WH Auden's centenary highlights the poverty of contemporary literary culture. More particularly, it highlights the decline of poetry as a vital public medium. In a sense he was the last Romantic, for no poet since has echoed the sheer ambition of that tradition. It is not enough for the poet to be accomplished in a fiddly verbal skill that is admired by a tiny subculture; he should strive to help an entire culture to think. He should be a special sort of public intellectual, a pioneer of sensibility.
Auden's rise to fame in the 1930s is hard to believe now: it is impossible to imagine a young poet achieving comparable status today. In his late 20s he was acknowledged as an influential stylist: "Audenesque" entered the discourse. And of course he was more than a stylist: he encouraged the idea that poetry could address social and psychological ills with unique acuity. It could help us to see ourselves honestly, to think through our situation, to puncture cliche, to move towards better ways of being in the world.
This grand idea of poetry's potential was informed by Marxist and Freudian currents, but he was also inspired by an idea of Englishness. His poetry incorporated public school and Oxbridge voices, mocking yet affectionate. (There is an echo of this in such semi-comedic tweedy types as Stephen Fry and Boris Johnson.) As Nicholas Jenkins argues in this week's Times Literary Supplement, the influence of Yeats was paramount; Auden wanted to be a sort of English Yeats, to renew the national character. Yet he was able to sit loosely to such grand ambition; he also employed clownish irreverence, camp eccentricity.
But what really stands out, from today's perspective, is the passion for ideas, which of course is present in his prose as well as his poetry. He was the sort of rare intellectual who really seems to care about the ideas he discusses (most seem more interested in seeming clever or in-the-right, or dominant in some tiny field). He took it for granted that poetry could be a vital public discourse that could help us to think about the largest questions. It should therefore be steeped in ideas: in psychology, political thought, philosophy, literary history and even theology. It should be restlessly in love with the history of ideas, and above all with relating ideas to the actual business of living.
.Auden's genius, or part of it, was to develop a highly intellectual poetry that was also friendly, accessible, public. When a lesser writer cites Freud or Kierkegaard, or Nietzsche or Voltaire, he or she is erecting a barrier, shutting out the ignorant masses. Auden manages to do the opposite, to make highbrow ideas seem urgent, existentially relevant. We should discuss big ideas, not in order to seem clever but because it might help us to understand our situation. And God knows we need all the help we can get. This is what I think defines his greatness: this willingness to admit that we are on a difficult quest to understand the world, and ourselves. To admit this, rather than to posture or polemicise, entails vulnerability. We have to admit that the world's problems are not the fault of this or that regime's policies (alone); that we ourselves gravitate towards being part of the problem. You don't find this spirit of vulnerable honesty on the opinion pages of a newspaper. And I don't think you find it in many literary writers of today, either.
Our culture is packed full of creative writers who love to hold forth about the artistic calling, and how they are bravely called to criticise society and pursue aesthetic excellence and so on. Such people should consider the achievement of Auden, and be ashamed of claiming to be in the same business.
Many will argue that his move to Christian faith was an artistic failure; that instead of keeping on asking the burning questions of his day he plumped for a cosy orthodoxy. This, I suggest, is an optical illusion. The fact is that his style of poetry loses a certain dynamism as he matures, just as Mick Jagger's music does (but in Auden's case the mature stuff goes on being interesting). Instead of plumping for a cosy orthodoxy, he began to see that Christian faith demanded, day in day out, the sort of vulnerable honesty that he had been developing in his poetry.
