Explaining the Modernist Joke: James Matthew Wilson Considers W.H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, and Letters from Iceland
by Ernie on 10/10/07 at 10:13 am
In this month’s issue of the Contemporary Poetry Review, James Matthew Wilson examines the famous collaboration between Auden and MacNeice:
Like many odd literary creatures from the British 1930′s, W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice’s Letters from Iceland (1936) is referred to more frequently as a representative period piece than as an achieved work of art. As Tim Youngs notes, in his essay on Auden’s travel writing in the recent Cambridge Companion to W.H. Auden (2004), Paul Fussell, Philip Dodd, and others have emphasized the historical importance of travel writing in the ‘thirties. Much of this writing captures the perspective of European cosmopolitanism in a period of intense nationalist feeling, of a deracinated liberalism brought by curiosity and passenger ship into contact with actual primitive civilizations, as well as the neo-paganisms or pseudo-classicisms of fascist movements. In the pages of such travel books, in other words, we have the opportunity to peek in on the exacerbation of self-doubt and alarm that greeted discontented English intellectuals as they disembarked in lands whose instability and potential for radical political rupture made one insistent promise: liberal industrial society is coming to an end. But if the interest of travel books for cultural history goes unchallenged, again, their value as works of art has remained at best undebated and at worst dismissed.
Such dismissal appears as especially odd in the case of Auden’s collaborative travel books—Iceland, of course, but also Journey to a War (1938), which he coauthored with Christopher Isherwood. Unfortunately, Auden did not long allow Journey to be taken seriously as a single work. While it was reprinted as late as 1972, he had long suppressed the “Verse Commentary” from that volume (his most topical contribution, which, Edward Mendelson has observed, Auden came to view as dishonest, along with most of his verses written in syllabic tercets); and “In Time of War,” a sonnet sequence that displays Auden’s masterful versatility with the form, would be truncated and republished out of context in the Collected Poems. Letters from Iceland encourages us not to take it seriously as a work of art for similar reasons. A number of Auden’s important early lyrics first appeared scattered in its pages, only to be reprinted elsewhere, consolidated with his other poems of the period. His most important single contribution to the book, the extended light verse “Letter to Lord Byron,” would also be mildly revised—deleting several stanzas of brilliant literary satire, Marxist historical prophecy, and gossipy nether-worldly chat, and reducing in the process the number of parts from five to four. This slightly more compact “Letter” would then take its place as part of the Auden canon, where it appears as an odd and frothy predecessor to his late philosophical and meditative long poems, “New Year Letter,” “The Age of Anxiety,” “For the Time Being,” and “The Sea and the Mirror.”
To read the rest of the article, click here.
super bowl betting
Mar 22nd, 2008
It’s a great website of yours. I surfed by and found it very informative. Bookmarked and check you back in a while
[Reply]