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6 - The reality of the mirror: Shakespeare in Auden's poetry
from PART III - AUDEN'S SHAKESPEARE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
Summary
Artists are inclined to suffer not from too much emotion but rather from too little. This business of being a mirror – you begin to question the reality of the mirror itself.
Auden, Lectures on ShakespeareABSORPTION
‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, the first poem Auden wrote in America, in 1939, contains the most famous lines on poetic inheritance by a modern poet in the English language, lines which have been returned to frequently by other poets and critics. On his death, Auden says, the poet ‘became his admirers’:
Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.
‘Scattered’ suggests Orphic dismemberment, and the wood is a Dantean importation; but the poet's subsequent modification is figured here in a peculiar somatic metaphor. John Fuller thinks that it ‘may be intended as a kind of sacramental metaphor of sowing, reaping and digesting bread’, and so it may, with the word ‘sacramental’ implying the doctrine of transubstantiation, when the bread is ‘modified’ into the body of Christ. Even so, in its use of the word ‘guts’, with its intense, almost queasy physicality, it emphasises digestion, and what follows on digestion, in a way that may owe something to Hamlet's morose imagining of how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar.
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- Shakespeare and the Modern Poet , pp. 147 - 180Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010