If one were to assemble a list of well-known Christian poems in English from the end of the last millennium, one might well include verses by Gerard Manly Hopkins, G. K. Chesterton, T. S. Eliot, Richard Wilbur, and Wendell Berry, but one might be forgiven for not including a poem by one of the greatest twentieth-century poets: W. H. Auden. Like Chesterton and Eliot, Auden took some time to embrace the Christian faith as an adult, but unlike these other writers, he seldom wrote poems expressing unqualified belief in Christianity. Fifty years after his death in 1973, Auden remains familiar to both literary world, especially in New York City where he lived for many years, and he is one of the few poets whose name and work retain recognition in the popular world (in no small part thanks to the appearance of “Funeral Blues” in Four Weddings and a Funeral). He is far less familiar to Christian readers, however–but then Auden was not exactly the ideal image of a Christian writer. He was a chain-smoking alcoholic, a liberal/socialist, and a homosexual. And yet he professed Christianity. Aside from what he called his “hiatus of unbelief” that lasted from his late teens to his early 30s, he was a regular church attender all his life. A renowned poet, he expressed his faith mainly in, quite literally, the most prosaic of ways—in the many prose pieces he wrote over the course of his life, and in quiet acts of charity that few ever heard about.
Born to a middle-class English family in 1907, Wystan Hugh Auden loved the elaborate rituals of the high-church Anglican services he attended as a boy. But in adolescence, Auden lost all interest in religion and—perhaps not coincidentally—discovered sex and decided to become a poet. After taking his third-class degree from Oxford, Auden taught high-school English while trying to establish himself as a professional poet. He was enthusiastic about cutting-edge ideas, from communism to psychoanalysis, and his poems were often seductively cryptic in their imagery. They were full of airplanes and secret agents, and their language reflected Auden’s wide-ranging interests, from psychology to geology to Anglo-Saxon verse. It was also not difficult to detect a homoerotic undertone in many of his poems—if one knew what to look for. In the politically heated climate of the 1930s, he seemed to be the voice of a new generation that was thoroughly modern, undermining authoritarianism, standing on the right side of history, and definitely not religious.
“Auden found himself asking, ‘If, as I am convinced, the Nazis are wrong and we are right, what is it that validates our values and invalidates theirs?'”
Then, in January 1939, Auden settled in New York City. He had found no place for himself in England and had spent much time abroad. He had lived in Germany and visited Iceland, and spent some weeks in Spain supporting the communists against Franco. Although he later recalled that he had been shocked that Spain’s churches were all closed, he was confident at the time that he was done with religion. Now he was returning from China where he had been working on a travel-book about the Second Sino-Japanese war. Having landed in New York, Auden made himself at home, and in the spring of that year, he fell in love with an American college student, Chester Kallman. Auden, it seems, quickly pledged fidelity to Kallman, and he and Auden spent the summer together on a road trip to California celebrating what Auden was calling a “honeymoon.” Auden hoped that the relationship, which he privately considered a marriage, would smooth the rough edges of his personality, as well as provide him with the domestic stability he craved.
Then the Nazis invaded Poland. Though Auden was now living an ocean away in America, he was personally shaken. He quickly wrote a poem, “September 1, 1939,” in which he acknowledged the capacity for evil in every human heart but cautiously hoped to “show an affirming flame” in the midst of political darkness. That November, in a New York movie theater, Auden saw a newsreel about the Nazi invasion, and he was horrified when several people in the German-speaking audience began to scream, “Kill them!” at the Poles on the screen. Years later, Auden recalled that “the novelty and shock of the Nazis was that they made no pretense of believing in justice and liberty for all….Confronted by such a phenomenon, it was impossible any longer to believe that the values of liberal humanism were self-evident.” Auden found himself asking, “If, as I am convinced, the Nazis are wrong and we are right, what is it that validates our values and invalidates theirs?”[1]
Furthermore, if the arc of history did not bend inexorably toward political peace and human equality, what was the real shape of human history? And just as importantly, what was the place of a poet in it? Auden set out to survey the intellectual history of Europe and to put his own struggles in context. The result was a long poem he called “New Year Letter,” which occupied him for much of the spring of 1940 and which hints at a return to the Christian faith. Auden had begun reading books by Christian authors, beginning with Charles Williams’s The Descent of the Dove, an eccentric but insightful account of the history of Christianity. Auden would go on to read Augustine’s Confessions and a number of Kierkegaard’s works. He devoured a now-forgotten book by Charles Norris Cochrane called Christianity and Classical Culture. He also discovered Reinhold Niebuhr and eventually Martin Buber’s book I and Thou. All of these authors made a profound and lasting impression on him.
Soon Auden’s housemates in New York City noticed that he was slipping away every Sunday morning in order to attend a local Episcopalian church. He went to the early service, where there was no homily. He wanted liturgy, not preaching. Evidently there had been no sudden conversion experience, only a steady intellectual movement from skepticism to tentative belief—and just as importantly for Auden, the restoration of regular religious practice.
But just as the rise of the Nazis had shocked Auden out of his intellectual confidence, so Chester Kallman soon shocked Auden out of his domestic confidence. In the summer of 1941, Auden discovered that Kallman was cheating on him with another man. As it turned out, Kallman (who was 14 years Auden’s junior) had not really intended to remain permanently monogamous, as Auden had. Auden was enraged, and later he hinted that at one point he had seriously contemplated murdering Kallman. Instead, however, he spent the rest of the year trying to come to terms with what had happened to him.
Elements of Auden’s personal crises energized his poetry of the early 1940s. In 1941, Auden started an ambitious poetic project, a Christmas oratorio called “For the Time Being,” which he intended to be set to music by his acquaintance Benjamin Britten. The finished piece ended up far too long to be sung, but it is one of the most explicitly religious poems Auden ever wrote. His idea was to depict the characters in the Nativity story as if the event were happening in the present day, such that the magi are depicted as scientists, Simeon as a philosopher, and the shepherds as factory workers. But despite his occasional forays into playwriting throughout his life, Auden had little talent for dramatic storytelling, and his characters are often little more than ideas in costume.
Yet the poem contains some memorable passages. One is a verse dialogue between Joseph and the chorus, in which Joseph struggles to accept what appears to be Mary’s infidelity. Joseph begs God for an explanation:
All I ask is one
Important and elegant proof
That what my Love had done
Was really at your will
And that your will is Love.
The reply Joseph gets from an angel is a simple assertion of the necessity of faith: “No, you must believe; / Be silent, and sit still.” The passage is widely read as an expression of Auden’s own emotional devastation at his discovery of Kallman’s infidelity, and Auden certainly sympathized with Joseph’s plight.
Auden also put much of himself into a passage spoken by King Herod in prose. The piece begins as a pastiche of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic Roman emperor who persecuted the early church. Herod, like Joseph, is dismayed at the news of a miraculous birth, but for an entirely different reason. Herod has spent his career doggedly trying to civilize his superstitious people, and now the notion of God being born threatens to undermine his rationalist utopia. He regretfully concludes that the military must be called in to eliminate the threat.
Auden, like Herod, had a taste for grand organizational schemes based on abstract ideas, and he also had a tyrannical streak. An inveterate formalist, Auden described his approach to writing poetry as dictatorial. Whole stanzas might be deported to some other poem, while words that did not belong had to be ruthlessly liquidated. But Auden could be tyrannical in life, too, and he may have felt that his attempts to establish a domestic utopia by controlling Kallman had finally pushed his partner away. In Herod, Auden acknowledges his own capacity to excuse any number of evils on the grounds that he just wants everyone to act rationally.
“Although Auden identified himself as a Christian, it is not always clear what exactly he meant by it”
In the years that followed his writing of “For the Time Being,” Auden continued to attend church, but his poetry moved on to other topics. Yet a few of his most notable post-conversion lyrics are energized by the problems posed by his faith. His 1958 poem “Friday’s Child,” dedicated to the memory of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, expresses dismay at the mystery of human free will—why God in the person of Christ would willingly become the silent victim of the evil he allows. “In Praise of Limestone,” written in 1948, ponders the significance of a limestone landscape, which the speaker concludes is a sign of the future possibility of “a faultless love/Or the life to come,” which the poet admits he knows nothing of as yet. These poems have often been read as expressions of doubt, but while they avoid dogmatic assertion, they also avoid denial. They may be read as expressions of faith—belief in what cannot be seen or proven, but what is nevertheless acknowledged as real in some mysterious way.
Although Auden identified himself as a Christian, it is not always clear what exactly he meant by it. His milieu was a time of serious intellectual objections to Christianity, and he generally subscribed to a liberal, mid-century Protestantism that emphasized the moral teachings of Jesus but could do without most or all of the miraculous elements of the Bible. Yet Auden never flatly denied such doctrines as the Virgin Birth or the bodily resurrection of Christ, even though he had every opportunity to do so.
Whenever the question of the Virgin Birth was raised, for example, Auden would merely quip that everyone believes in a virgin birth, for nobody can imagine his or her own parents having sex. It would be unwise to read too much into a joke either way, but the punchline is aimed as much at skeptics as at believers. Ironic deflection can be a way of concealing either doubt or belief. And after all, as Alan Jacobs has pointed out, Auden did say explicitly that he believed in such miracles as the Virgin Birth and Christ’s resurrection every time he recited the creed in church. Yet the recorded statements we have from him are neither unambiguous affirmations nor clear denials. What exactly he might have privately meant by “I believe” remains something of a mystery.
The great challenge to Auden’s personal faith was, of course, his homosexuality–and this is likewise the greatest challenge for orthodox Christian readers of his work. Auden’s friend Christopher Isherwood famously remarked that “his religion condemned it and he agreed that it was sinful, though he fully intended to go on sinning.” Auden’s biographer Humphrey Carpenter adds “this is a simplification, but is in essence true.”[2] Auden’s 1948 poem “The Love Feast” encapsulates his conflict between faith and sex, in which sex generally won out. The poem describes a party scene couched ironically in church language:
In an upper room at midnight See us gathered on behalf Of love according to the gospel Of the radio-phonograph.
Amid drunken love triangles and their attendant griefs, the poet reflects that “The Love that rules the sun and stars/Permits what He forbids.” The speaker knows he ought to leave, yet he succumbs once again to temptation:
But that Miss Number in the corner
Playing hard to get. . . .
I am sorry I’m not sorry . . .
Make me chaste, Lord, but not yet.
The “Miss Number” is, in Auden’s parlance, a gay man with whom he wants to hook up. This person has no name but is merely a number—just one more body in a long list of sexual encounters.
There had been a moment in the early 1940s, just as he was regaining his faith, that Auden had aspired to ascend the scala amoris—the ladder of love—with Chester Kallman. He thought he might redeem his erotic love by translating it into divine, agape love after the manner of Dante while retaining the privilege of regular physical gratification, and he had hoped to settle into a cozy, domestic life with Kallman as his spouse. But when this proved impossible, he went back to the short-term sexual relationships that had characterized his earlier years, and he no longer hoped or wished to find someone with whom he could be intimate both sexually and intellectually. Nor did he make any attempt to reconcile his homosexuality with his faith; he merely lived with the conflict between them.
While it cannot serve as an excuse, it is important to understand Auden’s sexuality by placing it in the context of his entire temperament. He had always lived at some distance from his body. Although his mind craved order of every kind, he did not seem to know how to bring order to his own physical existence. Despite his love of tidy intellectual categories, he neglected his personal hygiene, his clothes were often soiled, and his living quarters were famously squalid. He was temperamentally inclined to compulsions—he was, for example, compulsively punctual and had rigid routines for both work and social life. He was also addicted to tobacco, alcohol, and amphetamines, so sex was one one vice among many, albeit his most grievous. Compulsions and addictions are common ways of dealing with a chaotic life. Although he knew these were all coping mechanisms, he enjoyed all of them to a great extent, and probably never truly reckoned with how unhealthy–or spiritually deadly–they really were.
If it is disappointing that Auden never practiced sexual self-denial after he embraced Christianity, it is also surprising that he never wavered in his religious commitments. It would not have been out of character for him to drift away from his faith. He had already dabbled in other, more avant-guard worldviews as a young man, having been a brief follower of D. H. Lawrence, and then of Marx, before settling on Christianity. Perhaps in the 1940s some readers wondered when Auden was going to end his Christian phase and move on to something more modern. In an intellectual climate in which French existentialism was just coming into vogue, Auden had every reason to find a life-philosophy better suited to his personal habits than Christianity. Yet he remained a professing Christian for the rest of his life.
Although he said little about his personal faith in his poems, he became ever more explicit about his theological commitments in his prose. A good deal of Auden’s income came from his lectures, essays, and book reviews, and he often griped that he was paid far less for writing poems than he was for giving talks about writing poetry. But he had to pay his bills, so he wrote thousands of pages of prose, and one can hardly read more than two or three of Auden’s post-conversion essays without running across explicit references to Christian theology, liturgy, church history, the Bible, or the creeds.
There are, however, only a few prose pieces in which Auden discloses the more personal elements of his own faith, especially his personal history and his conversion, but also his frustrated struggles with some of the moral demands of Christianity. In 1955, Auden contributed an essay to a book titled Modern Canterbury Pilgrims, a collection of essays by converts to the Church of England. Auden concludes the essay by insisting on the value of embodied liturgical practice for individual faith: “it is with this body, with faith or without it, that all good works are done….It is easy to forget, particularly if I do not wish to remember, what I thought or felt yesterday, but it is difficult to forget what I did. Even mere routine has its value, as a reminder.”[3] The routines of liturgy very much appealed to Auden’s desire for order, as well as for punctuality, but liturgy also challenged Auden’s natural inclination toward a merely cerebral mode of existence. It forced him to express his faith with his body, which was never easy for him.
Although Auden disliked sermons, he was asked to take the pulpit himself at least twice, once at Oxford in 1965 where he gave a short, philosophical talk entitled “Words and the Word,” and again at Westminster Abbey in 1966, where he gave something more like a real homily about the struggle between flesh and spirit as described in Romans 8. Auden’s main point is difficult to encapsulate, but he identifies “the flesh” not with biological existence as such, nor with an inborn propensity toward sin, but with human society and culture of all kinds, the social systems into which we are born and in which we are more or less interchangeable pieces. He associates “the law of the flesh” with the super-ego, the socially-constructed censor that condemns each person from within.[4]
In contrast, the “law of the Spirit” is, in Auden’s mind, the command to love God and to love our neighbors as ourselves, treating people as unique persons like ourselves rather than as interchangeable social units. Doing so requires faith that every other person is uniquely valuable, just like ourselves. And for Auden, doing good for other people is the primary way in which we show love for God. Auden maintains that the root of all sins against God and against neighbor is pride, which Auden defines as treating another person as if that person were an object without a unique personhood like oneself.
Auden concluded that “Those of us who have the nerve to call ourselves Christians will do well to be extremely reticent on this subject. Indeed, it is almost the definition of a Christian that he is somebody who knows he isn’t one, either in faith or morals.” Auden urges his audience to ask, “given our time and place and talents, what, if our faith and love were perfect, would we be glad to find it obvious to do?”
Auden often answered that question himself in ways that even his closest friends knew nothing about. In an essay titled “The Secret Auden,” Auden’s literary executor Edward Mendelson details some of them.[5] Auden once supplied funds to pay for an expensive surgery for a fellow parishioner in New York. He arranged to pay schooling costs for a number of European children orphaned by WWII. He kept up long, generous correspondences with people who wrote to him—including people in prison. When a homeless shelter run by Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker organization was threatened with closure for violating fire codes, Auden accosted Day on the street in front of the shelter. Day recalled later that he was so poorly dressed that she thought he was a panhandler. But instead of asking for money, he pressed a check into her hand muttering, “here’s two-fifty” and walked away. She assumed he meant $2.50 and thought it was nice of a stranger to make a small donation to the shelter. Then she saw that the check was for $250, enough to pay the fine.
This disposition toward secretive charity explains why he so seldom wrote openly about his faith in his poetry. Auden felt that personal faith was not really a suitable subject for poems—at least as far as he was concerned as a professional poet. In a collection of reflections called “Postscript: Christianity & Art,” printed in The Dyer’s Hand, Auden asserted that
To a Christian, the godlike man is not the hero who does extraordinary deeds, but the holy man, the saint, who does good deeds. But the gospel defines a good deed as one done in secret, hidden, so far as it is possible, even from the doer, and forbids private prayer and fasting in public. This means that art, which by its nature can only deal with what can and should be manifested, cannot portray a saint.[6]
Later in the same essay, Auden articulates his discomfort with explicitly religious literature: “poems, like many of Donne’s and Hopkins’s, which express a poet’s personal feelings of religious devotion or penitence, make me uneasy….Is there not something a little odd, to say the least, about making an admirable public object out of one’s feelings of guilt and penitence before God?” This is not to say that there is no value in reading such poems, but Auden is speaking as a writer. He, at any rate, could not bring himself to make an artistic object for public display out of his private faith, and he strongly believed that he would have betrayed his own moral standards had he done so.
Auden strenuously denied that art has ultimate significance in itself. Writers like Shelley and Yeats had envisioned their own art as oracular, the new scriptures for a new age, but Auden saw such a Romantic exaltation of art as incompatible with Christianity. He observed that polytheistic societies like ancient Greece revered poets as divine oracles, just as modern societies have come to regard their scientists as sources of infallible truth. “To a Christian, unfortunately,” Auden said, “both art and science are secular activities, that is to say, small beer.”[7]
Auden was forthright about the conflict he perceived between his vocation as a poet and his faith as a Christian: “A poet who calls himself a Christian cannot but feel uncomfortable when he realizes that the New Testament contains no verse…, only prose.” Auden notes with dismay that the style of the New Testament is characterized by prosaic directness, and by clear proclamation. Even its most literary passages—the parables—are in prose. Auden concludes by saying, “I hope there is an answer to this objection, but I don’t know what it is.”[8]
Fortunately for the Christian poet, Auden had overlooked some facts. The New Testament does contain some passages in verse. The Book of Revelation contains several songs, and the epistles quote passages from the Psalms. Most importantly, in Luke 2 there are two complete poems, the Song of Zechariah and (how could Auden have forgotten it?) Mary’s Magnificat. Poetry is easier to spot in today’s Bibles, in which verse passages are lineated, whereas the older Bibles used to print the entire text as prose. Perhaps Auden overestimated the conflict between faith and poetry, at least as far as the New Testament goes. Yet he offers a valuable warning that great art should never be mistaken for great faith, and that faith is not best expressed in poetic utterance but in the small, prosaic acts of everyday charity that usually fail to attract the notice of a critic or a biographer.
Stephen J. Schuler is professor of English and chair of the department of English, Literature, and Modern Languages at Cedarville University.
W.H. Auden, untitled essay in the edited volume Modern Canterbury Pilgrims, reprinted in The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose, Vol. III, 1949-1955, ed. Edward Mendelson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 279. ↑
Humphrey Carpenter, W. H. Auden: A Biography (London: Houghton, 1981) 299. ↑
Auden, untitled essay in Modern Canterbury Pilgrims, 279. ↑
W.H. Auden, “A Sermon Delivered in Westminster Abbey,” in appendix to The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose, Vol. V, 1963-1968 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 436-442. ↑
Edward Mendelson, “The Secret Auden”, New York Review of Books, 20 March 2014, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/03/20/secret-auden/. ↑
W.H. Auden, “Postscript: Christianity & Art” in The Dyer’s Hand (London: Vintage, 1989), 457. ↑
Auden, “Postscript: Christianity & Art”, 456. ↑
Auden, “Postscript: Christianity & Art”, 459. ↑