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

On the other hand, the local genius associated with the individual's alter ego Lewis calls Genius B, which itself bifurcates into two: the good and the bad angel. The good angel, which Lewis calls Genius Bl, is a positive, affirming double who works in alliance with Genius A. The bad angel, which Lewis calls Genius B2, is associated with leading the poet into a state of illusion: in Auden's terms, of imagining possibilities which are neither real nor permissible (172).'

At the end of his essay, Lewis asserts that he is "certain that the Middle Ages distinguished Genius A from B (or even forgot about B in their concentration on A) as I have described" (174). How well this distinction characterizes Spenser, Lewis admits, is much more speculative. One might argue, in fact, that the passage in Spenser presented certain problems because poetry's relationship to its age was changing-thus the resulting shift in self-consciousness about the vocation of poetry. The fact that Lewis is less certain in Spenser of what was true in the Middle Ages points to this shift in poetic consciousnessor predisposition of a poet's mind, as Auden names it. "Great changes in artistic style always reflect some alteration in the frontier between the sacred and the profane in the imagination of a society" ("Making, Knowing, and Judging" DH 59).

In the case of Auden as the "Other" thanking the fog, using the distinctions of genius can help to explain why the poet does not appeal to some presiding genius for help in combating the "global gloom" of which the poet is so aware (CP 887): he is (acting as) the presiding genius. It can also help to explain why the poet does not even view the fog as a local genius that is thwarting what we would expect to be a desire for the fog's departure so that he could possibly experience an epiphany, or lifting of the "fog." As presiding genius, he sees in any circumstance. Pondering Auden's use of presiding and assisting geniuses, what will become evident is that in speaking as or playing the part of the most fictional voice of all, instead of undermining the authenticity of such an experience, Auden's quiet tone of voice uses the fictions in a way that undermines their mere fictionality. To read Auden's poem with his ideas of the sacred, living language, acting, and the distinctions of genius in mind illuminate that peculiarly Audenesque ease with fictions to which I initially referred. Recalling the definition of Good Drab, we can now describe it as the intimate tone of voice of Auden performing Genius A addressing Genius B 1. Performing the voice of the presiding genius, Auden finds his assisting genius in nature: in this case, the local fog is "lured" to visit and obligingly envelops the local countryside.

Notice the poem's beginning. New York Smog is the bad genius (the Genius B2). Auden's delight is in the "unsullied Sister," the Genius B 1. The final line of the first stanza declares that native knowledge returns to the poet. This is true, of course, on a personal level: as Nicholas Jenkins notes, Auden wrote the poem in May of 1973, after spending in England what turned out to be his last Christmas, experiencing an English Christmas for the first time since 1937 (63). But such a line makes more than a personal reference. It declares a poetic consciousness that speaks from a universal perspective, from the stance of speaking as Genius A, who seemingly has forgotten this native knowledge-or at least has not seen it for a long time from this internal perspective of a human narrator. Jenkins, in fact, cites the poem's "almost ghostly lack of ego" (64). Notice also along these lines the poem's use of capitalization. Every address to the fog or to some synonym of it is capitalized, as is his reference to the four selves joined in friendship and to the Daily Papers. This voice addresses the sanctity in all it sees, even in the slipshod prose of our current sacred texts: the Daily Papers.