W.H. Auden and the Imago Dei

"With Auden's turn to Christianity after his emigration to the United States in 1939, his poetic theory took on a vocabulary drawn less from psychology and more from theology. But he consistently described poetry in ways that suggest he saw it as modelling a non-coercive love only theoretically possible in social bonds or actual personal relationships. 'In a successful poem,' he wrote in 'The Virgin and the Dynamo,' 'society and community are one order and the system may love itself because the feelings which it embodies are all members of the same community, loving each other and it.' (DH, p69). Behind this proposition would seem to be the notion that poetic form can exemplify a reconciliation of human sameness and difference through its negotiation of the semantic multiplicity of language itself and the emotional multiplicity of the poet. Were such patterned arrangements carried out in society, Auden acknowledges, the result would be totalitarianism, but precisely because art is gratuitous - pointless, unnecessary - it provides what he calls an 'analogy' to 'paradise' or 'the forgiveness of sins.' Poetry, in other words, is an emblem of what Auden liked to term 'the City' in Augustine's sense - the City of God. Such verbal and emotional orders, however, are radically at odds with modernity, which the later Auden habitually attacks for the destructive sameness compelled by totalitarian systems and capitalist mass culture. Poetry's voice may amount to no more than that of a 'suburb of dissent,' but it marginality makes possible an intimacy that modern mass society would not otherwise tolerate. Ultimately, for Auden, Eros and Agape seem to merge in his views of poetry. In Secondary Worlds (1968), he defined poetic meaning as 'the outcome of a dialogue between the words o the poem and the response of whoever is listening to them,' a deeply interpersonal process yielding 'the kind of knowledge implied by the biblical phrase "Then Adam knew Eve his Wife": knowing is inseparable from being known' (SW, p.114). From this angle, all poetry can be read as love poetry, for all poems bear the potential for intimate self-revelation, by both poet and reader.'

- Richard R. Bozorth, "Auden: Love Sexuality and Desire." From the Cambridge Companion to W.H. Auden


I recently had a fruitful exchange with the Ochlophobist on the topic of Auden's poetry, and after reading this essay, I am even more convinced that the Ochlophobist's insights on Auden are correct. Bozorth's thesis is itself not particularly interesting - he spends most of the essay exploring Auden's career through the lens of gay/lesbian studies, and ends up expressing deep confusion over the tension between Auden's semi-public homosexuality and his persistent attitude that "homosexuality was psychologically or morally suspect." But I find it interesting that even through such distorted lenses, Bozorth seems to glimpse the deeper aesthetic that drive's Auden's work, particularly in his concept of poetry's gratuitousness and its capacity for revelation. Pace Bozorth, however, I would argue that for Auden, poetry is gratuitous, not because it is pointless or useless, but because the Latin root of 'gratuitous' points us towards an object which can help us ascend to a higher plane than the visible and material, perhaps even to that Augustinian City which Bozorth invokes. Similarly, I would argue that for Auden, poetry succeeds not because it is a revelation of the Self, but because it reveals the human person. I am fascinated by Auden because I think he sees in the human person a glimpse of the imago dei, and the entire story of Creation contained therein. Thus Auden sees clearly the modern distortions the imago as well as the possibility of its redemption, via the ascent of eros into agape that Bozorth describes. In his poetry and apparently in his life also, Auden captures the tension between the reality of that distortion and the possibility of that redemption which characterizes human existence this side of the Eschaton. It is this tension that Bozorth cannot see, and which causes him such critical confusion. It is also what makes Auden a deeply Christian poet and worthy of regular reading.