Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, prevent
the dog from barking with a juicy bone. You know
exactly where that's from. I do. And if you're
listening, you probably do too. You're picturing
a very, very specific scene in a movie. It has
to be four weddings and a funeral, right? It
has to be. The character reading that devastating
poem. It just it tears your heart out. It's one
of those cinematic moments that really, really
sticks with you forever. It absolutely is. And
for millions of people, that was their front
door into the world of W. H. Auden. It actually
sparked this massive resurgence in his popularity
back in the mid -90s. Which is incredible for
a poet who'd been dead for 20 years at that point.
It's unheard of. But here's the thing about Auden,
and this is what we're going to get into today.
That poem, Funeral Blues, is just the tiniest,
tiniest tip of a very large and very complicated
iceberg. Right. And honestly, the man who wrote
it... Might have been surprised and maybe even
a little bit annoyed that it became his defining
pop culture moment. That's what I find so fascinating,
because when you actually look at the stack of
research we have here and it's, you know, it's
pretty substantial. You realize that W .H. Auden
wasn't just a guy who wrote beautiful, sad poems.
Not at all. He was a figure just defined by these
massive radical contradictions. We are talking
about someone who contains multitudes. And I
mean that in the most literal sense. He really
was a 20th century giant, but a giant with two
heads, you could say. Metaphorically speaking,
of course, do heads. I like that. You've got
the Englishman who becomes a passionately American
citizen. You've got the left wing political icon
of the 1930s who later in life rejects politics
almost entirely for religion. And my favorite
detail. The man who lived in absolute squalor.
Oh, the stories are incredible. We're talking
physical chaos, cigarette ash everywhere, just
a complete mess. But he was obsessively, rigidly
punctual. To the minute. It's a paradox that
tells you so much about him. It really is. It's
the kind of character detail that a novelist
would invent. And, you know, usually when we
do these deep dives, we try to simplify things
to find a single thread. But today, I think our
mission is a little different. We're going to
lean into the complexity. We want to figure out
how a boy from York who started out wanting to
be a mining engineer of all things became the
enfant de rube of English poetry. and then eventually
the undisputed master. And we have to get into
the controversies. We can't avoid them. We're
going to unpack what was called the Great Betrayal
of 1939. Which sounds like a spy thriller. It
does, doesn't it? But it was a literary scandal
that nearly broke his reputation in Britain.
And we also have to understand why, later in
life, he tried to delete his own most famous
poems from history. He literally wanted to erase
them. It's an incredible thing. The poet Joseph
Brodsky, a Nobel laureate himself, said Auden
had the greatest mind of the 20th century. And
I think by the end of this, we'll start to see
why that isn't just hyperbole. I can't imagine
that in the Internet, AIDS trying to delete something
that's already gone viral. But OK, before we
get to the deletion of history, let's start with
the making of it. Let's go all the way back to
the beginning. 1907, York, England. What did
the world look like for a young Wyston Hugh Auden?
Well, to really get Auden, you have to start
with the atmosphere of his home. His father,
George Augustus Auden, was a very distinguished
physician, a professor. His mother, Constance,
had trained as a missionary nurse. So you have
medicine and service right there at the center.
Respectable middle class background. Very. But
the key here isn't just their professions. It's
the spiritual texture of the household. It was
a high Anglican household. OK, let's unpack that
term high Anglican. For people who aren't, you
know, steeped in the nuances of English church
history, does that just mean they were very devout?
It's more specific than that. It refers to a
particular style of worship. High Anglicanism
or Anglo -Catholicism places a huge emphasis
on ritual, on liturgy, on the whole aesthetic
experience of the service. So less about the
sermon and more about the show. In a way. You're
talking about incense, chanting, elaborate robes
or vestments. It's a very sensory, very theatrical
experience. Auden himself traced his love of
music and language directly back to those childhood
church services. I can see that. That solemn
chanting, the rhythm of the liturgy, it gets
into your bones when you're a child. He said
later that to understand his poetry, you have
to understand that he grew up thinking of the
church service as a form of... high drama, it
trained his ear. It trains your ear for meter
and cadence before you even know what poetry
is. And I saw something in the notes about an
Icelandic connection. He believed his family
was from Iceland. Yes, that was his father's
pet theory. George Auden was convinced the name
Auden came from the old Norse name Auden. Was
it true? Probably not. The evidence is pretty
thin. But it didn't matter. For a young, imaginative
boy like Whiston, it gave him this whole personal
mythology to latch onto. He's a secret Viking.
Exactly. He became obsessed with Norse sagas,
with the Eddas, with the stark, cold, mythical
landscapes of the North. It added this layer
of ancient heroic mystery to his very proper
English upbringing. I love that. But here's the
part that really surprised me in the research.
Yeah. He didn't set out to be a poet. Not at
all. Until he was about 15, he was dead set on
becoming a mining engineer. It's such a specific,
gritty ambition, isn't it? It seems completely
at odds with the man we think we know. It does.
I mean, what's the connection between writing
sonnets and digging for lead? It makes a strange
kind of sense when you look at what he called
his sacred landscape. He spent his holidays in
the Pennines in northern England. This is a rugged
limestone area. And at the time, the lead mining
industry there was in its final stages of decline.
Okay. And he was obsessed with it. The decaying
machinery, the abandoned mine shafts, the strange
names of the villages like Rookhope. He didn't
just see them as industrial ruins. He saw them
as emotionally resonant. He felt something spiritual
there. So while other kids are dreaming of being,
I don't know, train conductors or soldiers, he's
dreaming about rusty pit winding gear. Precisely.
He found something numinous in it. A word he
used a lot, meaning spiritually charged. There
is a later poem of his, Amor Losi, which means
love of place, where he revisits this obsession.
It's almost as if he took that fascination with
the underground, with digging into the earth
for hidden things, and just transferred it from
mining rocks to mining the human subconscious.
That is a perfect analogy, digging into the earth
versus digging into the mind. And speaking of
the mind, his father's library was a huge influence
too. Auden was reading psychoanalytic literature
from a very early age, wasn't he? He was. His
father was a physician, remember, and very intellectually
curious for a provincial doctor. He had books
by Freud, by Groddick, by other early psychoanalysts.
So you have this young boy steeped in high church
ritual, obsessed with industrial decay, and reading
about the Oedipus Complex. It's a unique cocktail,
isn't it? That's the formula that makes Auden.
He was diagnosing the neuroses of the human condition
before he could even vote. So when does this
switch? finally flip? When does he go from I
want to design mine shafts to I want to write
poetry? It happened at his boarding school, Gresham
School. It's 1922. He's about 15 years old. And
it wasn't some grand dramatic moment. A friend
of his, a boy named Robert Medley, just casually
asks him one day, do you write poetry? And that
was it. Just a simple question. According to
Auden, that was the catalyst. He said that until
that moment, the thought had never seriously
crossed his mind. But as soon as Medley asked,
he knew instantly that his true vocation was
poetry. Wow. It's one of those strange moments
where someone else sees something in you that
you haven't quite admitted to yourself yet. Exactly.
And once that damn broke, he just started writing
voraciously. Yeah. And interestingly, around
the same time, another major shift happens. He
loses his religious faith. Was it a dramatic,
angry rebellion? You know, storming out of the
chapel, denouncing God. Not at all. And this
is so typically Auden. It wasn't a crisis. It
wasn't a rebellion. He just sort of realized
he'd lost interest. He drifted away. It was a
gradual realization, as he put it. The church
of his childhood just didn't seem relevant to
his new intellectual and emotional interests.
He was discovering science. He was discovering
his sexuality. And he was also discovering his
flair for performance. But we have to talk about
the school play, The Taming of the Shrew. 1922.
Yes. Where he played Katharina. A fiery female
lead. That's the one. And there's this wonderful
review from the school newspaper at the time
that noted that despite wearing a poor wig, Auden
managed to infuse considerable dignity into Katharina's
passionate outbursts. I love that detail. Poor
wig. It's a funny little anecdote, but it's actually
quite telling. It foreshadows something important
in his work. Auden always had this ability to
mix the absurd, the bad wig, the chaotic apartment
with absolute seriousness and dignity. He was
never afraid to look a little bit ridiculous
in the pursuit of a deeper truth. OK, so he graduates
from Gresham's. He's found poetry. He's lost
his religion. And now it's off to Oxford. This
is where the legend of the Auden group really
begins, right? This is where we have to be a
bit careful with the history because the Auden
group is half fact, half media invention. OK.
So he goes to Christchurch, Oxford. And there
he meets Stephen Spender, Cecil Day -Lewis, and
Louis McNeice. Basically the Mount Rushmore of
1930s English poetry. Essentially, yes. And the
media and later literary critics absolutely loved
lumping them all together. They were seen as
the single entity. There was even a mocking portmanteau
for them later on. McSponday? McSponday? That
sounds like a terrible brand of Scottish whiskey.
It does, doesn't it? It was a blend of their
names. McNeese, Spender, Auden, Day -Lewis. And
the idea was that they were this monolith of
left -wing, anti -establishment, modernist views.
But they weren't. Well, they did share certain
left -wing sympathies, especially as the 30s
went on. But their actual politics and their
poetic styles were really quite different. Louis
McNeese, for instance, was always much more skeptical
of hardline communist dogma than the others were.
But Auden, Auden was undoubtedly the center of
gravity. He was the leader. What was he like
socially? I get the sense he was a bit of a character
even back then. Oh, absolutely. His friends described
him as incredibly extravagant, very funny, and
very generous, but also incredibly dogmatic.
A bit of a bully. In an intellectual sense, maybe.
In a group setting, he could be quite overbearing,
holding court, telling everyone what was what.
He would issue these pronouncements, tell his
friends who they should date, what they should
read, and exactly what was wrong with their latest
poem. But that was in public. What about in private?
That's the other side of the coin. In private,
he was often shy and diffident. And according
to his own letters, he was often incredibly lonely.
It's that contradiction again. The loud, confident
leader of the group who, deep down, felt isolated.
And it's at Oxford that he reconnects with Christopher
Asherwood, which is a key relationship in his
life. The key relationship of his early life,
certainly. They had met briefly at a prep school,
but they properly reconnected in 1925 at Oxford,
and it became what they called a sexual friendship
that lasted for years, even while they were involved
with other people. But it was more than just
a romance. Oh, much more. They were collaborators
in every sense of the word. Isherwood was the
burgeoning novelist. Auden was the poet. And
they critiqued each other's work brutally and
intimately. Isherwood was the one who famously
told Auden to stop being so obscure to clear
up his language. Auden, even though he was the
more famous one, often referred to Isherwood
as his literary mentor. It sounds like this really
intense creative and personal incubator. It was.
So they leave Oxford. The roaring 20s are winding
down. and the much darker decade of the 30s is
looming. And Auden makes a crucial decision.
He decides to go to Berlin. Now, why Berlin?
At that time, wasn't Paris the traditional spot
for young artistic expats? It was. Paris was
for the romantics, for the lost generation. But
this was 1928, and Berlin was for the realists.
Berlin was the place to be if you wanted to escape
what Auden saw as English repressiveness. In
what way? Well, in a sexual sense, certainly.
Auden was gay and the Berlin of the Weimar Republic
was famously liberal and experimental. It was
far more open than London. But it was also a
place of intense political and economic unrest.
Right. This is the Weimar Republic on the verge
of collapse. Yeah. The Nazis are on the rise.
Exactly. This is where the political Auden is
truly born. He sees the chaos firsthand. He sees
the poverty, the street fighting between the
communists and the Nazis, the decadence that
comes with desperation. It's a massive wake up
call. He realizes that the polite, orderly English
society he came from was living in a bubble,
ignoring this massive storm gathering on the
horizon. It's interesting that he had to leave
England to really understand what was happening
in the world. And yet one of the most profound
spiritual moments of his early 30s happens back
in England at a school. The vision of agape.
Yes. Can you unpack that for us? Because agape
is a Greek word, isn't it? It is. It refers to
a kind of selfless, unconditional, brotherly
love. It's distinct from eros, which is romantic
or sexual love. And the story is really quite
simple. It's 1933. And Auden is a schoolmaster
at the Downs School. He's sitting on the lawn
one evening with three of his fellow teachers.
They're just talking, joking around. And suddenly
he has this overwhelming experience, this epiphany.
He was overcome. the feeling that he loved them
for themselves. What does it mean exactly? It
meant their existence subtly had infinite value
to him, completely independent of what they could
do for him or how they made him feel. It was
a moment of pure, selfless connection. He saw
their intrinsic worth. That sounds almost mystical
or religious. It was. And even though he was
an atheist at the time, he later looked back
on that moment as a crucial turning point. It
was a seed that years later would blossom into
his return to the church. It was a break from
that selfish alter ego kind of love he'd been
chasing, you know, looking for someone to complete
him. And it was a glimpse of something universal.
A very profound experience. But before he fully
gets back to the church, he's got a war to deal
with, or a few wars, actually. The 1930s were
heating up. They were. And Auden had this very
strong philosophy that An artist had to be, and
this is his phrase, more than a bit of a reporting
journalist. Right. He absolutely rejected the
ivory tower. He believed the poet had to be down
in the muck of the real world reporting back
from the front lines of history. And he really
tried to live that. And that includes his personal
life, right? In 1935, he does something quite
extraordinary. He marries Erica Mann. Yes. Thomas
Mann's daughter. The great German novelist. But
this wasn't a love match. Not in any conventional
sense. It was a marriage of convenience, a purely
political act. The Nazis were in power in Germany
and they were stripping Erica, who is a vocal
anti -fascist, of her German citizenship. She
was in danger of becoming stateless. So she needed
a passport. She needed the passport. She first
asked Christopher Itcherwood if he would marry
her to give her British citizenship. He declined,
but he suggested Auden. And Auden, without having
ever met her, show excreed. It's like that. Hey,
want to get married to save me from the Nazis?
Sure, why not? Basically. Wow. It really highlights
that underneath the enfant terrible persona,
there was this deep well of private charity and
moral seriousness. He was willing to use his
privilege as a British citizen to help someone
in a very tangible, practical way. And then comes
the Spanish Civil War. Yeah. 1937. This was the
great cause for the left in the 30s. Everyone
who was anyone went. Hemingway, Orwell. It was
the defining political and moral test of that
generation. And Auden felt he had to go. He went
to Spain with the intention of driving an ambulance
for the Republic. He wanted to do something real,
not just write poems about it. Exactly. But the
reality was a complete and utter disaster for
him. Well, he wasn't driving an ambulance. As
soon as he arrived, the Republican government
recognized him and basically put him to work
in their propaganda office. Which he must have
hated. He just fled a version of that in England.
He despised it. He felt totally useless. But
more importantly, he was deeply disturbed by
what he actually saw in Republican Spain. The
political realities were not black and white,
as he had imagined from London. It wasn't just
the good guys versus the bad guys. Not at all.
There was brutal infighting among the various
left -wing factions, and as someone with that
Anglican background, he was particularly shocked
by the anti -clerical violence, the burning of
churches, the execution of priests and nuns.
It troubled him far more than he expected. He
left after only about seven weeks. That's a very
short time for such a major historical event.
It was a pivotal moment of disillusionment. He
realized that war wasn't a stage for poetic heroics.
It was a messy, ambiguous, and morally compromising
business. He wrote a famous poem, Spain, to raise
money for the cause, but he later came to absolutely
hate that poem. We're going to get to his habit
of hating his own poems. We are. He felt he was
simplifying a complex tragedy just to score easy
political points. And he didn't stop there. He
also went to China, right? to document the Sino
-Japanese War. Yes, that was in 1938, shortly
after Spain. He went with Isherwood. They co
-wrote a book called Journey to a War. So you
can see he was really trying to live up to this
ideal of the journalist poet. But by the end
of that year, something had clearly shifted in
him. He and Isherwood came back from China. They
stopped in New York on their way home, and they
made a decision, a decision that would change
their lives and Auden's reputation forever. And
this brings us right to part three. January 1939.
The year of the so -called Great Betrayal. That's
what the British press called it, yes. In January
of 1939, as war clouds are gathering over Europe,
Auden and Isherwood sail for New York. They decide
to leave Britain for good. And the timing. I
mean, you can't overstate how bad the timing
looked. January 1939. Hitler is on the march.
The Munich Agreement has already happened. War
is seen as inevitable. It's just a matter of
months away. And England's most famous, most
politically engaged young poet. Yeah. Packs his
bags and leaves. Exactly. It was seen as a profound
act of cowardice, of abandoning the ship just
as it was about to hit the iceberg. It created
a massive scandal. It was even debated in Parliament.
In Parliament, politicians were actually discussing
a poet's travel plan. They were, which tells
you how central a figure he was. He was seen
as a voice of his generation, a voice of the
nation. And for him to leave at that precise
moment was seen as an unforgivable betrayal.
His reputation in the UK must have taken a massive
hit. It was devastated. The writer Evelyn Waugh
mercilessly satirized them as two cowardly poets
named Parsnip and Timpernell. The general consensus
was that they were rats fleeing a sinking ship.
But what was Auden's perspective? Why did he
feel he had to leave? For him, it was a matter
of artistic survival. He felt that Europe was
creatively and spiritually dead. He believed
that if he stayed in England, he would inevitably
be co -opted by the war effort, forced to become
a propaganda writer, something he'd already had
a taste of and hated in Spain. He needed a new
start to find his own authentic voice again.
And crucially, in New York, he found a reason
to stay. He met someone who anchored him there.
He met Chester Coleman. A young, aspiring poet
from Brooklyn. And this relationship was fundamentally
different from any that Auden had experienced
before. How so? Remember we talked about him
looking for an alter ego? Before Kalman... Auden's
relationships tended to be with younger men or
people he could mentor. They were often unequal.
With Kalman, for the first time, he viewed it
as a marriage between equals. He actually used
the word marriage. He did. They exchanged rings.
They went on a honeymoon trip across the country.
For Auden, this was it. This was the real thing.
But it hit a major crisis very quickly. In 1941,
Kalman ended the sexual side of their relationship.
What happened? Auden demanded total monogamy.
He wanted a traditional... faithful marriage
dynamic, and Kalman, who was much younger and
more adventurous, simply couldn't or wouldn't
accept that. Kalman was unfaithful, Auden discovered
it, and he was completely heartbroken. There
are accounts of him literally weeping in the
streets of Ann Arbor. But, and this is the really
remarkable part, they didn't break up? No, they
didn't. And this is where that vision of Agape
comes back into play. Auden made a conscious,
painful decision to love Kalman anyway. Their
relationship transformed. They remained companions,
sharing homes and collaborating on work for the
rest of Auden's life. That's an incredible commitment.
It is. He supported Kalman financially. He co
-wrote several famous opera librettos with him,
and he dedicated both editions of his collected
poetry to two people, Christopher Isherwood and
Chester Kalman. It became this model of lifelong
companionship that defied any easy categorization.
It sounds like he was consciously building a
new kind of family for himself in exile. Which
brings us to the famous February House. I just
love the mental image of this place. It's the
ultimate bohemian artist commune. It was a house
at 7 Midder Street in Brooklyn Heights. And the
list of residents is just unbelievable. It's
a fantasy dinner party lineup. You have Auden,
the composer Benjamin Britten, the novelist Carson
McCullers. And Gypsy Rose Lee, the famous burlesque
entertainer, all living under the same roof.
Can you just imagine the breakfast table conversation?
A world -famous stripper, an avant -garde poet,
and an opera composer. all passing the toast.
It was this incredible, chaotic hub of creativity.
And Auden was the ringleader. He was a self -appointed
housemother. He was the one organizing the finances
and trying, mostly failing, to get people to
do their chores. But while he was living this
very bohemian, very public life, a profound internal
shift was happening. In 1940, Auden formally
returned to the Anglican Communion. He was confirmed
into the Episcopal Church in America. So the
seed that was planted with the vision of agape
finally bloomed. It did. But it was also heavily
influenced by his reading of the existentialist
theologian Kierkegaard and his friendship with
the writer Charles Williams. Auden's newfound
Christianity wasn't retreat from the world, though.
It was what you'd call an existential faith.
What do you mean by that? It wasn't about pie
in the sky when you die. It was about the here
and now. It was about grappling with sin, with
doubt, with the challenge of how to live a moral
life in a fundamentally flawed fallen world.
And this pivot from the political concerns of
the 30s to the spiritual and theological concerns
of the 40s completely changed the focus and tone
of his poetry. Let's unpack that change in the
work itself, because the critics definitely noticed,
right? And they weren't all happy about it. Oh,
they noticed. And the critical world was completely
divided. Many of his old admirers in England
felt he'd gone soft. They missed the angry, urgent,
political Auden of the 30s. But his style was
evolving, right? It wasn't just the subject matter.
Exactly. He moved away from that clipped, obscure,
almost telegraphic style of his early poems,
what some people called his secret agent style.
He started using different... forms like syllabic
verse, which he was inspired to use by the American
poet Marianne Moore. He wanted to communicate
more clearly. He wanted to be understood, not
just admired for his cleverness. And this is
when he writes The Age of Anxiety, which is just
a great title. It's such a great title that it's
become the shorthand for the entire post -war
era. He wrote that long poem in 1947, and it
won him the Pulitzer Prize. It's set in a bar
in New York during the war, and it just perfectly
captures that feeling of dislocation, of loneliness,
of spiritual uncertainty. It was the poem that
really solidified his status as a major American
poet. But this is also the period where he starts
turning against his own earlier work. This is
the whole controversy over the dishonest poems.
He literally started rejecting some of his biggest
hits. This is one of the most fascinating and
I think admirable things about him. Imagine a
rock star refusing to play their number one smash
hit because they've decided they no longer agree
with the lyrics. That would never happen today.
Never. But Auden did it. He specifically targeted
two of his most celebrated political poems, Spain
and September 1st, 1939. And September 1st, 1939
is the one that contains probably his most famous
line. We must love one another or die. That's
the one. It's a beautiful, powerful, incredibly
moving line. It was quoted everywhere. And Auden
grew to absolutely hate it. But why? It sounds
so profound. It sounds like the ultimate moral
truth. Because, as he later pointed out with
his relentless, obsessive logic, it's a lie.
A lie, how? He said, we must die anyway. Whether
we love one another or not, death is the one
certainty for everyone. He felt that the line
was, in his words, rhetorically effective, but
dishonest. He felt he was manipulating the reader
with a sweet sounding sentiment that wasn't,
strictly speaking, factually true. So he was
prioritizing logical truth over emotional resonance.
He was prioritizing intellectual and moral integrity
over popular effect. He tried to fix it at one
point, changing the line to the much more logical,
we must love one another and die. Which is less
catchy. It's much less catchy. It's scientifically
accurate, but it doesn't exactly make for an
inspiring bumper sticker. So eventually he just
gave up and scrapped the entire poem. He refused
to allow it to be reprinted in his later collections.
That is a level of artistic integrity that is
almost unheard of, or maybe it's just stubbornness.
But it shows how deeply he valued the truth of
poetry. He refused to be a propagandist, even
for a good cause like love. Precisely. He refused
to manipulate the reader with pretty lies. For
him, poetry had a moral obligation to be truthful.
And if he felt he had written something just
to get an emotional response or to get applause,
he felt it was dirty. So he's scrubbing his past.
He's living in New York. And then he discovers
a new landscape that changes his work again.
Italy. Yes. In 1948, he begins spending his summers
on the Italian island of Ischia. And this brings
a new warmth, a new sensuousness to his poetry.
The Mediterranean light and landscape seep into
his work. And he starts writing about new themes.
He does. He starts writing about the body. not
as a sexual object or as a political tool for
the state, but as a sacred, ordinary thing. Eating,
sleeping, breathing. The mundane miracle of having
a body. And he writes, in praise of limestone,
which is an absolute masterpiece connecting the
physical landscape of Issyria to the human condition.
What's the connection there? Why limestone specifically?
Well, think about what limestone is. It's a soft
rock. It's porous. It's easily eroded by water.
It creates caves and underground springs. Auden
saw it as a metaphor for a certain kind of human
nature. We are changeable. We are influenced
by our environment. We're not rigid and unyielding
like granite. We're messy. We're messy and soluble.
And he argues that this weakness, this permeability,
is actually what makes us capable of forgiveness,
of love, of art, and ultimately of redemption.
That's beautiful. And eventually he swaps his
summer home in Italy for a permanent one in Austria.
Right. In 1958, he and Chester Coleman buy a
small farmhouse in a village called Kirchstetten,
Austria. And there's this very touching detail
in his biography. When he signed the final papers,
he shed tears of joy. It was the first time in
his life at the age of 51 that he had ever owned
his own home. The great wanderer finally settles
down. He does. And this is where he becomes the
curmudgeon in Austria. This is the period of
his famously rigid routine. He lived his life
entirely by the clock. The contrast with his
messy house? Total contrast. He once said that
cocktails were at 6 .15 and dinner was at 7 .30.
And if you showed up at 6 .17, he would scold
you. Punctuality was a moral virtue for him.
But his actual living space was chaos. Absolute
chaos. Physical disorder everywhere. Books piled
to the ceiling, dirty dishes, cigarette ash coating
every surface. But the time was ordered. It's
that contradiction again. He needed the external
structure of a rigid tim table to manage the
internal chaos of his mind. He once said, routine
in an intelligent man is a sign of ambition.
He meant that you need that framework to get
the real work done. And during the same period,
he's also the professor of poetry at Oxford,
right? So he's commuting back and forth. Sort
of. From 1956 to 1961, he held that prestigious
post, but it only required him to be in residence
and give three lectures a year. So he'd pop over
to Oxford, give these incredibly popular, brilliant
lectures. which eventually became his great book
of prose, The Dyer's Hand, and then retreat back
to his ordered life in Austria. What was he like
as a professor? The students adored him. He was
this disheveled, eccentric, chain -smoking, brilliant
figure. He would sit in a cafe wearing old slippers
and hold court, just like he did as a young man,
but now with the authority and wisdom of age.
There's a line from a poem he wrote in this later
period that I think just perfectly sums up his
emotional life. If equal affection cannot be
in point, let the more loving one be me. That's
from The More Loving One. It's just a heartbreaking
and beautiful sentiment. And it really does encapsulate
his relationship with Coleman and his whole mature
philosophy on love. It's an acceptance of imbalance.
It is. He accepted that love is rarely, if ever,
perfectly balanced. And instead of growing bitter
or resentful about it, he chose to embrace the
role of the one who loves more. It's an act of
choice. An act of grace. It's a commitment to
love without demanding a perfect return on your
investment. That is a very long way from the
young political revolutionary of the 30s who
wanted to remake the world. It is. It's the full
arc of a life. The journey from trying to change
the world to learning how to live in it with
integrity and love. So we come to the end. September
1973. He's in Vienna. He's just given a reading
of his poetry at the Palais Palfi for the Austrian
Society for Literature. He goes back to his hotel
with a friend. And that night, he dies in his
sleep of heart failure. He was 66. That feels
quite young by modern standards. It was. But
he had lived a very hard life, decades of heavy
smoking, heavy drinking, the constant intellectual
and emotional stress of his work. His face was
famously incredibly lined. He once compared his
own face to a wedding cake left out in the rain.
A great line. A great Auden line. He was buried
in the village churchyard in Kirsten, which shows
how much that home meant to him. But, and here
is that dual identity coming right back at the
end, a year later, a memorial stone for him was
placed in Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey.
So England claimed him back in the end. They
did. He belongs to both places. He's both the
English poet and the American master. So let's
talk about his legacy, because it really has
been a roller coaster. You mentioned earlier
that some critics thought he was a complete washout.
Oh, the critical battles were fierce. The Scottish
poet Hugh McDiarmid called him a complete washout.
The English poet Philip Larkin wrote a famous,
rather nasty essay called What's Become of Wisdom,
which basically argued that Auden lost all his
talent the moment he stepped on the boat to America.
So there was a real split. A huge split. The
British critics, by and large, tended to prefer
the early political English Auden. They felt
betrayed by the later religious American Auden.
They thought he became too comfortable, too domestic,
too philosophical. But what about the Americans?
The next generation of American poets, people
like John Ashbery and James Merrill, saw him
as the modern master. His technical skill, his
formal range, it was just staggering. In fact,
you could argue that the beat generation, Ginsberg,
Kerouac, that whole movement, their wild, ecstatic,
free -verse style, was partly a direct reaction
against Auden's pervasive formal influence. You
can't rebel against something unless it's the
dominant. Exactly. For a time, Auden represented
the high bar of craftsmanship that everyone else
had to either measure themselves against or consciously
reject. And then, years after his death, comes
the great pop culture resurrection. Four weddings
and a funeral. 1994. The character Matthew, played
by John Hanna, reads Funeral Blues, Stop All
the Clocks. The movie becomes this massive, unexpected
global hit, and suddenly everyone wants to read
Auden. A small pamphlet of 10 of his love poems
sold 275 ,000 copies in the UK alone. That is
an absolutely staggering number for a book of
poetry. It's unheard of. It brought him to a
whole new generation who knew nothing about the
Spanish Civil War or 1930s politics. They just
connected with the raw, universal emotion of
grief. And isn't it ironic that the poem was
originally written as a piece of satire? It's
the ultimate irony. The first version was a satiric
eulogy for a political leader in a play he co
-wrote called The Ascent of F6. He later rewrote
it as a cabaret song to be sung by a soprano.
And then decades later, it becomes the world's
most sincere and heartbreaking anthem of grief.
It just shows how art can completely transcend
an artist's original intention. Once it's out
in the world, the audience decides what it truly
means. And then, unbelievably, it happens again.
Another one of his poems has a huge resurgence
after a tragedy. September 11th, 2001. And this
is the eeriest part of his legacy. After the
attacks on the World Trade Center, that very
poem he tried to delete September 1st, 1939,
went viral. Before going viral was even really
a thing. Right. People started faxing it to each
other, emailing it, reading it on the radio.
Lines like, the unmentionable odor of death offends
the September night, just resonated with a terrifying
power. It spoke to that specific awful moment
in a way nothing else could. It captured the
fear, the confusion, and the sudden desperate
need for human connection. So the poem he tried
to kill because he thought it was dishonest ended
up being the thing that felt most true to people
in a moment of absolute crisis. Exactly. It's
the ultimate proof that once a poem is out in
the world, it doesn't belong to the poet anymore.
It belongs to us. We needed that poem in that
moment, even if Auden himself had rejected it.
So if we step back and try to synthesize this
whole complicated arc, the clever schoolboy,
the political firebrand, the spiritual exile,
the master craftsman, what's the core struggle
at the heart of Auden's life and work? I think
Brodsky was right about him having the greatest
mind of the century, but it was a mind in constant
conflict with itself. The struggle was always
between the public role of the poet and the private
duty of the individual. He came to deeply distress
the idea of the great poet who could save the
world with words. He learned that poetry makes
nothing happen. As he famously wrote, he learned
that politics are messy and that art ultimately
can't stop a tank. So he turned his focus inward.
He turned to the private moral duty of the individual.
The duty to be truthful, to love your neighbor,
to create order in your own small corner of the
world, especially when the larger world is descending
into chaos. We must love one another and die.
Yes. Acknowledging the bleak reality of our mortality,
but choosing the difficult path of love anyway.
For him, that was the only true, honest form
of courage. That brings us to a final thought
for you, our listener. We've talked a lot about
Auden deleting his most famous work because he
felt it was rhetorically effective, but ultimately
dishonest. He chose integrity over popularity.
Very high bar to set for oneself. It is. So think
about this in our current age, the age of influencers,
of viral tweets, of content creators whose careers
depend on engagement. Imagine this scenario.
Would any modern creator delete their most popular,
most shared, most viral post simply because they
had a crisis of conscience and realized it wasn't
strictly philosophically true? Would they sacrifice
the likes, the shares, the ad revenue for the
sake of intellectual honesty? It's a tough question.
Auden did. It's something to think about. If
you want to dive deeper into his world, go and
read The Shield of Achilles or pick up his book
of essays, The Dyer's Hand. You won't regret
it. Absolutely. Time well spent. Thanks for joining
us on this deep dive. We'll see you next time.