Virgnia Woolf (1882-1941) (3/1, 3/3). Daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, a preeminent British critic and literary historian, Virginia Stephen Woolf was educated at home in London. In 1913, she married Leonard Woolf, and together they founded the Hogarth Press--which published, among many other things, T. S. Eliot's 1919 volume Poems (which included "Prufrock") and, later, a version of "The Waste Land." In addition to contributing to the modernist revolution in fiction with her "stream of consciousness" novels including Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, she is a major figure--perhaps the major literary figure--in the feminist movements of the last two or three generations. A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938) have supplied important imagery and langauge for much of today's feminist thought; the fictional character "Judith Shakespeare," from A Room of One's Own, is even better known than characters from her novels. Woolf also wrote hundreds of reviews and critical essays for a variety of audiences, a major one being the London literary establishment (in prominent publications such as TheTimes of London). Her style of critical writing is notable for its openness and provisionality--for its habit of inviting the reader into her processes of thinking.

Woolf committed suicide in 1941 in a river outside her country home, Monk's House. By this time the Nazis had been engaged in heavy air raids over London and southern England--thousands of lives had been lost from the bombs, which also claimed the Woolfs' London home. Woolf's anxieties about the fate of herself and her Jewish husband in an occupied London, combined with her lifelong history of unstable mental health, led to her decision to end her life, just after she had completed the novel Between the Acts.

Jacob's Room (1922). This novel is Woolf's third, and the first to be written in her modernist style; the previous two, although permeated with feminist themes, are written with the more conventional realist techniques that Woolf herself would later (for example in "Characters in Fiction") object to for its failure to get at inner psychological "reality." It was published the same years at "The Waste Land," and in some important ways it resonates with Eliot's poem as an attempt to give some unity and aesthetic form, at least, to their world after the ruptures caused by World War I. The novel also has interesting parallels to Brittain's memoir.

The plot is difficult to make out on a first reading. This book might serve as a good example of Woolf's theory, which she derived from her father (Oscar Wilde shared it too), that any book worth reading is worth rereading. For Woolf, as a modernist and a lifelong reader of the classics (a term that, unlike our generation, her generation could use without explanation or apology!), reading was a very active activity, requiring deep engagement and even creative response on the reader's part. I encourage you to reread Jacob's Room--not, by any means, as "punishment" for not getting it fixed in your head right the first time, but to interact with it further. With repeated readings, you'll start to see not just what is going on but how the book works as a structure to achieve certain effects. Reading Woolf, in fact, is a lot like reading poetry. There are several layers of "gaps" in the narrative that are there waiting for you to fill them in.

For an overview of what happens, I've abridged a part of Howard Harper's discussion in his Between Language and Silence.

The book opens in Cornwall. The exact location is unspecified, but it derives from the St. Ives in which Virginia Woolf spent the summers of her childhood. The story begins on the shore, and during the first chapter the narrative consciousness ascends, with Mrs. Flanders and her sons, to a panoramic view of the bay, and the discovery that "The lighthouse was lit. `Come along,' said Betty Flanders." Here the sequence of words links the discovery of the light with the mother's sheltering love. In this love little Jacob can sleep "profoundly unconscious" and can kick away the sheep's jaw (a vaguely sinister emblem of death).

The second chapter is set in Scarborough. Mrs. Flanders has "a house on the outskirts" at the foot of a hill which had been the site of a Roman fortress, which affords a "magnificent view" of the town. Hers, as at the seashore, Jacob is not the central presence, and the setting isn't very fully realized. Of the vista from the fortress, the narrative says that "The entire gamut of the view's changes should have been known to" Mrs. Flanders, and then goes into a description of it which might have come from a tourists' brochure, and concludes with the question "And now, what's the next thing to see in Scarborough?" Butterflies, perhaps--at least these are what the narrative seems to "see" most vividly. Why is Scarborough the setting for Jacob's youth? The emphasis on the Roman fortresses there may suggest the inevitability of warfare throughout human history. A couple of other facts not directly alluded to in Jacob's Room also seem relevant to the theme of war: the last land bridge joined England to the Continent--in fact, to Flanders--here; German warships shelled Scarborough during the war.

Geographically, the setting of Jacob's Room moves from the southwest coast of England in the first chapter to the northeast coast in the second, estalbishing vague boundaries for Jacob's "room" and preparing for its eventual center, in London. From Scarborough it moves toward London, to Cambridge, in the third chapter. Then after a holiday in the far southwest (the Scilly Isles) it moves to what seems to be a stable center in the fifth chapter. Throughout the central chapters of the book "Jacob's room" is London. There are occasional sections which are set in Scarborough, and a section describing a hunting trip to Essex. (In the first four chapters, each chapter as a whole had had the same setting.) Then beginning in Chapter 11, there is Jacob's grand tour to France and Greece, in which whole series of sections are set away from London, but even these series emphasize the centrality of London. Beginning with the final section of Chapter 12, however, the setting becomes much more unstable: whereas each previous section had been set in a single locaton, now the perspective begins to wander all over Europe and the Near East--a subliminal signal that chaos is imminent. When the narrative finally returns to the heart of Jacob's room (in the single section of Chapter 14), there is no one there.

The modulation of setting is only one aspect of the dynamics of form which constitute the world of Jacob's Room. Rhythms analogous to those of cinematic shots, scenes, and sequences shape the flow of paragraphs, sections, and chapters in the narrative. The relative durations of these elements, their contrapuntal relationships to each other, their contrasting and complementary tones--modulation of all these characteristics creates a narrative of great subtlety and complexity. As in contrapuntal music, the modulation of these parameters reaches always toward a dominant unity, and its power arises from the growing expectation--and postponement--of that unity. The style moves between nervousness and stability, chaos and order, cynicism and lyricism, throug a very broad range of psychological space.

The final, brief chapter of Jacob's Room serves as a kind of epilogue; the "story" itself is resolve in Chapter 13. As that thirteenth chapter opens, Jacob is back in London, no in his rooms, but in Hyde Park, sitting in a rented chair and talking with Bonamy. This chapter provides momentary glimpses of various lives which are related to each other in very complex and obscure ways, and also related, of course, to Jacob's life. In a sense, these characters constitute the boundaries of "Jacob's room": Bonamy, his closest friend, a homosexual, who walks away "in a rage" when he realizes that Jacob is in love with a woman; Clara Durrant (`of all women, Jacob honoured her most'); Julia Eliot, a prototype for Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse; Florinda, a prostitute; Sandra, an older woman with whom Jacob is now in love and whose "long, flowing letter" he reads; "poor Fanny Elmer," hopelessly in love with Jacob; Timmy Durrant, Clara's brother and Jacob's friend from the university; the Reverend Mr. Andrew Floyd, Mrs. Flanders' former suitor, who gave Jacob the works of Byron; Mrs. Pascoe, whose garden overlooks the sea in the Scilly Isles, where Jacob and Timmy had sailed; and at last Betty Flanders, awakened by the sound of guns--or is it the sea?--heralding Jacob's death. For each of these persons Jacob himself is a different person. Taken together these relationships define this existential space. Significantly, the first and last persons in this series, Bonamy and Mrs. Flanders, are the only ones present the final chapter. This is the only chapter to be set exclusively in Jacob's room--as if the narrative were now able for the first time to settle in that space, only to find it irrevocably empty. Perhaps the narrative can settle there only because it is empty.

At the end of Chapter 13, Jacob has vanished into the darkness in which the guns are heard. Chapter 14 provides a reflexive and retrospective comment on the story. "Did he think he would come back?" asks Bonamy. All the answer that the narrative can think of is to say that "The eighteenth century has its distinction," and then to reiterate a passage from its earlier essay (from Chapter 5) on the "distinction" of eighteenth-century houses.

"Distinction," the narrative had said in the earlier context, "was one of the words to use naturally" in speaking of Jacob. In Chapter 14, then, the word echoes ironically: the "distinction" of the houses remains, but that of Jacob himself does not. What remains instead is the debris of his life: a bill for a hunting crop, the letters from Sandra, notes from Mrs. Durrant and Lady Rocksbeir--these are now his "distinctions," all that remains of his identity, all that distinguishes him from the chaos that has come again.

Jacob's life itself had been, in a sense, an eighteenth-century room. Reason, order, proportion, privilege, moderation, tradition, comfrot: these were the values he was taught at Cambridge, and which he seems to have believed in. But these values no longer fit the new realities of the twentieth century, where eighteenth-century rooms can be inhabited only by ghosts. Thus the bill for the hunting crop is ironic. The sport itself is now anachronistic, and Bomany's comment that the bill "seems to have been paid" has a broader meaning than he knows: Jacob has paid the price for his naive belief in traditional values.

Now, let's go back and talk about some details of the novel and their implications. Woolf seems to be saying, critics have often concluded, that although we can go inside Jacob's room if that is our goal--although we can note the books he is reading, the essays he is writing, the pipe he is smoking--that room cannot come close to telling us about who Jacob really is. The point of calling the novel Jacob's Room, in fact, might be to issue a satire of a sort to such late Victorian realist novelists as Bennett, Gallsworthy, and Wells, the three men she explicitly criticizes in "Character in Fiction." She may be parodying their method when she writes that Jacob's room

"had a round table and two low chairs. There were yellow flags in a jar on the mantelpiece; a photograph of his mother; cards from societies . . . books . . . Lives of the Duke of Wellington, for example; spinoza . . . a Manual of the Diseases of the Horse . . . Listless is the air in an empty room, just swelling the curtain; the flowers in the jar shirt. One fibre in the wicker-arm creaks, though no one sits there."

Woolf's aesthetic was, in other words, very different from that of the realists. She was most closely influenced by the aesthetics of the Bloomsbury community of visual artists, which included her sister Vanessa Stephen Bell, Clive Bell, Duncan Grant, and Roger Fry. Fry's book Vision and Design (1920) outlines his theories of art: for Fry, a clear descendant of Pater, art was artifice, devoid of moral or emotional resonance. There was, in his mind, a sharp separation between "art" and "life."

Woolf was sympathetic to this view, at least to the extent that she shared the strong feeling that art should not be didactic. Art--and in her case she was of course thinking more of literature than painting--should not grab its audience by the collar and command them to take a particular stand on a particular subject. It should respect the reader's own judgment and intelligence more than that. But Woolf parted company with Fry, ultimately, because she did believe that art should incorporate "life." And for Woolf, getting "life" into fiction meant achieving a kind of psychological verisimilitude.

As Sue Roe notes in the introduction to the Penguin edition, Woolf "drew the psychology of Jacob from life, though the novelist's relationship with his or her model or sitter can never be as clear-cut or as obviously discernible as that of the painter. The writer's model is always composed of a whole wealth of different influences, put together through a mixture of imtimacy, imagination, reading, recollection and the myriad impressions which the mind receives from all sides. How might it be possible to `know' another person, even a loved, a cherished, a familiar person? This is one of the key questions she poses in Jacob's Room."

But although Woolf was interested in psychology, she resisted making her characters into psychological "types." To do that, she believed, would risk being didactic--and she was too much of a Paterian aesthete for that. She wants us to try to take our own measure of Jacob, however the narrative allows us to.

In suggesting that it is never possible to fully know another person, Woolf is participating in a distinctly modernist view. Think here of The Good Soldier--Ford was also raising, in his own way, the same possibility. But with Woolf we find a gendered (gendered "female," that is) response to the problem.

In Woolf, gender is always an issue, although it is treated subtly. To treat it crudely, didactically, would violate her rather Paterian aesthetic. The last thing she wanted to do was to impose a single-minded interpretation on her readers. She may be leading you in a certain direction, but it will take a bit of work to follow her there. The reward will be that you will feel as if you have earned something.

For example, she calls our attention to the many marginal women characters in the novel by giving them voices and faces and even names, when sometimes the men are treated indirectly or opaquely or not at all. It wouldn't be realistic to create women characters who were in positions of political power, but Woolf calls our attention to the women in their more customary low social positions so that we will notice them and think about what position they are in and how they got there. A good example of this technique is the passage where a tired cleaning-woman, Mrs. Lidgett, goes into St. Paul's and takes a seat "beneath the great Duke's tomb . . . whose victories mean nothing to her, whose name she knows not" (121).

Woolf's feminism and her antimilitarism/pacifism arose simultaneously. The first essay in which she uses the term "we" to mean her fellow-women readers, as opposed to an all-inclusive "we," was in a book review in which she took issue with a man's "objective" version of what happened in World War I.

The following analysis of "war and the politics of narration" in Jacob's Room comes mostly from an essay by William Handley in my friend Mark Hussey's essay collection Virginia Woolf and War.

According to Handley, the unconventional strategies of Woolf's narrator constitute "a distinct response to the war, to the hierarchical structure, culture, and rigid psychology of a society that pulls itself toward this destructive end." Woolf, accordingly, is not interested in "fixing" her characters but in "unhinging them, in demonstrating how individuals are constantly impinged upon by social forces that shape their internal reality." With her "dispersed and disjointed relationsip to the world," the narrator "refuses to reinscribe the traditional and self-blinding notion of the absolut autonomy that makes Jacob's body, in part, so easily used and killed by structures of power." Thus the narrator makes "a political response to the social and ideological prescriptions that result in violence."

Woolf places her narrator in a very difficult position--the narrator seems to want to "help" Jacob out of his own history, but something prevents her from knowing him well enough to do anything for him. She wants to write his story differently, but she can't, because he has already been too thoroughly colored by the forces of power and history that she would want to change. Or as Florinda says to him, "You're like one of those statues" in the British Museum. He is "composed, commanding, contemputuous" (145) and is morethan willing to believe in the certainty of the voice of the past, particularly of the Greeks. The episode that takes place in the British Museum is a good example of Jacob's unbending, unquestioning, and self-absorbed attitude. Jacob, along with his cultural history, have become "reified." In some ways, his life, his place in history, has become aestheticized--when, in Woolf's implicit view, it should be more connected to "life." (Consult your own class notes about the British Museum scene.)

One interesting symbol of the unreflective, exclusionary, war-making patriarchy is the clock, which shows up in various parts of the narrative as a symbol for order, military precision, the Law itself. (Consult our class notes for details.) Woolf's narrator deliberately violates strict chronological time, as a kind of protest move. Similarly, her narrator resists the kind of "summing up" of Jacob or of any other character, because that act would represent the same kind of dictatorial control that she is resisisting within the larger culture.

You should go back to the novel and work out for yourself how some of these themes unfold. (Again, the notes you took in class should help.) Finally, note that although Woolf's style of writing is not strongly didactic, she is asking us as readers to think long and deep about important political and cultural questions. She did believe that literature was part of the ongoing, unfinished project of making the world a better place. Her way of going about it was to shake up the conventions of the novel, with the hope that such a move would prompt the rest of us to rethink the way things are done. Although in many ways Woolf was radical for her time--in her prose style, in her feminism--her faith in the power of literature may strike some people today as profoundly conservative. The world has not changed very much for the better, after all, and many critical thinkers today think it must have been pretty naive for anyone to think that literature could effect any change at all.

What do you think?

Wystan Hugh Auden (1904-1973) (4/8, 4/10). With Auden we're turning a corner in our survey of British literature. The first writer we've studied to be born in the twentieth century, he had quite a different response to the problems of the modern world than did Yeats and Eliot, to cite two of his most important literary "fathers." He lived a long and productive life and is today enjoying a remarkable kind of popularity--he seems to be having a kind of "renaissance." This outburst of interest in him is reflected in a recent article on him in The New Yorker magazine (1 April 1996; copies available from me if you'd like one). You can also find Auden's poetry cited, in part or in full, in literally thousands of web sites, including Zheng Zhang's Home Page.

Auden's career spanned many decades; like Yeats he was productive right up until he died. In our course we're concentrating on his work of the 1930s, which was called, in English poetry, "the Auden decade." For background on that period, I'm turning again to David Perkins.

"Literature in the 1930s was caught up, with all intellectual life, in the public crises. In this decade of economic dislocation, business collapse, strikes, severe unemployment, and breadlines, liberal democracy appeared ineffective. With the general loss of confidence in it, other modes of government were envisioned, and the prospect of radical social change inspired fervent debate. There was militant political agitation against the existing order, class antagonism intensified, and to many intellectuals a revolution seemed a serious possiblity. The revolution might come from the political right, they thought, but they expected it to be Socialist or Communist, and their emotions were generally ambivalent, mingling dread and hope. But in the latter half of the thirties events in Europe caused a sense of doom. The Fascist dictatorships in Germany, Italy, and elsewhere liquidated their liberal, Socialist, and Communist opponents, with whom English writers and intellectuals identified. Germany's march into the Rhineland, Italy's invasion of Ethiopia, and civil war in Spain after 1936 were calamities and portents of greater calamities. Germany and Italy were rearming, and the English and French governments were impotent to prevent this. A second World War was a growing probability. The future looked apocalyptic" (2:110).

In this climate, the language that poets started to use became less difficult, less complicated and dense, than that used by Eliot and other high Modernists. Poetry acquired an urgent social mission, and such distancing devices were no longer appealing. Yet the achievements of the Modernist poets were constantly in the background, so there was a certain unavoidable tension inherent in the act of writing poetry in this period.

The cultural environment that Auden and his generation lived in consisted of Hardy, Yeats, Eliot, and the other great modernists; it also included Freud and Marx and the emerging genres of film and commercial fiction; Auden was distinctive for incorporating the language of film and other aspects of "low" culture. And he set a certain tone that allowed other poets to follow.

The relationship of this generation to Yeats was complicated. They easily criticized his magical visionary stances (his "irrationalism"), and they deplored his fascist-leaning political views. But they could not deny the greatness of his art, and they admired his ability to infuse his poems with strong moral and intellectual voices.

As to Eliot, Auden's generation was the first generation of readers to have studied him in school (like all of the rest of us since!). Like us, they were a bit "baffled" by him, simultaneously "repelled" and "fascinated" (Perkins 2:121). Mostly, they rejected his pessimism about the future of western civilization.

But even with this attitude of rejecting Eliot and by extension much of the modernist program, these poets couldn't help being troubled by guilt that they were not living up to some grand mission laid down by their predecessors. Their response was in part to lower the expectatations for themselves and for their poetry. As one of them, Louis MacNeice, observed, poetry needed to acknowledge that it could only "in tiny measure contribute" (qtd. in Perkins 2:125).

Auden was the son of a physician; he planned to be some kind of scientist. Early interests were geology and metallurgy, headed toward a career as a mining engineer. Later he specialized in biology and was interested in psychoanalysis. He described himself, looking back, as "mentally precocious, physically backward . . . untidy and grubby . . . dishonest, sentimental, with no community sense whatever, in fact a typical little highbrow and difficult child" (qtd. in Perkins 2:149).

At Oxford, he came under the influence of the poetry of Hardy and others including the emerging American poet Robert Frost--both of whom sustained an interest in formalist verse that he was to follow.

About Auden in the 1930s, here's more from Perkins: "The general trend of his writing, regarded as a reaction against Eliot, seemed to be toward accessibility (though it was still 'difficult' poetry), a more conversational tone, and a freer use of discursive or generalizing language.

"In the thirties, however, critics and readers especially noticed the leftist political commitment that seemed to run through his writing. Their view of Auden was too simple, but it was inevitable at a time when an approach to literature and criticism (often Marxist) stressing social orientations and implications was widely influential." Auden's political leanings made him popular with other poets such as Cecil Day-Lewis and Stephen Spender, "who were politically more committed than Auden was" (Perkins 2:151). It's not that Auden was not committed--but his attitudes, as the poetry demonstrates, are often qualified and hedged in ambivalence.

"Sir, no man's enemy, forgiving all" illustrates Stephen Spender's idea that "a dualistic idea run[s] through all [Auden's] work which encloses it like the sides of a box. This idea is Symptom and Cure" (qtd. in Michael O'Neill and Gareth Reeves, Auden, MacNeice, Spender: The Thirties Poetry145). It also illustrates Auden in the process of self-revising: he later disclaimed this poem, saying it was "dishonest" and that he "never liked modern architecture" (qtd. in O'Neill and Reeves 145). This "prayer" that is not really a prayer (or is it?) is typical of early Auden in its anxiety about the future ("the intolerable neural itch") and its embracing of the "new." The not-quite-rhyming is also typical--a trick he probably learned from Owen.

"This Lunar Beauty" is typical of Auden in another way--it is a performance piece. He sets up a very simple abbreviated poetic form for himself, and then the art of the poem becomes the way he is able to succeed in sticking to it. It sounds light: "This lunar beauty / has no history . . . ." But behind all of the complex iterations of "this"-ness is one of Auden's abiding themes--the vast distance between the time-bound pain of human life and the seemingly timeless unconcern of the natural world. The moon, of course, has a "history," but it is so remote from our own history as to stare us in the face as a kind of rebuke to all of our day-to-day concerns.

"Hearing of harvests rotting in the valleys" is a sestina that works to take issue with the romantic project generally, and perhaps the Yeatsian project more specifically. The poem tells a "story" of a series of peoples who actually go on searches for "islands," for places to live other than where they are, in hopes of finding a better life. These different peoples really do try to "arise and go now, and go to Innisfree." But in Auden's version, what they find there is only their old flawed selves. To make it even more complicated, even those who stay are criticized for not properly thinking themselves into the future. The conclusion of this poem typifies one aspect of Auden that troubles some readers: he seems pretty didactic in his vision of what should happen: "And we rebuild our cities, not dream of islands."

"Lay your sleeping head" is one of Auden's better-known poems. What most critics comment on is the way in which it takes unfaithfulness for granted: the line "faithless on my human arm" treats being "faithless" and being "human" as if they were the same thing. This poem is certainly not the first poem in English to talk about the issue of infidelity, but it may be the first to equate it with the brefity of life. The poem is also interesting for its gender-indeterminacy.

"As I walked out one evening" rewrites the traditional form of the ballad (and even, at one point, the nursery rhyme) in order to make an ironic commentary on the possibility of pure (purely narcissistic?) romantic love. The hyperbole of lines such as "I'll love you till the ocean / Is folded and hung up to dry" is matched or rather undone by the second half of the poem, which is much darker: "Into many a green valley / Drifts the appalling snow; / Time breaks the threaded dances / and the diver's brilliant bow." Recalling "This lunar beauty," Auden here contrasts the cold, unfeeling immensity of "time" with the mortal hardships of human life. And from that vantage-point, he takes a moment to ask his readers to "look, look in the mirror, / O look in your distress," to "love your crooked neighbour / With your crooked heart." In the end, even the clocks that keep the time for us mere human beings are shown to be more transitory than nature itself: "The clocks had ceased their chiming / And the deep river ran on."

"Musee des Beaux Arts"" is another justly famous poem. The American poet Anthony Hecht, in his good book on Auden, says the following about it:

It "is proportioned and divided, generally though not exactly, like a somewhat enlarged Petrarchan sonnet, with an opening section of thirteen lines followed by a closing section of eight. Auden cunningly surprises us, reversing our normal expectations of a poem as proportioned and balanced as a sonnet. Usually the octave [first eight lines] present a particular scene, event, rendered with a pleasing vividness and accuracy; and this is usually followed by a sestet in which what came before is meditated upon, regarded from a new or newly considered perspective. Auden reverses this and begins with a generalizatino about a lot of varied paintings, none of them really up for inspection.

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.

"The poem, in its brisk survey of quotidian life, in the midst of which astonishing events take place, 'the miraculous birth' and 'the dreadful martyrdom,' adopts in its opening section a calm and distant language that is meant to be slightly shocking as it portrays the common human indifference to the reverent, passionate waiting of 'the aged,' to say nothing of the nativity itself, . . . . Clearly the 'Old Masters' that Auden is referring tohere are only those who paint religious scenes, and very possibly he had Dutch and Flemish pictures in mind, though there are also Italian Renaissance paintings which exhibit indifferent or preoccupied people adjacent to dramatic religious events. . . . The second part begins with 'In Breughel's Icarus, for instance'; that 'for instance' serves to particularize and exemplify the generalities that began the poem. They seem to do so with especial success because the painting chosen as exemplum is not in fact a religious painting at all, which seems to confirm the suggestion that the Old Masters did not confine their view of the human situation to a purely religious one. There follows a specific, though by no means comprehensive, description of the details of the painting (no mention is made, for example, of the shepherd and his flock), and the poem ends

. . . the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

"The painting, to be sure, is called The Fall of Icarus, and way over in its right-hand corner, made almost insignificant by their diminished size in the remote distance, the boy's two legs are just visible above the surface of the water which conceals the rest of his body. The most prominent thing in the painting is the ploughman, placed center and boldly in the foreground, along with his plough and his horse. But way over on the left, nearly concealed in a thicket, even more unnoticed than the drowning boy, lies the bald head of an unburied corpse, face up [note--this is virtually impossible to see in the computer representations!]. And art historians have persuasively concluded that this painting, despite its name, is meant to illustrate a well-known Flemish proverb . . . which means, 'No plough comes to a standstaill because a man dies.' This maxim has its echo in the [Christian] liturgy ('In the midst of life we are in death') and in the Gospels ('Let the dead bury their dead') but it has a plain, secular sense that can be viewed as callous, and which can be summarized in the saying that 'it is the business of the living to live.' It seems to me plausible that the generalized proposition with which Auden begins his poem may have been derived from a book on art history rather than from a personal inspection of this and other paintings.

Hecht concludes by nothing that this poem's great popularity "may well be due to the way in which the mythic or miraculous subject of the painting is subdued and domesticated to our habitual and quotidian experience. And the proverbial source of the painting, and hence of the poem, is shockingly and familiarly borne out by our routine experience of the daily news as we receive it in the papers and on television, where nearly unendurable agonies, cataclysmic misfortunes, and deaths are randomly juxtaposed with accounts of the weather, the announcements of betrothals, and movie reviews."

In early 1939, two significant things happened: W.B. Yeats died in the south of France (due to the imminent war, it was some quite a few years later before his body was brought back to Ireland); and Auden set out for America. In February 1939, in America, he wrote his elegy "In Memory of W.B. Yeats." It stands in a long tradition of elegies written by one poet on the death of another, but one of the things that distinguishes it is that rather than claiming that the poet's spirit lives on after death, it takes up the topic of poetry itself--poetry, more than the poet, is described as having its own life, long after the body of the poet suffers the inevitable decay. "The squares of his mind were empty, / Silence invaded the suburbs, / The current of his feeling failed: he became his admirers."

A student essay by Mark Telloyan provides a good close reading of the poem while it makes the argument that Auden's subject is more poetry itself than it is Yeats himself. (That essay is worth looking at as an example of a well-written paper.) For the themes and interests of our class, you might want to organize the notes you took in class around such questions as does poetry "make nothing happen"? and if so, then have the efforts of Auden and the other political poets of the thirties, and the World War I poets, and of Yeats himself, been for nothing? Or is it more to the point that poetry should make nothing happen, more like what Pater suggests--and therefore is political poetry really "poetry" at all? And assuming it is "poetry," what happens to a poem when other generations of readers get ahold of it? "The words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living." How so, and is that a good or a bad thing?

The form--make that the forms--of this poem are interesting to consider also as part of Auden's overall formalist project. Consult your own class notes for details.

"September 1, 1939" commemorates the outbreak of World War II. The reference to the "clever hopes . . . / Of a low dishonest decade" surely must be to the deal that Neville Chamberlain made with Hitler in September 1938: Chamberlain agreed to let Hitler take over Czechoslovakian Sudetenland in exchange for Hitler's promise to do no more annexing of lands. But on Sept. 1, 1939, Hitler broke this promise and invaded Poland. (It actually wasn't until Sept. 3 that the British Parliament declared war on Germany, but no matter.)

The structure of the poem has obvious connections to Yeats' "Easter 1916." In fact, it looks as if Auden was trying literally to play a game of one-upsmanship. Yeats' poem commemorating the Easter Rising consists of eight stanzas of eight lines, and Auden's is nine stanzas of nine lines (each of which, in another exhibition of craftsmanship, consists of one sentence).

Since we went over this poem thoroughly in class, please consult your class notes. Note especially the controversy over the line "We must love on another or die."

W.B. Yeats (4/15, 4/17). Why Yeats again? As Auden's poem to him suggests, he was still very much a presence for the poets and writers of the thirties. In Ireland, retired from the Senate, he was continuing to write moving and influential poems and plays (all informed by his own mystical-mythological beliefs). "Purgatory," one of his last and most puzzling plays, is situated in 1938 (first published in 1939), on the eve of the war if we consider it from an international perspective, or more than a decade after the declaration of the Irish Free State if we look at it more locally. Because, like other of Yeats' plays, the play is so severe in its imagery, it might also be taken as a much more personal (or even, in another sense, widely relevant) kind of drama.

"Purgatory" can be read on several levels--perhaps most literally as a story of the decline of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy; Yeats' belief, which comes through clearly, was that this great "race" (the word he probably would have used, although today it's considered inaccrate) was being "polluted" through genetic contact with lower classes in the post-1922 Irish enviroment. It might also be a prophetic allegory for the "purging" about to happen in the second world war. The title "Purgatory" also has obvious religious implications, although we have to remember that Yeats had a religion of his own. And the way the play engages with paradoxical issues and questions (such as, for important example, the passage at the end in which the old man wonders if his mother relives the pleasure of sex as she relives the pain of her experience) are typically Yeatsian, if you'll think back to the poetry.

Further helpful notes are available in the background readings.

Additionally, here are some links to the eugenics movement, at least in America (this site has a British discussion planned but it is, in the proverbial phrase, "under construction"). Another good discussion called "Eugenics in Iowa" really talks about the history of eugenics laws in the United States; you'll find some surprising facts there, including reference to a 1927 Supreme Court case that upheld the constitutionality of sterilization for eugenic purposes. Then there's a brief abstract of someone's article about eugenics and American churches.

Another link gives a historical perspective on eugenics that focuses on its value to Hitler and the Third Reich .

In America, the resistance to eugenics is particularly strong, because the very idea seems anti-democratic and opposed to the notion that education and hard work can result in an improvement of one's possibilities. This critique of the recent book The Bell Curve gives you a taste of such resistance.

In searching the Web for information about the eugenics movement, I tried my best to be "balanced"--that is, I intended to throw some "pro-eugenics" material at you also. But alas, there doesn't seem to be much of a case being made for it! The same site that gave us the speil on American eugenics above has a kind of "eugenics watch" where they post pro-eugenics articles and ask us to read them with suspicion . If the internet world is any measure, most people currently thinking about eugenics believe it is a false science .

And by the way, April is National Poetry Month. That site, sponsored by the Academy of American Poets , features University of Virginia poets Rita Dove and Charles Wright, among others. Enjoy!