That undecidability infects the whole passage, and that shiftiness is precisely what is, I think, most deeply moving about this passage. It begins with a question, but one phrased in such a manner and at such length that the sentence containing it hovers between grammatical moods, not committing to the interrogative almost until the very moment the punctuation mark appears.Īuden pierces the grandiosity of calling poetry “the greatest of vocations” by winkingly referring to it next as a mere “trade” (and does so in a rather glib rhyme-“afraid… trade”), but it is difficult to tell if this impulse comes from humility or irony. It is with the passage just before on which I want to focus, though, as it contains one of the finest descriptions of “Impostor Syndrome” that I have read. There is also a longish passage that resembles Chaucer’s House of Fame, in which Auden encounters a number of “great masters,” his literary forebears-Dante, Blake, Dryden, Tennyson, Hardy, Rilke (whom he bizarrely calls “The Santa Claus of loneliness”). Some passages echo the desperately hortatory tone of “September 1, 1939.” There are stanzas ripped from the headlines, clusters that veer into the vatic, and parts that reflect on the supposed innocence of the past. There are a number of confessional sections and passages where the poet remembers the epistolary frame of the poem, addressing Elizabeth Mayer, its dedicatee. There is an ars poetica section (“Art in intention is mimesis / But, realised, the resemblance ceases / Art is not life and can not be / A midwife to society, / For Art is a fait accompli”). “New Year Letter” reads less like a single train of thought than a portfolio of poetic genres or moods.
In what follows, I hope to pace through some of its stanzas, thinking about what separated it from the “dishonesty” of “September 1, 1939” and how the greater honesty of “New Year Letter,” in its (I agree) more demanding mixture of the personal and the political can help us perhaps be more honest with ourselves this year.
Auden did not, however, disown “New Year Letter.” It appears-complete-in his Collected Poems, and we should be grateful: it is a rich, relentlessly searching poem, and well worth reading at the New Year-perhaps annually! “New Year Letter” is a much longer poem, but its amalgamation of the ominous and the epic, the topical and the universal, the almost maudlin and the hard-boiled, the lapidary and the singsong is identical: the length only amplifies his characteristic talents and faults. Yet only four months later he began a poem that, outwardly at least, resembles “September 1, 1939” closely in its brooding on the “vast spiritual disorders” of the age. Auden’s most famous poems is “ September 1, 1939,” which you likely remember from its well-known denomination of the 1930s as “a low dishonest decade” and its soaring admonition: “We must love one another or die.” (This poem-and that line in particular-is luminously glossed by Spencer Lenfield at the JHI Blog here.) Auden hated that poem, however: he called it “the most dishonest poem I have ever written” and carried his recantation into the curation of his works-it does not appear (by his wish) in his Collected Poems.