The Caliban Beneath the Skin: Abstract Drama in Auden's Favorite Poem

It is a language that engages its audience in seeing again - as if for the first time - that in which they have already participated, seeing what they have not yet lived as if they have already lived it. In this respect, the language is both prologue and epilogue to the life not yet lived and prologue and epilogue to the life already lived. As an actor speaking for the imagination to and on behalf of the sacred object or human being, Auden consistently makes poetry out of such prologues and epilogues. For the imagination, whose relationship to this human creature is either momentary or timeless, "no consistent plot is possible" ("Genius & Apostle," Dyer's Head 441). One cannot demonstrate the imagination in the act of creating. By necessity, then, Auden's poetry is abstract drama, all action only implied. This stance, however, forms the consistency in Auden's oeuvre. Like Caliban's address, the Collected Poems form themselves an amazingly interwoven, encyclopedic range of echoes: echoes that come from this technique of echoes, not ideological theme.(24) Like prologues and epilogues, the poems are echoes of the same "play." They are echoes of apostrophe: of a poet using his imagination to address the audience of himself, echoing back his thoughts into apostrophes to the self and for the self.

True to himself, Auden was thus committed to revising his poetry, committed to growing as an artist, to using his art in order to become his actual self. Doing so was the result of reading himself, of being his own primary audience. Doing so, he could travel into the dangerous territory of dramatizing the making of poetry and the making of a poet, for himself first and then for others. Finding an art that focused in these dangerous ways on himself, he found a way of speaking for the imagination as apostrophe to self, talking to himself.

"Poetry," he declared in his 1939 elegy for Yeats, "makes nothing happen" (Collected Poems 248). This is its dramatic doing: to make Auden's imagination happen - that which we could not otherwise see or hear. In making nothing happen, Auden makes a dog-skin talk and then Caliban: these inarticulate entities served as mouthpieces for the imagination and helped Auden to see himself, "Mortal, guilty," yet "entirely beautiful" (Collected Poems 157). Moreover, this way of seeing the sell' is not in the Narcissistic fashion that Auden describes, "'After all,' sighed Narcissus the hunchback, 'on me it looks good'" ("Hic et Ille," Dyer's Head 94). Rather, it is seeing the self in a way that helps him to realize that it was not in spite of his limitations but because of them that he was blessed (Collected Poems 444).

To return to the idea of Auden's awareness of the too serious nature of James' prefaces, finally, this way of happening is not without comedy; its life-affirming quality comes through comedy. As Auden declared, "What no critic seems to see in my work are its comic undertones. Only through comedy can one be serious" (Osborne 339). Like Shakespeare's Touchstone, Caliban is a preposterously comic and crucially insightful figure, a character who works for uniting the members of society. For Auden, those facets include Caliban, Ariel, and the audience, who represent the different facets of Auden's personality. As Auden writes in "The Virgin & The Dynamo," a poem is comprised of a"crowd of recollected occasions of feeling, among which the most important are recollections of encounters with sacred beings (Dyer's Hand 67). In this case, the sacred object is Caliban, the mortal self that speaks for the real word. The poet "attempts to transform" his feelings for this object into a "community by embodying it in a verbal society" (Dyer's Hand 67). Auden's ability to use comedy in this way demonstrates that he met the greatest challenge of all: to make poetry that was neither public nor private but intimate, "the speech of one person addressing another" ("The Poet & The City," Dyer's Hand 84). Auden makes poetry out of the interior dialogues between the facets of himself and his imagination. He thus accepts rather than bemoans poetry's marginalized status. Not adding to that status by undermining poetry's ability to say anything lasting, he affirms poetry's ability to find an artistic way of happening: a way of surviving in the autobiographical valley of its own making.