the “inner enemy” that “personifies the fears and repressions that oppose love.” The Antagonist finds an ample number of victims in the decadent society and spreads its evil, “scattering the people” and seizing them with “immeasurable neurotic dread.” In this section, the poem’s intense language and deliberate rhetorical excess are beautifully modulated, making the speaker aloof and detached yet with an edge of hysteria in his voice.

The final verse paragraph is addressed to the banker, the don, and the clergyman (representatives of the social elite), along with all others who seek happiness by following the “convolutions” of the distorted ego. The poem ends by warning the selfish and the elite of the inescapable psychological diseases that the Antagonist holds in store for them, diseases that will further destroy the possibility for love.

Auden’s adaptation of various psychological theories in “Consider” is typical of his method in the 1930’s, as is the detached clinical posture of the speaker and the explicit social and political concern voiced in the poem. Auden characteristically offers little hope and, given the extent of the ills he describes, his doing so might well have seemed facile. Auden’s earliest poetry sometimes offers an idealized, vague notion of love as a healing force capable of breaking down repression and restoring social and personal relationships to their proper order. Usually, though, this message is faint and clearly secondary to the diagnostic aim of the poems.

“Lullaby” and “As I Walked Out One Evening”

In two love poems written somewhat later than “Consider,” Auden approaches more explicitly the view of love hinted at in the earliest poems. “Lullaby,” his best-known lyric, ends with the speaker’s hope that his beloved may be “watched by every human love.” The poem’s emphasis, however, rests on the transience of “human love”: The arm on which the sleeping lover rests is “faithless”; love is at best a temporary stay against loneliness. Likewise, in “As I Walked Out One Evening,” Auden stresses the limitations of romantic and erotic love. “Time” lurks in the shadows and coughs when the lovers “would kiss,” deflating the romantic delusions satirized at the beginning of the poem. Later, though, near the end, the chiming clocks of the city offer an injunction that suggests a new direction: “You shall love your crooked neighbor/ With your crooked heart.” Though undercut by a number of ironies, the love described here moves tentatively toward the vision of the 1940’s. Even so, the “human love” that Auden evokes in the 1930’s seems insufficient to resolve the social and personal ills diagnosed by his poetry.

During the 1930’s, Auden gradually left behind the various ideologies he had seriously (and, perhaps, half-seriously) adopted during the decade. Humphrey Carpenter, Auden’s biographer, suggests that these ideologies—Marxism, post-Freudianism, liberal humanism—all had in common a fundamental belief in the natural goodness of man. Near the end of the decade, Auden began to question his liberal humanism, partly because of its inability to offer, as he put it, “some reason why [Adolf Hitler] was utterly wrong.” The reason he sought turned out to be in Christianity, particularly the doctrine of humankind’s sinful nature and its need, because of that nature, for forgiveness and redemption. The quest for love that began in the early poetry thus grows in the 1940’s into a quest for Christian love. There is, of course, no sudden shift in Auden’s poetry as a result of the new direction in his thinking. Rather, at the end of the 1930’s, he begins gradually to formulate this vision of agape; in a sense, he was already doing so in the two love poems examined above.

“Herman Melville”

The poem “Herman Melville,” though written a year before Auden “officially” rejoined the Church in 1940, demonstrates his thinking at this crucial period, a time that coincided with his arrival in the United States. The poem also suggests something of Auden’s more relaxed, lucid style, a shift that began in the mid-1930’s away from the verbal glitter and rhetorical intensity of poems such as “Consider.” “Herman Melville” is thus a good example of Auden’s thematic and stylistic direction in the shorter poems published during the 1940’s.

In the poem Auden describes Melville’s life and literary career as a metaphorical “gale” that had blown the novelist “Past the Cape Horn of sensible success” and “deafened him with thunder.” Near the end of his life, after Melville had exorcised his demons, he “sailed into an extraordinary mildness,” entering a domestic contentment where he discovered “new knowledge”—that “Evil is unspectacular and always human” (Auden develops a similar idea in “Musée des Beaux Arts”) and “that we are introduced to Goodness every day.” What Melville found, in essence, is what Auden himself was in the process of accepting—the universality of humankind’s sinfulness and the possibility that goodness (that is, grace and redemption) can, in an unspectacular fashion, transform the corrupt present, enabling humans to transcend their sinfulness.

At the end of the poem Auden describes Melville’s exultation and surrender at his discovery of the transforming power of agape. The poem, while not autobiographical, certainly seems to be Auden’s testing ground, his rehearsal of an idea that had been forming in his mind. Melville’s discovery that his love had been “selfish” suggests perhaps that Auden has come full circle from his early poems, now denying completely the efficacy of eros, sexual-romantic love. Auden himself suggests, however, that this is not the case; writing for Theology in 1950, he argues that “agape is the fulfillment of eros, not its contradiction.” Perhaps “Herman Melville” contains an early formulation of a position whose full complexity Auden had not yet resolved.

The Age of Anxiety

If “Herman Melville” records Auden’s initial approach to Christianity, then The Age of Anxiety shows his response to a modern society at odds with the directives of agape. The poem is the longest of the four extended works Auden wrote in the 1940’s. The bulk of his energy during the decade went into these poems, which were ambitious undertakings in an age when the long poem had all but died out. The Age of Anxiety is a baroque eclogue, a pastoral form entirely incongruous with the poem’s urban setting (New York) and its subject matter (four modern-day city dwellers during World War II). Auden also achieves irony with his imitation of Old English metric patterns. The contrast between an epic measure and the pettiness of modern life creates a mock-heroic tone.

The poem begins in a Third Avenue bar where four customers—Quant, Malin, Emble, and Rosetta—drink and discuss their lives. The conversation of these four representatives of modern humanity becomes an effort to find order in an age of chaos and disbelief. At the outset the characters drink in private corners of the bar, each dreaming (as Monroe Spears puts it) “of his own way of escape, but aware . . . of no recourse beyond the human level.” Rosetta, for example, has “a favourite day-dream” of “lovely innocent countrysides,” while the youthful Emble dreams of success achieved only in a hollow “succession of sexual triumphs.” The four dreamers eventually move out of their private corners and begin to discuss the war. As they grow more and more drunk their discussion turns, in the second part of the poem (“The Seven Ages”), to the human, “the traveller through time . . . As he bumbles by from birth to death.” Their analysis constitutes a psychological study of the maturation process of the individual and leads them to recognize their own failure in coming to terms with life. Their recognition is, however, only momentary, for in the poem’s third section (“The Seven Stages”) the four figures lapse into a drunken state of unconsciousness and travel over an allegorical dream landscape searching again for a solution of their own, and hence humankind’s, dilemma.

The journey, however, is doomed to fail, for the four seek not spiritual enlightenment but a way of escaping it. The first six stages of their vision carry them through (and they believe away from) the anxiety and suffering of the world, but they are merely led deeper into themselves. The truth revealed in the dream is that the world and its anxieties—which they can only see in distortion—are unbearable for modern human beings. The egotism of the dreamer will not allow them salvation.

The first six stages of the dream explore every possible path of escape. In the seventh stage, however, all hope is lost. They are now, as Emble says, “miles” from any “workable world.” The quest has taken them into a landscape of “ravenous unreals.” As the chaos closes in on them they turn away from it, refusing to attempt the only true quest—the seeking of spiritual knowledge not in their own illusions but in the redemption of the present moment through a religious commitment. At the end of the poem, Malin recognizes the failure of their journey. The moment is not redeemed, but the resolution of the poem defines their failure in Christian terms. In his final speech Malin describes modern humankind’s unwillingness “to say Yes” to “That-Always-Opposite” who “Condescended to exist and to suffer death/ And, scorned on a scaffold, ensconced in His life/ The human household.”

Thus the poem ends with humankind’s refusal of agape, its resignation to loneliness, and its unwillingness to forgo egotism and accept the world as redeemed through the Incarnation. The Age of Anxiety takes up two main strands in Auden’s work—the diagnosis of social and personal ills and the possibility of agape as a release from isolation. The four characters in this poem fail to achieve that release.

Later years

The Age of Anxiety brings to an end what some have called Auden’s American period. From 1948 to the end of his life, he spent half of each year abroad, and many of the poems of this time reflect the change of landscape. There is also a change in perspective, certainly not as radical as some of the earlier changes but a change nevertheless. Justin Replogle suggests that after 1950 Auden becomes an essentially comic poet whose emphasis shifts away from poetry as a repository for ideas. His work, says Replogle, “begins less to proclaim a belief than to celebrate one.” The later poetry, then, is generally lighter in tone and technique than his earlier work, and Replogle’s word “celebrate” is especially apt, for there are a variety of celebrations going on in the later work: of the natural world (“Bucolics”), of the five senses (“Precious Five”), of friends (“For Friends Only”), of the ordinary and domestic (“Thanksgiving for a Habitat”), and of earthly happiness (“In Praise of Limestone”). All these celebrations are enacted in About the House, a collection that typifies Auden’s later style. The book celebrates the rooms of his converted farmhouse in Kirchstetten, Austria, becoming a sort of homage to domesticity.

About the House

About the House is the work of a poet who, in a sense, has arrived. Auden’s quest for love as a cure for humankind’s ills took him in the 1930’s to a landscape of desperation, isolation, and decay. Gradually he discovered a basis on which, in the 1940’s, he could build a vision of agape, a knowledge that, despite its sinfulness and guilt, humankind could be forgiven through grace; love was possible. In About the House, nearly forty years after his first poems appeared, the “cure” of love is still at the center of Auden’s work; in his later work, however, the possibility of love is not so much proclaimed as celebrated.

“Tonight at Seven-Thirty,” the dining-room poem in About the House, discusses with wit and charm the place where humans enact a ritual of celebration (the dinner party) that is nearly religious or mythical in its implications—the breaking of bread with friends. If many of Auden’s poems call on humankind to love (often with didactic urgency), then the dining-room poem, like all of About the House, is informed by a gentle spirit of love. In one sense, the volume is a celebration of friendship; all the poems are dedicated to close friends, and several of them are addressed to people Auden loved. The agape proclaimed earlier now unobtrusively informs every poem as each room of the house becomes a celebration of some ordinary human activity—eating, sleeping, conversing, working.

“Tonight at Seven-Thirty” opens with a clever comparison of the eating habits of several species: plants (“one solitary continuous meal”), predators (“none of them play host”), and humans (who alone can “do the honors of a feast”). This definition is designed, first of all, to amuse; it nevertheless makes a serious point in asserting that only humans—“Dame Kind’s thoroughbred lunatic”—can invite a stranger to the table and serve him first. Auden celebrates humankind’s capacity for kindness, ritual, and even good manners—another recurrent motif in the later poems.