THE LIFE OF LITERATURE
construction of his tower of Christian belief within the waste land.
And so with W. H. Auden: the early poetry in which the subject is
only the peg to hang the pure poetry on, then the poetry of the
consciousness of social and individual problems, then the painful
effort to construct a philosophy to withstand this inrush of conscious–
ness.
Thus the world of an actuality which pressed on me had to
become poetry in me, or I must cease to be a poet. Poetic experience
was no longer separate from other experience: nor could I draw for
ever on the poetry of childhood. Yet the invasion of the disorder and
chaos, the unresolved problem of the world, threatened the life of
the imagination. Poetry can escape from actuality into another kind
of reality, the power of the imagination to create its own world, but
it cannot just become a passive receptacle for the unresolved problems
of the actual
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies.
Keats died when he was in the grips of the same problem-the
modern problem-and since then every poet endowed with sensibility
has been confronted by it. ,
During the nineteen-thirties I attempted to solve the problem
in my own work by a faith that there were forces within society
which could transform chaos and which I might imagine in my
poetry. But such an attempt makes poetry dependent on whether
or not there really are such forces
in
the world.
If
there really were
a social revolution which could transform the world, then there could
be a Shelley capable of writing revolutionary poetry. Ultimately the
weakness of Shelley's social poetry is not in Shelley but in society
itself. And if Shelley seems unrealistic and an idealist,
in
fact, he is
no less realistic and no more in the clouds than a Maiakovsky or
an Aragon or an Eluard: because all these poets are betrayed by
the social movements which they trust will change the world. It is
their revolution which betrays them. Until I realized this, I had for
a time one foot in poetry, and one in politics, imagining that there
was a politics which could solve the problems of a disordered experi–
ence in my poetry, and that my poetry could help such a revolu–
tionary politics. A history which the poets were certainly not able
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