Why W.H. Auden Hated His Most Famous Political Poems
In his 1960 essay “What’s Become of Wystan?” Philip Larkin made the case that everything which had made W.H. Auden an exceptional poet was inextricable from his themes of economic and social crisis.
“Depression, strikes, the hunger marchers … Spain and China,” Larkin rattled off as Auden’s true muses. He continued, “and above all … not only the age’s properties but its obsessions: feeling inferior to the working class, a sense that things needed a new impetus from somewhere, seeing out of the corner of an eye the rise of Fascism, the persecution of the Jews, the gathering dread of the next war that was half projected guilt about the last.”
This new impetus, at least as Auden saw it, was a combination of Marxist revolution and Freudian sexual emancipation. But once he abandoned his role as the Virgilian herald of these fashionable doctrines of the Thirties and retreated into a more insular literary intellectualism after the outbreak of the Second World War and his expatriation to America, Larkin concluded, Auden ceased to be a great poet.