The Unknown Citizen

The beginning of Auden’s career, starting at Oxford, was mixed in with several contemporaries’, particularly those of Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, and Cecil Day-Lewis. While they did not know each other collectively as a group at that time, as is commonly supposed, their work was actively anti-fascist in sentiment and aesthetically similar. While Auden himself was influenced by earlier Romantic poets, particularly their humanism, he was also drawn to the more experimentally modern T. S. Eliot. Auden was also influenced by his friendship and collaborations with novelist Christopher Isherwood. In the 1930s, Auden’s interest in political events is apparent in the poems of Another Time, which solidified his reputation as a political poet, a definition Auden did not always like. Eventually, he wrote about the political poems of Irish poet William Butler Yeats, noting “the fallacious belief that art ever makes anything happen, whereas the honest truth, gentlemen, is that, if not a poem had been written, not a picture painted nor a bar of music composed, the history of man would be materially unchanged” (Share, Don. “Poetry makes nothing happen. . . or does it?” poetryfoundation.org, 2009). While this statement is often summarized as a dyspeptic credo, Don Share points out that “for Auden, the job of the poet is not to be what he called, at about this time, a ‘crusader’—but to make poems happen.” Due to Auden’s focus on artistic process, he was criticized for abandoning his role as a voice for his generation, Robert Huddleston explains (See: Further Reading & Resources). Auden ironically noted that “[i]f the criterion of art were its power to incite action […] [Joseph] Goebbels would be one of the greatest artists of all time.” The question of the link between politics and poetry, and whether poetry makes things happen, is still taken up by poets and critics today, who invariably cite Auden.