On D-Day, I think of the success of that unprecedented cross-channel invasion -- and my gratitude to the people that fought and won the war. This year I find myself returning to the subjects of war and peace, revolution and resistance, and other such antitheses worth analyzing. I think, too, of the rampant ignorance of history, a phrase worth dwelling on because it goes both ways. We ignore history -- to do so seems part and parcel of the American impulse, the self-created ideal. But history is pretty good at ignoring us, too.
One reason Auden's poetry gives me pleasure is that he uses poetry as a vehicle for thought. Sometimes that thought was on an abstract plane, words with capital letters duking it out. At other times in his late career, after he had established himself as an institution in New York literary circles, he can resemble the Walter Cronkite of poetry, a bohemian eccentric version of the most trusted voice in America. In the least of his efforts his astuteness of intellect is matched by his mastery of rhetoric and form.
Beyond category is "The Shield of Achilles," one of the strongest poems of Auden's later period. And here I pick up on my essay on "Peace and War in American Poetry," a fragment of which we posted on Memorial Day. -- DL
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"The Shield of Achilles" (1952) invokes the Homeric precedent -- the great shield that the god designs for Achilles -- to throw into relief the bleakness he sees around him. World War II may have ended in 1945, but Auden’s shield reflects a world dominated by implacable hostility between erstwhile allies. We were at peace, but the supreme metaphor of the era joined winter freeze with military might: the Cold War. On the shield of Achilles, as Auden pictures it in 1952, are “an unintelligible multitude,” a disembodied voice proving “by statistics that some cause was just,” a martyrdom enclosed in barbed wire, a thug wielding a weapon:
A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who’d never heard
Of any world where promises were kept
Or one could weep because another wept.
It is a deeply pessimistic view of human nature.
In his elegy for William Butler Yeats (1939), Auden declared that “poetry makes nothing happen.” The assertion is debatable; exceptions come to mind. Poems have saved old battleships, changed attitudes, tested the judiciary, rallied people. But the larger point seems incontestable. Poetry has little effect on politics, while politics has damaged an awful lot of poetry. Art and even love are powerless against the ruthless use of superior force. Indifference “is the least / We have to fear from man or beast.” A spirited rendition of Beethoven’s fourth Piano Concerto will not stop the wars, make the old young again, or lower the price of bread. “We must love one another or die”: a noble sentiment, but it will not help you win the war against the Third Reich or the Empire of Japan.
So, in Lenin's immortal words but with a rather different intent, what are we to do?
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For more of the essay on "Peace and War in American Poetry," click here.
