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

Renascence, Summer 1997 by Cappeluti, Jo-Anne

There is much in Auden's aesthetics to substantiate this possibility. This argument will address three foci. 1) Auden's awareness that he lives in an age that does not make the distinction between the sacred and the profane does not stop him from writing poetry from what he calls "the sacred encounters of his [Primary] imagination" ("Making, Knowing and Judging" DH 59). 2) Along these lines, Auden also has a lot to say about language as the analogous, outer structure that reflects the Primary imagination's perception of the sacred and, by implication, about the role of the poet as actor for this perspective. 3) Such concepts align with what Hartman notes as C. S. Lewis' detailed study of the genius tradition. I will certainly not argue that Auden consciously chose to speak as a presiding genius (as far as I know, he never makes mention of the genius loci tradition), but as Auden's ideas of the imagination (specifically his drawing on Coleridge's idea of the Primary Imagination), language, and the poet as actor demonstrate, his primary orientation toward making poetry out of dramatizing his reflections in the mirror of art creates the need for a fictional persona that can help him to avoid the "ego-consciousness which paints himself painting himself" ("Hic et Ille" DH 96).2 As the poem "Thank You, Fog" demonstrates, by performing or speaking on behalf of this fictional persona, which speaks from a perspective that transcends his own disillusionment with this "sorry spot" we call earth, Auden thus avoids such self-consciousness. In addition, by using his Primary Imagination (a realm "without freedom, sense of time or humor") in conjunction with a tone of "deliberate informality," Auden humanizes this larger perspective, thus actually expanding (rather than reducing) our sense of what is entailed in being human ("Making, Knowing and Judging" DH 55, 58).

Finally, although Auden's strategies are obviously different than those of the Romantics, he is trying to get at something similar: the experience of something that transcends the ability of language to name it. Knowing that it is impossible to represent this non-empirical experience, but that nevertheless language is itself both a fiction and yet what Auden calls "living," Auden devises a strategy that purposefully uses the fictionality of language in a way that dramatizes its ability to get at more than our culturally-determined interior voices. In a final section, I will argue that Auden's strategies do not signify the failure of Romanticism, as has been argued by a long line of scholars, most recently by John Boly. It is Boly's argument in particular to which I will respond, specifically his assertions that Auden's use of the interior monologue demonstrates Auden's willful exposure of culturally-determined, "internally persuasive voices" (94).

Auden's age viewed "the distinction between the sacred and the profane" as quite fictional ("Making, Knowing and Judging" DH 54). Knowing that such "is not socially recognized" and as a result a poet like himself, who does make this distinction, must write poetry that is neither "public nor esoteric but intimate"; Auden thus knows that, regardless of whatever persona he uses, if he "raises his voice" he will sound "phony," i.e., he is not writing public poetry, which would warrant using a "loud" voice ("The Poet & The City" DH 84).3 In writing intimate poetry, then, he is writing in the quiet, easy tone of Good Drab, the term used by C. S. Lewis to describe the intimate tone of voice in the speech of one person addressing another.4