W. H. Auden's Poetics and the Political

W. H. 오든의 시학과 정치성

Controversies over W. H. Auden's "political" poetry remind us of an old but perhaps never easily resolved problem about the relationship between poetry (literature) and politics. Auden has arguably been referred to as a "leftist" or "Marxist" because of his political viewpoint registered in "Spain" or "September 1, 1939," which embodies his contemporaries' loss and fear, brought by the socio-political turmoil, economic depression, and moral conflicts of the 1930s. Interestingly, however, Auden is known to have an ambivalent position toward the political reality. He once disavowed the above "political" poems as "dishonest" in the preface of the 1966 edition of Collected Poems and declared, "poetry makes nothing happen" in "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," which seemingly acknowledges the political incapacity of poetry. Auden's position and poetry should be understood as the result of complicated interactions between his perspectives on society, human beings, and poetics. Auden definitely believed in the role of poetry in such a politically demanding time, yet was not concerned with the anticipation of certain immediate changes effected by poetry in real situations. Instead, he sought the intellectual and moral effects that poetry could give his readers to help them survive the dismal circumstances of the 1930s. This is what distinguished Auden's poetry from political propaganda. In doing so, Auden's poetry captures the zeitgeist of his generation and has privileged him as the leading voice of his time, but it has also encouraged the following generations to confront different socio-political difficulties. This is something poetry can make happen politically, and the survival of Auden's "memorable speech" proves the legitimacy of his frequently misunderstood poetics.