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Modernism/modernity 10.3 (2003) 584-585



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W. H. Auden: Contexts for Poetry. Peter Edgerly Firchow. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002. Pp. 274. $46.50 (cloth).

A variety of "contexts" for Auden's poetry are invoked in this study—intellectual, biographical, cultural—and while many of these are well-traveled territory, others are not, even for readers familiar with the body of work on Auden from the last few decades. Thus, for example, questions of "English" vs. "American" Auden have been fought over probably from the moment of his arrival in New York in 1939, and this book contributes valuably to a sense of just how deliberately he sought to remake himself and his poetry as "American." But no one until Firchow has (to my knowledge) proposed an "Austrian" version for the years 1958-1973, when Auden lived in Kirchstetten, outside Vienna.

The originality of this book is most apparent in its details. Some of these belong to the category of surprising Auden trivia (for example, the information that he briefly practiced yoga and contemplated becoming Buddhist in 1939). Others illuminate the poetry in striking ways: the roots of some of Auden's stylistic eccentricities in German syntax and Austrian idioms; his ongoing, fraught engagement with Rilke's influence; the allusion to Nietzsche's Zarathustra in "September 1, 1939," where Auden writes, famously, "There is no such thing as the State." 1 As these examples suggest, one of Firchow's critical assets is his facility with German language and knowledge of German literature. Auden's avowed preference for Germany over France is well known, but this book shows in detail that he was not simply defying modernist francophilia but genuinely responding to German culture and intellectual thought.

Readers familiar with Firchow's earlier criticism on Auden will recognize here the same skills at work in his seminal 1977 article in PMLA on The Orators (1932). Perhaps the most [End Page 584] important British long poem of the 1930s, The Orators is largely unknown today except to Auden specialists and scholars of Britain in the 1930s. This neglect is unfortunate and somewhat mysterious, given the increasing interest of modernist studies in so many of the very issues Auden wrestled with here: fascism and group politics; the politics of homoeroticism and queer identity; the ideological construction of the subject through institutional and rhetorical mechanisms of power; English-language literature's engagement with non-western cultures. Valuably included as this book's third chapter, Firchow's revelatory work on The Orators traces Auden's ambivalent efforts to make sense of the politics of leadership and group identity, and the covert but crucial role played in these efforts by John Layard's anthropological study of shamanism, epilepsy, and tribal tricksters in New Guinea. Other works of Auden's benefit here from this kind of attention, especially Paid on Both Sides and the poetry from the late 1920s, whose atmosphere and semantic apparatus of espionage Firchow usefully connects with the culture of spies—both living and literary—in Weimar Berlin and popular spy fiction.

Firchow presents this book as "an attempt to consolidate the critical findings of the last quarter century, and then to take them a step further in the direction of seeing how some of Auden's most important poems can be better understood against the background of his own intellectual development and the often troubled history of his time" (11). That such an agenda is unexceptionable is both its strength and its weakness. Those seeking a reliable guide to Auden's overall development as a poet and to a number of the recurring critical preoccupations will find this book informative and reliable, and it makes for an accessible, though (as Firchow freely admits) far from complete study of Auden's career. Readers familiar with perennial critical disputes about Auden (How much of a leftist was he in the 1930s? How good was his work after he left for the U.S.?), or with poems that have amassed a large body of commentary, may come away unsure how much has been clarified, despite the...

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