Radical anthropocentrism

Auden's aversion to Romantic idealism, especially the Shelleyan mingling of spiritual sublimation and political radicalism, is well documented. His nature images also reject Romantic models. For the Romantics, nature provided an imaginary framework enabling the self to overcome alienation. 'Nature' bridged the gap between childhood and adulthood as a quasireligious power enabling the self to enter a higher plane than that of a mundane reality where actual, physical nature was increasingly sacrificed to the Industrial Revolution.

In Auden, images of nature are always man-made constructs. The early poem '1929' is telling. It contains a list of potentially Romantic nature images, frogs in ponds, 'traffic of magnificent cloud' across open sky, only to frame them in the urban context of a public garden and eventually of individual, social and political concerns. Already the term 'traffic' hints at a thoroughly anthropocentric perspective. In an essay on Robert Frost in 1936, Auden stated bluntly: 'Man is naturally anthropocentric and interested in his kind and in things or animals only in so far as they contribute to his life and sustain him; he does not interest himself in things to the exclusion of people till his relations with the latter have become difficult or have broken down.'

M, it would appear, felt violated.

M, for those who are not intimately acquainted with the succès de scandale in question, is the much-lauded Spanish novelist Javier Marías, who published a petulant article in El País concerning his treatment at the hands of the father–daughter team, Elías and Gracia Querejeta, producer and director, respectively, of the film adaptation of Marías’ novel Todas las almas (“All Souls,” 1989). While it is not in the least unusual for writers to decry publicly the inadequacies of films that have been based on their work, what is notable here is the way in which Marías makes explicit the subtext of sexual deviance that, as Robert Stam suggests, usually only lurks beneath the surface of such discussions of filmic “infidelity.” For Marías is uncomfortable, above all, with the film’s specific representations of sexuality. Indeed, the author begins his article by recounting (in the third person, and using the initials M, Q, and Q for the three parties concerned) a conversation that he has had with Q senior concerning the homosexuality of one of the characters (Cromer-Blake), and the possibility of a sexual relationship between that character and another male protagonist (Toby Rylands). Marías insists that such a relationship is unthinkable, and then records his astonishment at Q senior’s response: “Aun así Q insistió con una pregunta en verdad genialoide: ‘¿Estás seguro?’ M pudo haber sido sarcástico pero no lo fue, se limitó a contestar lo obvio: ‘¿Cómo no voy a estar seguro, si el libro lo he escrito yo?’ M, ingenuo, respiró con alivio creyendo haber atajado a tiempo un grave malentendido de lectura’ (“Even so Q insisted with a truly brilliant-ish question: ‘Are you sure?’ M could have been sarcastic, but he wasn’t, he limited himself to responding with the obvious: ‘How could I not be sure, if it is I who wrote the book?’ M, ingenuous, sighed with relief thinking that he had prevented a grave misreading, just in time”).

The classical route map for a great poet's career was linear and ascendant. Following the Virgilian example, it began with pastoral apprenticeship (The Eclogues), continued with works about subjects of greater significance in more complex forms (The Georgics) and ended with the loftiest achievement, a national epic (The Aeneid). By this standard almost all twentieth-century artistic lives, marked by lateral turns and ideological reversals, seem flawed beyond mending. But classicism's failings have become modernity's virtues, and, understood in this light, W. H. Auden's career, with its sudden departures, intense foreswearings and radical changes of direction, is prototypically unpredictable, prototypically modern.

It is ‘my vocation to be aWandering Jew’, Auden, aware of this emblematic restlessness, told friends. Of his many ‘moves’, the most fateful was his decision to leave England at the height of his early celebrity, to live in the United States and, before long, become an American citizen. It was also easily the most controversial.

On a freezing January morning in 1939, Auden and Isherwood came ashore in Manhattan, apparently intending to stay for a year and write a travel book about the States, to be titled Address Not Known. Auden was beginning his challenge, at first perhaps unintended but later certainly deliberate, to one of the most tenaciously held assumptions of post-Romantic culture, one so deeply embedded in current ways of imagining literary history that many critics hardly acknowledge its existence, let alone question its explanatory power.

Although possibly inspired in the contemporary term Risorgimento, the name Renaixença derives from the title of a journal that, from 1871 to 1905, promoted the recuperation of the high-cultural uses of the Catalan language. As a period marker, the term refers to the nineteenth-century retrieval of Catalan culture after the long decline known to Catalan historiography as La Decadència. Pierre Vilar has called the Renaixença “a new datum, in the sense that the [Catalan] language … becomes once more a sign of the social group.” This is indeed the primary and, in retrospect, the decisive meaning of the term, which has come to signify the restoration of the cultural uses of the vernacular. Nevertheless, considering the class tensions that played themselves out in this process, the definition demands more precision. The Renaixença also represented the growing self-assertion of social groups whose recently achieved economic hegemony required cultural and historical legitimation.

While it would be simplistic to mistake the cultural and, above all, the linguistic reclamation for the political will that enlivened this process, it is true that the Renaixença consolidated the values of Catalonia’s economic elite. It is not by chance that a latter-day politician like Jordi Pujol, who championed a comparable retrieval of Catalonia’s language and political personality in the twentieth century, could assert that “Es difícil que la Renaixença, que anava fent el seu procés lentament, hagués pogut produir el canvi sobtadíssim en quantitat i en qualitat que hi va haver si no hagués tingut el suport d’una classe social i d’una economia creixents” (“Without the support of a growing social class and an expansive economy, it would have been difficult for the Renaixença, which advanced slowly, to produce the sudden change in quantity and quality that actually took place”).

In his Proemio e carta al condestable de Portugal (“Prologue and Letter to the Constable of Portugal”), written at the threshold of the Renaissance, Ínigo López de Mendoza, the marqués de Santillana (1398–1458), placed poetry at the epicenter of human affairs: “Las plazas, las lonjas, las fiestas, los conbites opulentos sin ella asi como sordos e en silencio se fallan. ¿E qué son o quáles aquellas cosas adonde – oso dezir – esa arte así como necesaria no intervenga e no sirva?” (“Public squares, marketplaces, festivals, opulent feasts are as if deaf and silent without it. What are those affairs in which – dare I say it – this art does not intervene as if by necessity?”). Poetry literally gives voice to culture, understood in its broad sense as a whole way of life. Like other early modern European writers, however, Santillana also elevated vernacular verse, rendering selected aspects of it into Culture (Culture, with a capital “C,” meaning high or learned culture), and investing them with the symbolic capital previously reserved for the classics. These twin perspectives are fundamental to understanding Spanish verse during a period of expansion and exploration.

If poetry enabled individuals to make sense of themselves and their society, it was also instrumental in creating those very categories. This is evident not only in the diversity of Renaissance poetic forms, genres, and subjects, but also in other material factors. Sixteenth-century verse circulated orally and in writing, in many forms and contexts, whose social significance is sometimes obscured by the limited institutionalized forms and settings in which it is read and reproduced today.

In Spain as elsewhere the 1920s saw a wave of experimentalism in fictional narrative. Modernist narrative, however, cannot be circumscribed to the historical Avant-Garde of the 1920s. Clear precedents can be traced back to the 1890s. The Pío Cid novels (1897–1898) of Ángel Ganivet, as well as some of Galdós’ later work, already evince some of the characteristics that will become the hallmarks of Modernist fiction. The well-known 1902 novels of Unamuno, Baroja, Azorín, and Valle-Inclán confirm an emerging trend, but it is the appearance of Unamuno’s Niebla (“Mist”) in 1914 that sets the seal. Here are visibly present many of the central preoccupations of Modernist narrative. Such concerns as the self-conscious text, the nature of artistic autonomy, the role of language, the identity of the self, and authenticity of the image are all given prominence in this work. Baroja was at his most innovative in his early work but, despite a strong defense of Modernism in 1903, never developed into a leading-edge experimental novelist, preferring in his later years to return to a highly personal brand of documentary Realism. Azorín on the other hand moved from an amorphous Bildungsroman-type novel in the first decade of the century to a more radical exploration of Modernist themes such as time, writing, and creative doubt in Doña Inés (1925), El caballero inactual (‘The Unmodern Gentleman,” 1928), and El libro de Levante (“The Book from the Levant,” 1929), each more rarified than the preceding one and demonstrating only too well the danger of artistic introversion.

Genesis and chronicles

At the beginnings of literary histories lie the most alluring questions. We want to know all about what we call the origins of the tradition whose story is about to be told. Few start with “once upon a time” and yet nearly all are tempted down that road marked “sources” or “birth” or “genesis,” even when we know that it is a path that, nearly by definition, can have nothing like an unambiguous endpoint or resolution. Why do we persist in our scholarly tradition’s most quixotic quest, the search for that grail, that moment of birth, that earliest text or, as it is often called, “monument”? Why do we persist, even when we know (for we ourselves teach this) that what does survive from the earliest sources, in relatively remote times, may be largely a trick of history, and may bear only an accidental relationship to what there really was? Why do we not begin, more simply and cleanly, in some indisputable medias res and from there go bravely forward into the future, rather than backwards to where the question of the source of that particular river may lie? Why are we most insistent of all, when writing about those periods often charmingly called by poetic names (such as the “springtime” of our literature), on the need to clarify what we call “influences” – and what can that mean other than the poetic company that poets kept? Why are the histories of medieval literatures (whether free-standing or, as here, as the origins stories of later literatures) so consistently our versions of the story of Adam and Eve, sometimes down to and including quasi-biblical titles such as “the creation of literature in Spanish”?

Women, while still significantly underrepresented as playwrights on Spanish stages, gained slightly more visibility during the second half of the nineteenth century. The model of Gómez de Avellaneda, whose powerful and well-written plays could not be ignored by the establishment (in spite of their continued refusal to recognize her merits publicly with membership in the Real Academia Española), opened pathways to other women who wanted to express themselves in the theatre. Dozens of now semi-forgotten women (we do not even know the birth and death dates of many of them) labored in the margins of the Spanish theatre scene. The best-known woman writer of the second half of the nineteenth century, Emilia Pardo Bazán, while gaining fame as a polemical prose stylist, also wrote several plays.

Many of the plays penned by women fit into traditional “women’s” categories such as religious dramas, children’s literature, or sentimental comedies, a characterization that makes them no less interesting. In fact, if one were to trace carefully the language, themes, and structures of these plays, one would be able to track more precisely the “domestic” concerns of late nineteenth-century Spanish bourgeois society (this is being done for the novel; the theatre remains largely unexplored territory). Life, love, honor, the place of women, the need for education, the role of constancy and forbearance, and the importance of religion and spirituality in women’s lives become the foci of many of these plays. Examples come from the work of Enriqueta Lozano de Vílchez, Adelaida Muñiz y Mas, and Rosario de Acuña.

The foundations of the study of medieval literatures in the modern era were, of course, essentially philological. The preparation of a readable text from existing manuscripts (if more than one was available), the provenance of the manuscript(s) and the work(s) inscribed thereupon, and finally the ability to read and understand the medieval language(s) transmitted by these texts were the principal aims of an earlier generation of scholars and students. Some students of these works also understood that it was necessary to understand the modes of procedure of the scribal culture in which these literary artifacts originated. Later some scholars and critics began to apply a “new critical” approach in their analysis. Why were these pieces in and of themselves worthy of attention as literary objects?

New ways of viewing the so-called “literary text” began to emerge as the scholarly community came to appreciate and elaborate upon various approaches (linguistic, psychological, structural) which produced a notable effect upon the manner in which medieval works were read and interpreted. In recent years the “new historicists” have begun to question the validity of many of these approaches. Their views, which to some degree must have evolved from and along with those of the French historical writers concerned with “mentalités,” understand the medieval text as an artifact best analyzed in context, that is, in relation to the cultural codes which prevailed when the work was composed.

The term modernismo is generally applied to the writings of a generation of artists from Latin America and Spain who initiated a revolution in literature in the 1880s in the Americas and the late 1890s in Spain. The literary histories of Spanish modernismo written in the period 1936–1955 by Ángel Valbuena Prat, Guillermo Díaz-Plaja, and others, and subsequent accounts based on them have presented an overview which, in the light of recent research, is seriously flawed. First, they contend that the movement began in the Americas with the work of Rubén Darío (1867–1916) and was taken to Spain on his second visit to the peninsula in 1899. Second, modernismo is perceived as an essentially aesthetic movement, drawing its inspiration eclectically from European, largely French, literary models. Third, the movement was a homogeneous one, emerging in the late 1890s and largely abandoned by major writers before 1910. Lastly, it was devoid of serious preoccupations and, by the 1950s, held little relevance.

These accounts, with a concentration on aesthetic issues and literary origins, have failed to treat the movement seriously and recognize its complexity. In part this is because, at a very early stage, the modernistas explored aspects of experience which seemed, to the conservative establishment, to be in some way subversive. Their affirmation that art could supply meaning and spiritual beauty which a contemporary mercantile and philistine society lacked, their rejection of an art based on the civic and national ideals of a pragmatic bourgeoisie, and their disgust with a discredited political and social system led to what Manuel Machado (1874–1947), in 1913, called “una guerra literaria” (“a literary war”).

At the beginning of the eighteenth century Spanish theatre had a well-established tradition of generic models, performing styles, theatrical conventions, and audience preferences. The imaginative power of Spain’s Golden Age theatre had resulted in some of the most seminal works in the history of drama, giving birth to mythical characters like don Juan or Celestina. The seventeenth-century stage was supremely responsive to the demands of audiences and developed in close conformity with the dominant mentality of Baroque Spain. Lope de Vega and Pedro Calderón de la Barca created a successful national dramatic tradition whose generic models and principles were followed by most other playwrights.

However, in 1701 a new dynasty ascended the Spanish throne, and the new king, Felipe V, introduced reform at all levels of national life. The idea of change became a constant of the new age and had innumerable repercussions for the theatre. Changes took place in the nation’s mental outlook, stimulated by new ideas, written texts, artistic modes, and scientific advances; the new dynasty stimulated changes in Spanish attitudes. The resulting turmoil is reflected most intensely in the theatre because it was the public forum with the deepest ideological significance, enjoying the widest popular favor. Initial confrontations arose out of the questioning of the national theatrical tradition, which promptly took on ideological connotations, but it was from the 1760s onwards that the change in atmosphere became most evident, with the existence of fierce public debate.

Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) is Spain’s most celebrated twentieth-century author. He achieved success and popularity as both poet and dramatist within Spain before his untimely death, and his international reputation has grown steadily since then, resulting in an extraordinary range of editions, translations, critical commentary, productions, and adaptations.

Lorca is most often categorized as belonging to the “Generation of 1927,” a group of ten or so writers – predominantly poets – who rose to prominence in Spain in the later 1920s and the first half of the 1930s. The group originated in a number of friendships, some of which went back to childhood, and while its members admired each other’s work, that work was, stylistically, very diverse.

Lorca’s family and friends expected him to pursue a career in music rather than literature, but a cultural excursion in which he participated in 1916 seems to have been the catalyst that re-oriented him toward letters. Organized by one of his professors at the University of Granada, it involved regular writing assignments, and prose, surprisingly enough, was the first genre that the young Lorca essayed. Soon, however, he was also experimenting with both poetry and drama.

Responding in 1932 to an enquiry from Geoffrey Grigson, Wystan Auden asked 'Why do you want to start a poetry review [?]', adding 'I'm glad you like poetry but cant [sic] we take it a little more lightly . . . I hope you'll keep it gay.'

There are enough instances of Auden's play with this last word to suggest that it already, by the 1930s, had some of its modern resonance, at least as a coded formula among those in the know. The satiric verse epistle, 'Letter to Lord Byron' (1937), for example, approved Byron's muse 'because she's gay and witty'. Byron's bisexuality would have been an open secret in Auden's circles, which included Harold Nicolson, author of a 1924 biography of the poet, and Peter Quennell, whose Byron in Italy would appear in four years' time. Certainly, in the 1930s many of the attacks on Auden's 'gaiety', his lightness and unseriousness of tone, linked it surreptitiously to a hinted moral 'deviancy'. Thus F. R. Leavis, reviewing Poems in 1931, wrote of Auden's 'combination of seriousness and flippancy' being in a mould 'so peculiar to himself and so eccentric in its terminology', displaying 'mental idiosyncrasies . . . extravagantly indulged', that it 'fails to make a living contact with us'.

One of the outstanding achievements of eighteenth-century Spanish culture was the rehabilitation of prose as a valid, expressive medium for literary composition. For many years mainstream literary criticism, which tended to privilege the poetry and drama of the Golden Age, interpreted the widespread use of prose in the eighteenth century as a failing. Presentday literary scholarship has reversed that judgment, considering the use of prose in essays, novels, memoirs, polemical writings, satires, and works of scholarship as a major accomplishment.

It can also be argued that some of the more important and successful genres of earlier centuries began to lose their importance in the eighteenth century as culture advanced toward modernity. Among forms which ceased to meet the needs of writers, or for that matter their audiences, were the epic and certain categories of poetry and drama, which were replaced by new prose genres, more up-to-date and in tune with the demands of society. Thus the essay, the novel, and bourgeois drama responded to new social circumstances and the ever-increasing need of the public to see itself and its social world reflected in culture. This required authors to convert contemporary reality into literature, taking models from the world around them rather than looking to writings and literary conventions from the past, and abandoning the traditional imitation of the universal to concentrate on the particular. Being challenged to produce an effect upon the reader or spectator, authors felt obliged to write in prose, setting aside the artifice of poetic meter. Modern Spanish theatre gradually abandoned the use of verse, and one of the achievements of Leandro Fernández de Moratín (1760–1828) was to create a prose that was genuinely poetic, which other writers would only gradually adopt.

The description of Auden's influence usually concentrates on the work of a small core group during a limited period - what Samuel Hynes called 'the Auden Generation'. My intention is to extend the discussion to include several generations of English and American poets - what might be called, to pluralise Hynes, the Auden Generations.

The chapter does not purport to be a theoretical or practical-critical account of Auden's influence: it is not a set of hypotheses or close readings. Nor is it a list of writers who have obviously been influenced by Auden (although such a list would be useful, and it would be long). It is, rather, a descriptive mapping and selective interpretation of the reception of and responses to Auden's work, and an analysis of some of the significant ways in which Auden's influence has been mediated and made itself apparent. It should be acknowledged from the outset that Auden's influence has not always been positive. Auden has been blamed personally, and literally, for just about every failing in English verse over the past three-quarters of a century, and there undoubtedly are those individuals for whom his influence has been inhibiting, dispiriting or downright destructive. There have also always been those like Hugh McDiarmid, who regarded Auden as 'a complete wash-out', or like Truman Capote, who when asked what he thought of Auden's poetry replied, 'Never meant nothin' to me.' Nonetheless, Auden's influence has been widespread, and, it is worth noting (since I will be restricting myself to British, Irish and American poetry), international in its scope.

Humphrey Carpenter and friends such as Brian Howard and Lincoln Kirstein have suggested that Auden had no visual sense and little interest in the visual arts. His topographical and pictorial iconography has, possibly in consequence, been largely overlooked. But the depiction of landscape, both real and symbolic, is a recurrent feature of his poetry. His approach to the physical landscape and to painters such as Daumier, Picasso, Cézanne, Dürer, Titian, Brueghel, Salvator Rosa, Poussin and Piero di Cosimo, consistently transforms the perceived world into symbolic, allegorical and metonymic modes, as vehicles for intellectual and moral ratiocination. Not for nothing is one of his early poems called 'Paysage Moralisé' (1933).

Auden consistently projected his bipolar vision, working through a complex series of opposites, on to his landscapes. His early approach to topographical imagery, shaped by a Romantic sense of the contradiction between reason and feeling, was gradually transformed into a postmodern acceptance of duality as a ‘unity-in-tension’ (DH, p. 65) of different modes of being. His poetic landscapes are haunted by the opposition of the wilderness and the city, reflecting a divided human nature, engaged in a historic quest in which the ideal is repeatedly threatened with relapse into barbarism. Landscape forms the backdrop for such journeying along an unending road, with a great city behind and unexplored regions ahead.

Definition of “Romantic” appeared less complicated in the early nineteenth century than subsequent critical disputation might suggest. Within the parameters adumbrated by the German critic and poet Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) – for René Wellek “the fountainhead of universal literary history” – application of the term as systematized by the brothers August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel and by Madame de Staël came to be understood and acknowledged all over Europe. It was in 1814 under the heading “Reflexiones de Schlegel sobre el teatro, traducidas del alemán” (“Schlegel’s Reflections upon the Theatre, Translated from the German”) that Johann Nikolaus Böhl von Faber (1770–1836), an expatriate German merchant and bibliophile resident in the southwest port city of Cadiz, first sought to acclimatize within Spain those new aesthetic doctrines originating in his native land. Using principally the twelfth and fourteenth lectures of A. W. Schlegel’s Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur (“Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature”) of 1809–1811, Böhl exhorted a return to national traditions, to a literature reflecting popular ideals that was heroic, monarchical, and Christian, the expression of a discernibly Spanish worldview embodied in Golden Age drama; he signed himself an “apasionado de la naciön española” (“passionate admirer of the Spanish nation”).

There was a significant ideological dimension. Böhl, a Catholic convert with servil – i.e. conservative and Absolutist – connections, was combating what he saw as the deleterious consequences of Enlightenment rationalism; he resented the imposition upon Spain of a foreign Neoclassical preference, dismissing detractors of Calderón and of Spain’s literary heritage as unpatriotic subversives.

Disapproval of Baroque flourishes was inscribed into modern Spanish literary historiography by Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo at the end of the nineteenth century, so indelibly that vigorous campaigns from later readers were required to elevate major Baroque poets to the canonical status they enjoy in our time. Meeting on the tercentenary of his death, a brilliant roster of young Spanish writers adopted Luis de Góngora y Argote (1561–1627) as patron saint of their attempts to renovate poetic discourse. Because many of these twentieth-century poets – Federico García Lorca, Pedro Salinas, Jorge Guillén, Dámaso Alonso, Gerardo Diego – contributed significantly to criticism, historiography, and text diffusion, their admiration not only canonized Góngora, but also defined the standards by which seventeenth-century poets would be judged. It is one of the ironies of literary history that the very poets who revered the Baroque master’s devotion to language freed from the strictures of conventional logic should also have contributed, over the longer term, to limiting appreciation of his work. In subsequent assessments, Góngora’s verse is frequently cited as proof of the definitive exhaustion of classical and Petrarchan imitation. In this view, his brilliant images and dazzling verbal pyrotechnics not only say nothing new: tied to the sensory and the superficial, they seem to spin over an abyss of nothingness. If Baroque verse was “saved” by the creed of linguistic freedom, it was by the same means doomed to irrelevance. The present chapter explores the phenomenon of Baroque poetry, considering the work of major poets in the multiple contexts of literary history, poetics, and the cultural setting of poetic practice, from the last decades of the sixteenth century through the seventeenth.

New light appeared on Spain’s intellectual horizons in the 1680s, and for more than a century afterwards the impulse for renewal through skeptical questioning of past truths and methods brought significant changes in cultural attitudes and practices. Yet the context of Spain’s intellectual and social life was distinctive, and just as the French experience of Enlightenment was different from Britain’s, so Enlightenment in Spain must be examined on its own terms, though from a reasoned comparative perspective. For the intellectual historian, Enlightenment primarily concerns knowledge and the move from authoritative, privileged forms of truth to a skeptical, reasoning, empirically based conception. John Locke’s assertion in 1690 of the sense-data basis of knowledge and the role of the human understanding in processing experience gave new significance to the individual and the action of the mind in subscribing to and appropriating truths. An assumption by the individual of responsibility for challenging error or unquestioned authority effected a process of personal emancipation and self-confidence. Locke’s theory de-emphasized the reliance on authority, especially religious, and, in combination with Francis Bacon’s empirical paradigm of scientific research, this led to the secularized concept of knowledge familiar today. The assault on authoritative knowledge challenged the power of those asserting it, and in Spain the existence of an Inquisition, whose vigilance over theological orthodoxy embraced the sciences and philosophy, implied a lack of freedom and consequent danger when arguing for change. Daring to know, in Immanuel Kant’s opportune allusion to Horace (Sapere aude), entailed risk in Spain. The Catholic Church asserted a monopoly on knowledge and truth, punishing the written and oral expression of intellectual dissidence.