War in Auden's poetry

War is as much a punishment to the punisher as it is to the sufferer.

--Thomas Jefferson

War is a curse for civilization. Poets, the sensitive, conscious, visionary persons of the society, have been affected by the wars in the history and have raised their voice against them. Similarly, wars affect his life and inspire many of his poems.

          Auden’s view about the war and poet’s relation is declared in the letter he wrote to his friend E. R. Dodds in 1936:

I do believe that the poet must have direct knowledge of the major political events. ... I shall probably be a bloody bad soldier but how can I speak to/for them without becoming one? (Auden 18)

From this aspiration, In January, 1937, Auden joined the Spanish Civil War to drive an ambulance as a way of taking part in the war, and returning he wrote “Spain” and published it as a pamphlet form to raise a fund for medical aid in the Spanish war. Spain….

But later his views became skeptic when he wrote “In memory of W. B. Yeats” a few years later. He changed his belief in poet or poetry and began to think it is incapable for poets to make things happen

Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still.

For poetry makes nothing happen.

Moreover, the imminence of World War II has been dealt in the second half of the section III of the poem,

In the nightmare of the dark

          All the dogs of Europe bark,

          And the living nations wait,

          Each sequestered in its hate;

In 1965 Auden wrote that he had to ‘throw out’ poems including “Spain” as invalid, since they had been ‘dishonest’ (Beom and Park 96). It indicates that he had been a ‘political’ poet only temporarily and later turned to be indifferent to politics.

Auden wrote the poem "September 1, 1939" on the occasion of the outbreak of World War II when he was working as a Major with the U.S. Army in Germany to report on the psychological effects of bombing on civilians.

The poem briefly describes, until the two final stanzas, the social and personal pathology that has brought about the outbreak of war: first the historical development of Germany "from Luther until now", next the internal conflicts in every individual person that correspond to the external conflicts of the war.

The poem expresses anger and sadness towards those events, and it questions the historical and mass psychological process that led to the war. In fact, it focuses on the political psychosis of the German people, echoing a few lines of Nietzsche

“Accurate scholarship can  

Unearth the whole offence 

From Luther until now

That has driven a culture mad”.

It then turns to the effect that this war will have on the world and its people, again with psychological overtones.

Lost in a haunted wood,

Children afraid of the night

Who have never been happy or good.

However, the final two stanzas shift radically in tone and content, turning to the truth that the poet can tell,

"We must love one another or die,"

The poem ends with the hope that the poet, like "the Just", can "show an affirming flame" in the midst of the disaster.

WH Auden's poem "The Shield of Achilles" regarded as an anti war poem is a depiction of the awfulness of 20th-century mass warfare, set against a more heroic, classical vision. Like Eliot’s The Waste Land, the poem juxtaposes the myth of the past with the reality of the present in order to show the cruelty and  uninspiring barrenness of modern world.

Thetis, mother of Achilles, looks on her son’s shield, for classical virtues. She looks for resourceful and peaceful city,

For vines and olive trees,

Marble well-governed cities

But there on the shining metal His hands had put instead

An artificial wilderness

And a sky like lead.

Thetis found an “unintelligible multitude” just like a herd of cattle no ability to rationally think or speculate. They are “without expression”, without the power to communicate, “waiting for a sign” of order……… Auden’s observation in Here War Is Simple also reflects that making war is very simple happening in modern world,

Here war is simple like a monument:

A telephone is speaking to a man;

The people of the world are cheated by the so-called commander into the logic of their reason. Little did the common people comprehend that though they were small in comparison, nothing could be done without their acceptance. They could not hope for help, and therefore no help came. Nevertheless, redemption lay in their own hands. They die before their bodies, as their self-respect is crushed under the totalitarian forces.

          And we can watch a thousand faces

Made active by one lie

          (Here War Is Simple)

         

Thetis realizes that the modern war is unexpected and imposed. Her observation reminds us of the recent Iraq War which was imposed ……..

“No one was cheered and nothing was discussed”  

This line echoes some lines from Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade”:

Their’s not to make a reply

Their’s not to reason why,

Their’s but to do and die.

          What is the result of such wars in modern life? The result is a devastating “grief” for the mankind:

Column by column in a cloud of dust

They marched away enduring a belief

Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.

In the modern age there is no place for religion and faith. Rather there is mockery of religion. In "The Shield of Achilles", there is a picture of a concentration camp in Germany where crucifixion of Christ is mocked:

          As three pale figures were led forth and bound

To three posts driven upright in the ground.

Work Cited:

Auden, Wystan Hugh. The English Auden. Ed. Edward Mendelann. London: Faber and Faber, 1977.