addition to “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” Auden wrote a number of other elegies, including “In Memory of Ernst Toller,” a tribute to the German playwright and leftist politician who died in May 1939; “In Memory of Sigmund Freud” (1939); “At the Grave of Henry James” (1941); “The Cave of Making” (1965), a tribute to his friend, the poet Louis MacNeice; and “Elegy for J. F. K.,” for US President John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in November 1963.
These elegies differ widely in style. “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” considered the finest of them, has influenced later 20th-century elegies. Russian poet Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996) was especially moved by what Auden wrote about the triumph, over time, of those who master language. When Brodsky heard of the death in 1965 of English poet T. S. Eliot, he wrote a three-part elegy modeled on “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.” Brodsky’s “Verses on the Death of T. S. Eliot” uses similar winter imagery, since Eliot, like Yeats, died in January. After Auden died in 1973, prominent Saint Lucian poet Derek Walcott (1930-2017) wrote “Eulogy for W. H. Auden,” which was also modeled in the Yeats elegy. Twenty-three years later, in 1996, Brodsky died on January 28, the anniversary of Yeats’s death. Brodsky’s friend, the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, wrote “Audenesque” (2001), an elegy in memory of Brodsky that makes numerous allusions to Auden’s poem and follows the meter of Auden’s third section (See: Form and Meter).
