Selected Poems

Selected Poems is a prescribed selection of poems by the English-born poet W.H. Auden (1907 to 1973), including Musée des Beaux Arts, The Shield of Achilles and September 1, 1939. The selection is set for HSC English Extension 1 in the elective Historical Worlds.

Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973) was the defining English poet of the 1930s, a decade he later branded, in "September 1, 1939", a "low dishonest decade". He wrote across the exact hinge of the twentieth century's catastrophe - the rise of fascism, the Spanish Civil War, the outbreak of the Second World War, and the long shadow the death camps and the Cold War threw over the classical inheritance of Europe. He emigrated to the United States in January 1939, and much of the selected verse is written by a man watching Europe destroy itself from across an ocean.

The poems in the selection share one recurring move: Auden takes an older world and remakes it so that we feel the present pressing through it. In "Musée des Beaux Arts" the world is sixteenth-century painting, Bruegel's ploughman turning away while Icarus drowns in a corner. In "The Shield of Achilles" it is Homeric epic, the sea-nymph Thetis watching the smith-god forge a totalitarian wasteland where she expects marble cities. In "The Fall of Rome" it is the late Roman Empire, dissolving into the bored bureaucracy of a modern state. In "September 1, 1939" and "Spain" it is the whole recorded past summoned as a warning, and in "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" it is the very recent past of a poet's death and the way the living remake the dead. Auden was also a compulsive reviser who came to disown "Spain" and "September 1, 1939" entirely - a poet editing and deleting his own historical record.

Auden's central move is to reach into an older world and rebuild it so that we feel it has been made, not found. "Musée des Beaux Arts" opens on the confident aphorism "About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters", borrowing the archive's authority for a reading that is really Auden's own: "how everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster". Suffering happens "in a corner, some untidy spot", while the expensive delicate ship "had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on" - indifference made procedural, an ethics built into composition.

"The Shield of Achilles" stages the contest over what a historical world should contain. Thetis looks over the armourer's shoulder expecting the classical inheritance, "vines and olive trees, / Marble well-governed cities", and the forge delivers instead "An artificial wilderness / And a sky like lead". The Homeric host returns as totalitarian mass - "A million eyes, a million boots in line, / Without expression, waiting for a sign" - and atrocity is laundered into propaganda by "a voice without a face" that "Proved by statistics that some cause was just". No historical world, the poem insists, can be forged untouched by the moment of its making.

The elegy for Yeats makes the same process intimate. The dead poet "became his admirers", and the poem's thesis is stated in a visceral metaphor of digestion: "The words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living". Even the record-keeping is suspect - "What instruments we have agree / The day of his death was a dark cold day" pretends to objective measurement while pathetic fallacy leaks through. Memory, in Auden, is transmission that distorts as it preserves.

Between the anxious witness and the tyrant lies the selection's ethical stake. The dive-bar speaker of "September 1, 1939" keeps correcting himself, watching "Faces along the bar / Cling to their average day" and offering the consolation "We must love one another or die" - a line Auden later revised and then suppressed with the whole poem. "Epitaph on a Tyrant" gives the opposite figure, the abuser of the record, in six lines: "the poetry he invented was easy to understand", and "When he cried the little children died in the streets". One voice struggles to represent history honestly; the other simply writes himself into it.

The contest over the past even runs inside Auden's own career. "The Fall of Rome" shrinks empire to "an unimportant clerk" scrawling "I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK / On a pink official form", then swerves "altogether elsewhere" to herds of reindeer that pay the whole human record no attention. And by disowning his most famous political poems, Auden demonstrated the elective's concern in his own archive: a historical world is provisional even to its maker.

• Birthday Letters
• 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare
• The Hare with Amber Eyes
• Marie Antoinette
• Possession
• The Complete Poems
• As You Like It
• All HSC English resources