Abstract

On one hand Auden appears the most cerebral of poets. It is said that when he arrived at school, aged eight, he professed himself excited to study the different psychological types, and the cryptic verse that was to emerge over a decade later bears the scars of his reading, psychological or otherwise, as clearly as the relentlessly analytical Dichtung und Wahrheit and other late works.Absorbing and repurposing philosophical, psychological, religious, and scientific works was an essential part of his artistic strategy, and led to credible accusations of plagiarism on a number of occasions.And just as his collaborators and friends mocked the speed with which he integrated ideas— C. Day Lewis said the dogmas of one year were the heresies of the next—they also downplayed his access to the non-intellectual side of life. Robert Craft, for example, Stravinsky’s biographer and close friend, said the senses “seemed to be of negligible importance” to Auden, whose eating and drinking habits appeared barbaric next to the composer’s fastidious and urbane manners. To Craft he also seemed “purblind to painting,” and “more concerned with the virtues of gardening than with the beauty of flowers.”Such was the poet’s indifference to physical works of art that Anthony Hecht has speculated that Auden’s much-anthologized poem, “Musee des Beaux Arts,” was based on reading about the poem in an art guidebook rather than actually seeing it in person. At the same time, however, Auden became one of the staunchest defenders of the importance of the body, and the necessity of accounting for its existence in any philosophical or religious scheme. Not since Augustine has anyone written so consistently and vehemently against the Manicheans and their dualist conception of the cosmos, which Auden saw prefigured in Plato. These attacks puzzled contemporaries and commentators who, with some sense, wondered who identified as a Manichean in the twentieth century. Used to either the exalted magnification of the body in Lawrence or the scrupulous distaste of Eliot, Auden’s propensity to uncritically celebrate the mundane existence of the body only added to the notion that after his Christian conversion made him more accessible but less relevant. The poet who seemed to have retreated into himself intellectually, abandoning the rhetorically eccentric and politically flamboyant elements of his work in favor of a moderate, gently humorous tone best suited to the verse essay or personal ode, also seemed to have retreated physically into himself, exchanging trenchant diagnoses of “England, this country of ours where nobody is well” for the creature comforts of poems like “About the House” and “Talking to Myself. My thesis explores this change in Auden's work, and his developing conception of the body/mind relationship.