The Plural of Us: Poetry and Community in Auden and Others by Bonnie Costello (review)

The Plural of Us examines the uses and meanings of the first person plural in many modern poems, almost all of them by W. H. Auden. It is Bonnie Costello’s fifth book of literary criticism (not counting edited volumes), her first study of a single author since Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery (1991) and Marianne Moore: Imaginary Possessions (1981). Those earlier books did much to establish both poets as major figures, worthy of poetic heirs, archival editions, published correspondence (Costello co-edited Moore’s), and scrutiny that continue to this day. With Auden there is already a subfield, even an industry, and the query a monograph must answer is less “why does this poet matter?” than “what does this critic bring?” Or, sometimes, “why now?”

What Costello brings—besides sympathy and erudition—are questions about who speaks in what kind of poems; about whether lyric and rhetoric are complementary, or opposed, or orthogonal, or somehow parts of one enterprise; and about when and how and whether a modern poem speaks for more than one person at once. These questions reach back, within Anglophone academia, at least to W. R. Johnson’s The Idea of Lyric, with its call for a paradoxical (and Whitmanesque) “choral lyric,” and forward to the present-day debate between prominent critics like Jonathan Culler (for whom “lyric” names or should name a genre of inwardness and ritual reaching back to antiquity) and others such as Virginia Jackson (who focus on how “lyric” has evolved over time, and who see much of its meaning as a nineteenth-or twentieth-century invention).

The idea that all true poetry must be lyric, and all lyric connote a radical solitude, is obviously false to the variety of poetry available, even canonical poetry, even from our own time, and even for a poet as solitary as Wallace Stevens (who incorporated narrative and choral elements into such major, in-part-lyric works as “Credences of Summer” and “Esthétique du Mal”). And yet the idea that poetry often derives its power from self-scrutiny, inwardness, and intimacy, that it turns its face against public history—“pressing back,” as Stevens put it, “against the pressure of reality” (CPP 665)—rings true. For many of us, that’s why we’re here. But who are “we,” and what do we have in common? How do we know? When do poets know?

They are good questions for Auden to answer. In all the phases of his career (and he could change phases faster than he changed his socks) Auden tried out various ways to say “we”—ways to imagine collectives to which he belonged, and literal ways to use first-person-plural pronouns. Auden usually reacts against bad groups (potentially fascist crowds; the impersonality of the bureaucratic state; the faceless mass; the enemies of love) not by defending isolated individuals but by proposing good groups in their stead. The Orators (1932), and other poems he wrote about and for English schools, imagined— with a great deal of ambivalence—“a self-deprecating and self-sacrificing group of intimates” (159). His love poems asked—as poets writing of erotic love have done for millennia—when and whether and where the dyad of lovers could thrive, and whether Auden, a gay man in a homophobic era, could ever “align erotic energy with rather than against the social surround” (70).

The Sea and the Mirror (1944) drew on Auden’s experience with stage drama, and in American college classrooms (132), to project an “audience . . . complex and divided in relation to society,” through “metaphors of performance” (137, 122). And the postwar Auden, committed to Christian faith, examined “[e]cclesiastical forms” that could project a “community of the faithful” (173). These sacred communities became for him, as for the liberal theologians he read, alternatives to the dangerous unanimity of “the Public” (qtd. on 169) or the crowd; here, as in Costello’s favored earlier poems, “poetry becomes a place of...