Forewords and Afterwords by W. H. Auden

by W.H. Auden

The essays in this collection were written as reviews, mainly for The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker, on books by or about Alexander Pope, Vincent van Gogh, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, and A. E. Housman, or as introductions to editions of the classical Greek writers, the Protestant mystics, Shakespeare, Goethe, Kierkegaard, Tennyson, Grimm and Andersen, Poe, G. K. Chesterton, Paul Valéry, and others. Throughout, these prose pieces reveal the same wit and intelligence--as well as the vision--that sparked the brilliance of Auden's poetry.

Genres: Essays, Poetry, Nonfiction, Literature, Literary Criticism

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

Poems, published in such collections as Look, Stranger! (1936) and The Shield of Achilles (1955), established importance of British-American writer and critic Wystan Hugh Auden in 20th-century literature.

In and near Birmingham, he developed in a professional middle-class family. He attended English independent schools and studied at Christ church, Oxford. From 1927, Auden and Christopher Isherwood maintained a lasting but intermittent sexual friendship despite briefer but more intense relations with other men. Auden passed a few months in Berlin in 1928 and 1929.

He then spent five years from 1930 to 1935, teaching in English schools and then traveled to Iceland and China for books about his journeys. People noted stylistic and technical achievement, engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and variety in tone, form and content. He came to wide attention at the age of 23 years in 1930 with his first book, Poems ; The Orators followed in 1932.

Three plays in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood in 1935 to 1938 built his reputation in a left-wing politics.

People best know this Anglo for love such as "Funeral Blues," for political and social themes, such as "September 1, 1939," for culture and psychology, such as The Age of Anxiety , and for religion, such as For the Time Being and "Horae Canonicae." In 1939, partly to escape a liberal reputation, Auden moved to the United States. Auden and Christopher Isherwood maintained a lasting but intermittent sexual friendship to 1939. In 1939, Auden fell in lust with Chester Kallman and regarded their relation as a marriage.

From 1941, Auden taught in universities. This relationship ended in 1941, when Chester Kallman refused to accept the faithful relation that Auden demanded, but the two maintained their friendship.

Auden taught in universities through 1945. His work, including the long For the Time Being and The Sea and the Mirror , in the 1940s focused on religious themes. He attained citizenship in 1946.

The title of his long The Age of Anxiety , a popular phrase, described the modern era; it won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1947. From 1947, he wintered in New York and summered in Ischia. From 1947, Auden and Chester Kallman lived in the same house or apartment in a non-sexual relation and often collaborated on opera libretti, such as The Rake's Progress for music of Igor Stravinsky until death of Auden.

Occasional visiting professorships followed in the 1950s. From 1956, he served as professor at Oxford. He wintered in New York and summered in Ischia through 1957. From 1958, he wintered usually in New York and summered in Kirchstetten, Austria.

He served as professor at Oxford to 1961; his popular lectures with students and faculty served as the basis of his prose The Dyer's Hand in 1962.

Auden, a prolific prose essayist, reviewed political, psychological and religious subjects, and worked at various times on documentary films, plays, and other forms of performance. Throughout his controversial and influential career, views on his work ranged from sharply dismissive, treating him as a lesser follower of William Butler Yeats and T.S. Eliot, to strongly affirmative, as claim of Joseph Brodsky of his "greatest mind of the twentieth century."

He wintered in Oxford in 1972/1973 and summered in Kirchstetten, Austria, until the end of his life.

After his death, films, broadcasts, and popular media enabled people to know and ton note much more widely "Funeral Blues," "Musée des Beaux Arts," "Refugee Blues," "The Unknown Citizen," and "September 1, 1939," t

Reviews

[Alok Mishra · Rating 4 out of 5]

The only drawback that this book has - personal in nature, to some extent.

Auden has composed 'beautifully crafted' essays in this book which is beneficial for anyone interested in the theory of literature. He has covered most of the topics that a student or an enthusiast would like to know more. Many things that I wasn't aware of (historically) got from this book. The essay on 'marriage of true minds' adds a new dimension to the concepts of 'union of two greats' in practical life. I enjoyed the book!

[Z. · Rating 3 out of 5]

"The difference between a pure craft, like carpentry, and art is that when the carpenter starts work he knows exactly what the finished product will be, whereas the artist never knows just what he is going to make until he has made it. But, like the carpenter, all he can or should consciously think about is how to make it as well as possible, so that it may become a durable object, permanently 'on hand' in the world."

I’m not usually into "literary criticism" as a codified academic discipline (apparently nor was Auden), but I love to read a smart and accomplished writer opining freely about the books of others. This collection of reviews and introductions, containing pieces originally published between the early '40s and the early '70s, is exactly that, so for the past few weeks I've been casually making my way through all 524 pages of it.

The selections are arranged roughly chronologically by topic, meaning we start with some reflections on the ancient Greeks and Romans and end with pieces on some of Auden's contemporaries and acquaintances, regardless of what order the essays themselves were actually written in. Since Auden was not consciously setting out to catalog his thoughts on all of western art, the subjects covered are (at least inasmuch as a book dedicated almost exclusively to white European and American men can be) far-ranging, and there are some interesting emphases and exclusions.

Naturally Auden writes a lot about poets, but I was more surprised to find three different essays on Goethe, two on Kierkegaard, several on opera composers, and several more on children's authors and humorists; meanwhile there are none on Milton or any of the English Romantics, for instance. Essays on canonical authors like Poe, Tennyson, and Mann sit alongside musings about much more obscure or unexpected figures like the Victorian social reformer Henry Mayhew, the Russian philosopher Konstantin Leontiev, ill-fated U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld, and Auden's own lover, the poet Chester Kallman. (Auden refers to Kallman simply as a "close friend," but does insist that his poem "The African Ambassador" is "one of the most original and significant" of its era.) The "modern-day" section is by far the most random, as Auden shifts away from artistic subjects in order to review books on the animal world, neurology (oh hi, Oliver Sacks!), food, mountain-climbing, and the like—topics on which I found him much less astute and engaging than on literature. But overall I enjoyed the unpredictability of this anthology, to the point that I decided not even to look ahead to see what topics were coming up.

Alongside his literary insights the reader receives some interesting and often perplexing glimpses into Auden's own mind, though he would hate my saying so. He insists over and over again that he doesn't believe in literary biography or in publishing authors' letters, claiming that these are an invasion of privacy and don't actually reveal anything meaningful about the creative work, but because so many of these pieces are reviews of or forewords to biographies and collected correspondences, he's constantly contradicting himself or making exceptions to his own rules. My favorite example is when he gives his usual spiel about the author's privacy while discussing a collection of A.E. Housman's letters, and then two pages later happily speculates that Housman was an "anal receptive"—a bottom—in bed. (He also utterly abandons this credo in the final piece, which uses a pair of memoirs by Leonard Woolf and Evelyn Waugh as a pretext to compare and contrast his own life experiences with theirs.)

Auden is surprisingly earnest and for me a bit tiresome on religious topics (I knew he professed to be a Christian, but didn't realize he was so devout), unapologetically Freudian in his psychology, interested in the inner lives of children but rarely of women (though the collection is dedicated to Hannah Arendt, only 2 1/2 of the 46 essays concern works by women writers), and open yet very weird and often unpleasant on love and sexuality. For instance, though he makes no indication that he engages in it himself, he seems to view what we would today call grooming—which he experienced himself as a teenager—as a healthy rite of passage for a queer adolescent. He also claims that most people will never experience true "Eros," a state of almost supernatural romantic infatuation exhibited by the great love poets, and also that this state is rarely reciprocal and cannot exist between people who actually have sex or get married. Periodically he says something so bizarre or out-of-pocket you just have to roll your eyes and move on:

We know, too, that in later life [Martin Luther] became obese, and an obese male always looks like a cross between a small child and a pregnant woman.

(This observation is supposed to somehow illuminate Luther's affection for his own mother.)

A lot of ideas, and now and then even a verbatim passage of text, get copied from essay to essay, which sometimes gives the impression (probably unfairly) that Auden is a slightly lazy reviewer at best or at worst doesn't actually have much to say on some of these topics. But in general he's a sharp—if highly idiosyncratic and not always agreeable—critic, incisive but never intentionally mean-spirited, with an impressive range of interests and an appealingly candid style. It would be difficult to come up with an overarching "theory" of art or literature based on these selections, but Auden—like myself, and ironically given his death-of-the-author ideals—seems to admire artists who plunge themselves into "real life" and the affairs of the world rather than cloistering themselves off in ivory towers. He also occasionally showcases a commendable willingness to change his mind or hold contrasting things as true, as in his pair of Kierkegaard essays, published 16 years apart: in the first he seems practically ready to canonize Kierkegaard as a Protestant saint, while in the second he's much more critical of K's martyr complex and apparent disinterest in the major moral issues of his day. But of course his best insights are on poetry:

The formal restrictions of poetry teach us that the thoughts which arise from our needs, feelings, and experiences are only a small part of the thoughts of which we are capable. In any poem [are] some lines [which] were 'given' the poet, which he then tried to perfect, and others which he had to calculate and at the same time make them sound as 'natural' as possible. It is more becoming in a poet to talk of versification than of mysterious voices, and his genius should be so well hidden in his talent that the reader attributes to his art what comes from his nature.

I wouldn't go out of my way to recommend this odd and slightly musty collection to most (though if you liked, say, Virginia Woolf's Common Reader Auden will possibly scratch the same itch), and I certainly don't think it needs to be read front to back, but for the most part I did find the time I spent in his critical company an engaging intellectual diversion. These were the standout pieces for me, if you'd like to try to sample some of them:

"The Greeks and Us"
"Shakespeare's Sonnets"
"A Civilized Voice" (on Pope)
"A Knight of Doleful Countenance" (on Kierkegaard)
"Edgar Allan Poe"
"A Very Inquisitive Old Party" (on Henry Mayhew)
"The Greatest of the Monsters" (on Wagner)
"George Macdonald"
"Lewis Carroll"
"Calm Even in the Catastrophe" (on Van Gogh's letters)
"An Improbable Life" (on Wilde)
"C.P. Cavafy"
"The Poet of the Encirclement" (on Kipling)
"Walter de la Mare"
"G.K. Chesterton's Non-Fictional Prose"
"Private Poet" (on Lincoln Kirstein)
"Markings" (on Dag Hammarskjöld)

[Roz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Forwards and Afterwards – W.H. Auden

A collection of essays about literature, Forewords and Afterwords is a nice collection of reviews, forewords and such but it suffers from a lack of context, not to mention age.

Today, Auden’s remembered mostly as a poet (when he’s remembered at all, anyway), but during his lifetime he was a voluminous writer and lecturer. He translated, wrote librettos and taught at universities on both sides of the Atlantic. And he wrote a lot for the trades, too.

These are generally what comprises Forewords and Afterwords. It’s generally taken from the last decade of Auden’s life, when he wrote short book reviews for slicks like The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books and elsewhere. In these, he generally lays down his ideas on prose, what a biographer should include (or ignore) and the perils of translation.

Some of his ideas are interesting, if a bit odd. He doesn’t just think writers should have biographies written about them, he suggests most writers would gladly publish anonymously to stay out of the spotlight. Likewise, he draws a thick line between private and public life and what a biographer should cover.

For example, Auden writes that Charles Dickens’ disastrous marriage doesn’t offer any light on his novels, so why should it be reported. Elsewhere, he says reading correspondence between people after their death is no better than sneaking a peek at their letters when they’re out of the room. I wonder what he made of James Joyce’s infamous love letters, let alone their publication. Of course, he has no problem bending his own rules when it comes to a book he likes, like a biography of Alexander Pope. One wonders if his own messy private life – which ranged from sexual excess, binge drinking to messy relationships with women like Hannah Arendt – is simply why he holds this opinion.

Elsewhere, he betrays an attitude that’s either intentionally cantankerous or just reflective of snobby taste. When reviewing Lincoln Kerstein’s long-forgotten book of poetry Rhymes of a PFC, he calls it the best book he’s read about World War II, slighting books like Catch-22, The Naked and the Dead, The Thin Red Line and more.

Still, at times, he writes with force, particularly on religious matters. I especially liked his line when reviewing a science book through his devout Episcopalian beliefs:

“If… it is a statistical impossibility that I should be walking the Earth instead of a million other people, I can only think of it as a miracle I must do my best to deserve.”

The forewords collected in this book are also interesting snapshots of their time they were written: his take on Shakespeare’s sonnets is wildly different than other writers: not only is he uninterested in their subject and circumstances, he casually dismisses several of them:

“Going through the hundred and fifty-four of them, I can find forty-nine which seem to me excellent throughout, a good number of the rest have one or two memorable lines but there are also several which I can only read out of a sense of duty.”

Of course, he makes the interesting observation of their publication: did Shakespeare intend for them to be made public? And if not, was publishing them after his death tantamount to betraying his privacy? It’s an interesting take on someone who’s writing an introduction to a collection of them. And questions Auden poses again and again.

I suppose the great flaw of a collection like this also works as one of it’s virtues: by this time, so many of these books have fallen out of print and into obscurity that reading about them has the duel effect of spotlighting something impossible to find.

Another example: he praises a collection of writing by Russian author Konstantin Leontiev called Against the Current. The book he praises is long out of print and goes for a pretty penny on sites like Amazon. And Leontiev himself has fallen basically into the abyss; I don’t think any collection of his writing is in print at all. Reading about Leontiev raises his profile a bit, but it’s also like reading about music you can’t hear or a painting you can’t see: you’re trusting the critic to portray something you’ll likely never encounter. And, as shown above, Auden was somewhat problematic in his opinions, so that trust is only grudgingly given – if at all.

Despite his contrariness and desire for privacy, some of the books most interesting passages come when he interjects his own life into his reviews, comparing his upbringing to that of Evelyn Waugh, outlining his family history or the importance of reading Greek in prep school. He never would’ve written an autobiography – even when he writes of himself, it’s hard not to feel a shade being drawn over his past – but when he shows a little of himself, his reviews shine.

In all, a bit of a mixed bag: some of the introductions and reviews are interesting, especially if you’re familiar with the books or authors involved. He certainly convinced me to look more into Goethe and Henry Mayhew’s books. But elsewhere, the reviews lack interest to someone in 2015. After all, it’s hard to convince anyone to read a book these days; it’s harder still to convince them on something published nearly 40 years ago.

Interesting to literary snobs and Auden fans. And occasionally, his prose shines – and makes me curious in reading The Dyer’s Hand, not to mention any other collection of his as-yet uncollected nonfiction – but not enough for me to recommend.

[Feliks · Rating 4 out of 5]

These are some of the best essays on art, methodology, inner life, history, and spirituality that I've ever come across. They're astounding. The essay on Poe alone, is worth the price. Alongside the similar analysis of DH Lawrence, superb.

Frequent references to Baudelaire abound. You can find even a footnote, exquisite: 'TS Eliot mentioned to me...'. What? Yeah man. This is WH Auden. Its like having seen Olivier on stage.

It's otherwise a modest, temperate, understated, and conversational chat about the classics. Lucid and illuminating; authoritative. Very much a pleasure to progress through. But some passages are searing as lightning strikes. Multiple jolts per page.

Good God. Where are men like this anymore left in the world? What can we say about our times that such minds are completely unknown? Why does the stupid NFL dominate our culture?

[Tom Schulte · Rating 3 out of 5]

Most of these pieces, especially the first half, are long and detailed synopses of the books with added facts and points of view from Auden's immense knowledge. Shakespeare and Goethe can especially detailed examination. Other people I had not heard of are worthy of Auden's detailed introduction. This includes Sidney Smith from whom comes this interesting quote about "nice people"

...Sydney Smith's use of bourgeois terms to define A Nice Person:

A nice person is neither too tall nor too short, looks clean and cheerful, has no prominent features, makes no difficulties, is never displaced, sits bodkin, is never foolishly affronted, and is void of affectations. ... A nice person is clear of trumpery little passions, acknowledges superiority, delights in talent, shelters humility, pardons adversity, for- gives deficiency, respects all men's rights, never stops the bottle, is never long and never wrong, always knows the day of the month, the name of everybody at table, and never gives pain to any human being.... A nice person never knocks over wine or melted butter, does not tread upon the dog's foot, or molest the family cat, eats soup without noise, laughs in the right place, and has a watchful and attentive eye.

Of course, Auden does not merely entertain use with quotes. He shares much of his intelligence and trove of facts, putting that together such as in this detailed definition of the subtle nature of the English Whig from his introduction to The Selected Writings of Sydney Smith:

The historical experience with which the Whigs of 1688 and their successors had to cope was a century and a half of bitter quarrels and drastic changes imposed upon the public by individuals or minorities. The most fundamental notion in English Liberalism, therefore, is the notion of limited sovereignty and its characteristic way of thinking goes something like this:

1. All people differ from each other in character and temperament so that any attempt to impose an absolute uniformity is a tyranny. On the other hand there can be no social life unless the members of a society hold certain beliefs in common, and behave in certain commonly accepted ways

2. The beliefs which it is necessary to hold in common must therefore be so defined that differences of emphasis are possible and the laws which regulate social conduct must be such that they command common consent. Insofar as conformity has to be enforced, this should be in matters of outward behavior not of private belief, firstly because there can be no doubt whether an individual does or does not conform, and secondly because men find behaving in a way with which they are not in complete sympathy more toler- able than being told to believe something they consider false. Thus, in the English Prayer Book the rules for con- ducting the Liturgy are precise, while the meaning of the Thirty-Nine Articles is purposely left vague.

3. The way in which a reform is effected is just as important as the reform itself. Violent change is as injurious to free- dom as inertia.

4. Utopians are a public menace. Reformers must concern themselves with the concrete and the possible.

...another from his trove that resonated with me:

Dag Hammerskjöld, in a diary found after his death and just recently published in Sweden, makes an observation to which both the above types would do well to listen.

How easy Psychology has made it for us to dismiss the perplexing mystery with a label which assigns it a place in the list of common aberrations.

[E. Merrill Brouder · Rating 3 out of 5]

Forewords and Afterwords and The Dyer's Hand are published as a set, but the two books are very different—and the latter is the better reading. Forewords and Afterwords is, as the name suggests, a collection of forewords, afterwords, and reviews. These essays are very good, and their breadth is staggering (subjects include Shakespeare, modern poetry, philosophy, biology, history, mountaineering, cookery, and Auden's own childhood—among others), but the genre itself is not as suited to Auden's wit and acuity in the way lectures and essays (eg. The Dyer's Hand). Still, some of the essays are really quite good (the review for an edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets struck me as exceptional), and the book contains countless moments of insight that make it worth reading from cover to cover.

[tomas p · Rating 4 out of 5]

hes a chill guy and i like him