THE ENGLISH LITERARY LEFT
17
His powers of literary assimilation are not unconnected with this me–
diumistic faculty. Among the innumerable writers he has tapped, he ob–
viously owes most to Lawrence and Eliot (his early rejection of Eliot did
DOt prevent his being greatly influenced by him both then and later on).
Different as these two writers are, yet Auden reconciled them by incor–
porating them as part of the living experience of his time. A waste land
which has acquired the features of the depressed areas, the landscape of
his early poems is peopled with spectral neurasthenics which resemble
Lawrence characters stripped of their sex, their mannerisms, their person–
alties-of everything but their "symptoms."
We must remember, however, that Eliot and Lawrence were children
of the static pre-war system: for all the intensity of their beliefs they
could not but see the world as fixed in its agony. Auden's world on the
contrary is one in which change is implied in the very immobility of the
old order: On one side are arrayed the "Holders of one position, wrong for
y~rs";
on the other side is the Adversary who is waiting and plotting
to blow them off the map.
The falling leaves know it, the children,
At play on the fuming alkali-tip
.
Or by the flooded football ground, know it-–
This is the dragon's day, the devourer's .
..
While Spender imports the tragic subject from abroad, Auden makes capital
out of poverty at home, uncovers the kernel of violence in the husk of
inertia, the tragedy in the pathos of England, where
Noone will ever know
For what conversion brilliant capital is waiting,
What ugly feast may village band be celebrating;
For no one goes
Further than railhead or the ends of piers,
Will neither go nor send his son
Further through foothills than the rotting stack
Where gaitered gamekeeper with dog and gun
Will shout 'Turn back.'
These lines belong to the period (1928-34) when Auden was a genuinely
subversive force in English poetry, his vision unimpaired by loyalties to
friend or party. Day Lewis was at that time still seeking private norms in
marriage and fatherhood. Today Lewis salutes each new repulse of history
with· a fresh gust of "democratic" optimism. And Auden? A
Left Review
critic complains that he has drifted into "the simple exploration of indi–
viduality" : look at the plaintive lyrics, the rueful public clowning, the
growing tendency to challenge the pamphlet in the name of the poem,
Marxism in the name of Love. This is a retreat! True, but is it not possible
