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anguish of war, are unflinching but without the dark brutalism of H em–
ingway. Certain poems of immature tone Shapiro might have omitted
had he been able to select and edit in person. Clearly, however, he did
not need war "to test externality against the soul."
The course of Auden has now become plainer through
For the
Time Being
(a semi-dramatic verse-'prose commentary on
The T empest,
"The Sea and the Mirror," that really introduces the following Christmas
Oratorio) . The basic theme of "The Sea and the Mirror," the relation
between illusion and reality in science, in social reform, in art, in living,
is most fully developed through the resignation of Prospera, intellectual
and reformer, to his failure, and through the prose discourse of Caliban.
This Caliban monologue is Auden's confessional: living in the Grandly
Average Place will not do, an art reflecting our illusions. or dedicated to
social reform will not do; indeed art at its most accomplished isl self-tor–
menting and self-defeating-there is, at last, nothing to say. The Word
remains our only
raison d'etre.
Thus the early Auden, half Byronic intellectual of the middle clas–
ses, has been transcended by the humanistic-stoic, who has now in turn
been transcended by the convert to the Word comprehended with an
intuition sensitized by Kierkegaard particularly, as well as by Freud,
Eliot, Rilke, and many others. In
For the Time Being
Auden performs
a metabasis, a leap from time to the Timeless. In a sense this leap solves
nothing, but instead creates a new dilemma: is Auden to take the Plotin–
ian flight of the alone to the Alone, the mystical course that ends in
silence; or will he find, like Eliot, that the Letter giveth life, that he
becomes increasingly dependent upon ritual (passages in the Oratorio
might occur in the
Four Quartets).
Auden's position is highly individual.
He mistrusts dogma, as did Kierkegaard, for whom truth was an ab–
surditY: held fast in the pa,ssion of inwardness, and his deep sense of the
comic, again like Kierkegaard's, would check any rational formulation
of faith; yet he falls back upon liturgy. Thus the Oratorio gives the im–
pression of liturgy dissociated from any dogma. In the Oratorio and the
preceding "The Sea and the Mirror"-that is, in Auden's view of both
faith and art-the individual, as in Kierkegaard, by an absurdity partakes
of the infinite only through existing
in
time and circumstance.
The main issue is whether Auden as a person legitimately turning
to the Word, will not suffer as a poet. From this view
For the Time Being
may mark a retrogression, signify a danger. In
Another Time,
"In Time
of War," and
The Double Man
Auden, pressed from the cynicism and
flippancy of his early social verse, had achieved a mediation (Kierkegaard
repudiates mediation) in the form of a paradoxical but effective stoicism.
The points of contact between the Auden of 1939-41 and the classical
Stoics, both living among dissolving values, were notable. Both Auden
and the Stoics accepted the world as process, material but not mecha–
nical; both subordinated to the practical moral faculty the science of the
