Auden, Shakespeare, and the Defence of Poetry

Summary

One of W. H. Auden’s own poems, though it is about another poet, offers two points of departure for an exploration of Auden’s use of Shakespeare. In his celebrated elegy on Yeats, he says of the poet’s works after his death,

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities

And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections . . .

The words of a dead man

Are modified in the guts of the living.

The second point of departure comes a bit later, the blunt statement that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’.

A poet becomes what his readers want to make of him, in their historical situations and individual needs, and the same is true of Shakespeare as read and seen by Auden. In an essay of 1959, he admits cheerfully that Shakespeare critics tell more about themselves than about Shakespeare; 'but', he goes on, 'perhaps this is the great value of drama of the Shakespearian kind, namely, that whatever he may see taking place on stage, its final effect on each spectator is a self-revelation'. The self that Auden brought to this Shakespearian mirror was a poet, and - after 1940 - a Christian. Because there was a tension between these two professions, a fear that poetry is in the religious sense beside the point, the self-revelation that Auden seeks is also a self-justification, a place for his art inside religious values and priorities. Almost all of Auden's work about or based on Shakespeare belongs to the 1940s and 1950s, the period after his conversion when he was still working out its implications.