Thank you, fog: W. H. Auden as presiding genius

Renascence, Summer 1997 by Cappeluti, Jo-Anne

By repeating the speaker's thanks three times, the poem's conclusion presses fictionality to the limits; at the same time, the voice speaking is not straining at all-an impossible feat without this fictional persona. This poem of "Good Drab" thus reveals Auden's achievement of what he describes in Secondary Worlds: "We are always intimately related to nonhuman natures and unless we try to understand and relate to what we are not, we shall never try to understand what we are" (131). Poetry makes nothing happen in exactly this way, premised as it is on the open-ended belief that the human-much less the sublime-has less than sure boundaries.

In speaking as this Genius A, Auden exercises the freedom he defines in saying that "once art becomes a secular activity, every artist is free to treat whatever subject excites his imagination, and in any stylistic manner which he feels appropriate" ("Postscript: Christianity & Art" DH 460). His subject is himself; his stylistic manner includes the idea of "re-living in a new situation" that he defines in "Psychology and Art Today" as grappling with the "artistic medium" (that which is the new situation) that makes art "more than an autobiographical record" in its use of words that become signs for the universe, with associations "always greater than those of the individual" (337).