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Paper 107: W.H. Auden's Poetry as Political and Historical Commentary: A Study of September 1, 1939 and In Memory of W.B. Yeats

 Paper 107: W.H. Auden's Poetry as Political and Historical Commentary: A Study of September 1, 1939 and In Memory of W.B. Yeats

Assignment of Paper 107: The Twentieth Century Literature: From World War II to the End of the Century

 

Academic Details

• Name: Adityarajsinh Gohil

• Roll No.: 1

• Enrollment No.: 5108250035

• Sem.: 2

• Batch: 2025 - 2027

• E-mail: adityarajsinh.r.gohil@gmail.com

 

Assignment Details

• Paper Name: The Twentieth Century Literature: From World War II to the End of the Century

• Paper No.: Paper 107

• Paper Code: 22400

• Unit 3: Poems - W. H. Auden

• Topic: W.H. Auden's Poetry as Political and Historical Commentary: A Study of September 1, 1939 and In Memory of W.B. Yeats

• Submitted To: Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University, Bhavnagar

• Submitted Date:

 

Table of Contents

Academic Details. 

Assignment Details. 

Abstract. 

Research Question. 

Hypothesis. 

I. Introduction. 

II. Historical and Political Context. 

III. "September 1, 1939" as Anti-War Commentary. 

A. The Poet as Witness and Critic. 

B. Critique of Political Leadership and Collective Failure. 

C. The Nijinsky–Diaghilev Allusion: Encoded Political and Personal Commentary. 

D. The Role of the Individual Voice. 

IV. "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" as Political and Elegiac Commentary. 

A. Subverting Elegiac Convention for Political Purposes. 

B. The Limits of Poetry as Political Force. 

C. The Poet's Legacy in a Politically Fractured World. 

D. The Closing Political Imperative. 

V. Comparative Analysis: Common Threads. 

VI. Conclusion. 

References: 

 

Abstract

This paper explores how W.H. Auden uses his poetry to comment on politics and history, specifically focusing on two of his major poems: "September 1, 1939" and "In Memory of W.B. Yeats". Written during a time of global crisis and the beginning of the Second World War, these poems show that Auden viewed lyric poetry and elegies as tools to diagnose political problems, rather than just ways to express personal feelings. By looking at the work of several literary critics, the essay shows how Auden's poetry balances two contrasting ideas. On one hand, he admits that art cannot stop wars or directly change historical events. On the other hand, he believes that art is still a moral necessity because it helps record the truth, exposes political lies, and keeps human feelings like grief and joy alive. Ultimately, the paper concludes that Auden's work provides an honest look at what poetry can and cannot achieve during dark political times.

 

Research Question

How does W.H. Auden use his 1939 poems, "September 1, 1939" and "In Memory of W.B. Yeats," to respond to the political crises of his time, and what do these poems reveal about the purpose and limits of art during a historical disaster ?

 

Hypothesis

W.H. Auden's 1939 poems act as powerful instruments for analysing political and historical events rather than just serving as personal expressions. Even though Auden acknowledges that poetry is powerless to change the course of history or stop political violence, his work demonstrates that the poet's voice remains morally essential to expose societal failures, bear witness to history, and preserve the human capacity for reflection and praise during times of crisis.


I. Introduction

Wystan Hugh Auden (1907–1973) occupies a singular position in the tradition of twentieth-century poetry as a writer whose personal sensibility was inextricably bound to the political upheavals of his era. Emerging from a physician's household and educated at Oxford, Auden developed a literary voice at once intellectual, diagnostic, and deeply moral. His reputation as the unofficial poet laureate of the English-speaking world was cemented during the turbulent 1930s and early 1940s, a period of collapsing democracies, rising fascism, and global war. Two poems in particular  "September 1, 1939" and "In Memory of W.B. Yeats"  stand as his most searching engagements with the relationship between art, politics, and history, and both were composed in the extraordinary year of 1939: the year of William Butler Yeats's death in January and the year Germany invaded Poland in September, igniting the Second World War.

This essay argues that Auden employs elegy and lyric poetry not merely as vehicles for personal expression but as instruments of political diagnosis, historical reflection, and meditation on the role of art in times of crisis. Drawing on Haider's anti-war reading of "September 1, 1939," Miller's biographical-contextual analysis of the Nijinsky Diaghilev allusion, the deconstructive study of "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" by Madlool and Jadwe, and the transitivity analysis of Farooq et al., this essay traces how Auden's twin masterworks resist both propagandistic simplification and aestheticist withdrawal, holding instead the productive tension between art's limitations and its moral necessity.

 

II. Historical and Political Context       

To read Auden's 1939 poems with any adequacy, one must first inhabit the historical moment they address. Europe in 1939 stood at the precipice of catastrophe. Yeats died in January; by September, the Second World War had begun. The decade preceding this moment was, in Auden's own memorable phrase from "September 1, 1939," a period of mismanagement and collective moral failure  . What Haider describes as the "low dishonest decade" of diplomatic failure, in which world leaders sacrificed principle for expediency and ordinary people were left to bear the consequences (Haider 31).

Auden had emigrated from England to the United States in early 1939, placing himself in a peculiar position as an intellectual commentator on both European collapse and American complicity. As Miller notes, this dual position  as a celebrated public poet subject to scrutiny and as a homosexual man living under a homophobic social order  created what he terms a "dualism" that shaped the encoded, layered quality of Auden's political poetry (Miller 116). The shared backdrop of both poems, then, is not merely World War II as a geopolitical event, but a broader atmosphere of fear, hatred, and the failure of collective human solidarity. In "In Memory of W.B. Yeats," Auden maps this atmosphere with searing clarity: Europe's political fragmentation is rendered as nations each "sequestered in its hate," while "the dogs of Europe bark" across a darkened continent.

 

III. "September 1, 1939" as Anti-War Commentary

 

A. The Poet as Witness and Critic

"September 1, 1939" opens with a deliberate and significant gesture of positioning. The speaker sits in a dive bar on Fifty-second Street in New York, uncertain and afraid, observing rather than participating in the machinery of history. This is not the heroic, declamatory stance of a war poet in the tradition of Wilfred Owen; it is, as Haider observes, a reflective, almost journalistic posture in which the poet functions as an analyst of collective failure rather than a celebrant of national virtue (Haider 31–32). The poem's tone is confessional and anxious, and its analytical intelligence is deployed not to inspire but to diagnose.

The historical specificity of the poem's title is itself a political act. By naming the precise date of Germany's invasion of Poland, Auden refuses the generalizing move of much elegiac or lyric verse and insists on accountability  on naming the moment, tracing its causes, and implicating those responsible. This is poetry that refuses transcendence in favour of testimony.

B. Critique of Political Leadership and Collective Failure

Auden traces the origins of Nazi aggression through a chain of historical and psychological references: Luther, Linz (Hitler's hometown), and Thucydides all appear as signposts in a genealogy of violence and authoritarian mania. Crucially, Auden does not assign blame solely to Germany. As Haider carefully demonstrates, the poem implicates the Allied powers in the creation of the conditions for fascism, through the vindictive and unjust treatment of Germany following the First World War (Haider 32). The moral geometry of the poem is captured in the formulation that those to whom evil is done do evil in return  a Freudian as much as a historical insight, locating aggression in cycles of humiliation and resentment rather than in the innate depravity of any people.

Ordinary people in the poem are cast as victims of decisions made by war lords they never elected and cannot control. Haider reads this as one of the poem's central anti-war arguments: common men and women are reduced to what he calls "Ginny pigs," subjected to the consequences of mismanagement by those in power (Haider 32). The poem refuses the consoling narrative of patriotic sacrifice, insisting instead on exposing the mechanics of political dishonesty.

C. The Nijinsky–Diaghilev Allusion: Encoded Political and Personal Commentary

One of the most illuminating elements of "September 1, 1939" is the allusion to the relationship between Vaslav Nijinsky, the Russian ballet dancer, and Sergei Diaghilev, his choreographer and patron. Miller's analysis is indispensable here. He argues that the allusion operates simultaneously on a macro scale  as a critique of artistic authoritarianism and dictatorship  and on a micro scale, as a deeply personal, encoded commentary on Auden's own position as a homosexual artist in a homophobic society (Miller 115–116).

Diaghilev, Miller notes, was described by contemporaries as always a dictator  ruthless in his pursuit of aesthetic perfection and willing to destroy those who served him when their usefulness was exhausted (Miller 117). This portrait of artistic tyranny allows Auden to extend the poem's thematic concern with dictatorship beyond the political sphere into the realm of culture itself: art, relentlessly pursued as a master narrative, can itself become a form of oppression. The parallel with Hitler's political fascism is implicit but powerful. Furthermore, Nijinsky's persecution mania resonated, in Miller's reading, with the paranoid vulnerability of persecuted minorities in the 1930s  Jews in Eastern Europe and homosexuals in New York and beyond  making the allusion a vehicle for a political critique of discrimination that Auden could not safely make explicit (Miller 116). The encoding of personal concern beneath layers of historical and cultural reference is, Miller suggests, one of the poem's most sophisticated achievements.

D. The Role of the Individual Voice

The poem's eighth stanza arrives at what might be called its thesis statement: all I have is a voice / To undo the folded lie. This declaration of the poet's limited but defiant power against institutional dishonesty is simultaneously modest and resolute. As Haider reads it, the poet understands that he cannot reverse the machinery of war, cannot bring world leaders to account, cannot save the ordinary people caught in history's undertow  but he can speak the truth against the institutional lies that sustain political violence (Haider 35). Love  universal, mutual love  is proposed as the only genuine remedy, yet the poem presents this conclusion almost ironically, acknowledging how remote such a remedy is in the actual conditions of 1939.

 

IV. "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" as Political and Elegiac Commentary

 

A. Subverting Elegiac Convention for Political Purposes

"In Memory of W.B. Yeats" opens by breaking almost every convention of the elegiac tradition. Classical elegy mourns the dead with hyperbolic praise and recruits the natural world as a fellow mourner. Auden, by contrast, presents a natural world that is entirely indifferent to Yeats's passing. As Madlool and Jadwe demonstrate through their deconstructive reading, the poem's initial movement is one of deliberate marginalization: nature continues its business  wolves run through forests, rivers flow past fashionable quays  entirely unmoved by the death of one of the greatest poets of the age (Madlool and Jadwe 11516). Life proceeds; the brokers roar; the poor endure their familiar sufferings.

This indifference is not merely an aesthetic choice. It is, in the context of 1939, a profoundly political statement: the death of even the greatest poet changes nothing in the machinery of history. The European political catastrophe gathering momentum at the moment of Yeats's death does not pause to acknowledge his passing. There is a bitter irony here: the poet who devoted his life to Ireland and to art dies unnoticed by the world he sought to transform.

 

B. The Limits of Poetry as Political Force

The poem's most debated and philosophically significant claim is that poetry makes nothing happen. Auden does not mean by this that poetry is trivial or worthless. Rather, as the introduction to the poem in the uploaded source notes, he is insisting on a distinction between poetry as a historical agent  capable of changing political outcomes  and poetry as a form of cultural and human survival (Document 4). Yeats devoted his work to Ireland, but after his death, Ireland has her madness and her weather still. The poet's devotion to national transformation did not, could not, accomplish what politics and war accomplish  or fail to accomplish.

Poetry survives as what Auden calls a way of happening, a mouth  present, eloquent, continuous, but not directive. This formulation is taken up and extended by the transitivity analysis of Farooq et al., who find that the dominant process type in the poem is material (52.6%), reflecting a world of action and physical process in which events occur independently of the poet's will or voice (Farooq et al. 2392). The relational processes (31.57%) further enact the poem's thesis by describing conditions and attributes of the external world: the cold day, the frozen brooks, the roaring brokers  that carry on regardless of poetic achievement. The grammar of the poem linguistically performs the argument the poem makes philosophically.

C. The Poet's Legacy in a Politically Fractured World

Auden's treatment of Yeats's legacy is complex and, as Madlool and Jadwe argue, yields two opposing readings depending on the angle of interpretation. The surface or centered reading presents Yeats as diminished in death: his poetry will be modified in the guts of the living, reinterpreted beyond his control, potentially distorted by the unfamiliar affections of readers who did not know him (Madlool and Jadwe 11516–11517). His body becomes a metaphor for a collapsing political state: the provinces of his body revolted, the squares of his mind were empty  suggesting not heroic death but institutional disintegration.

Yet the deconstructive reading reveals what Madlool and Jadwe call the hidden glorification of Yeats that runs beneath the poem's surface marginalization (Madlool and Jadwe 11518). The poem's formal structure  moving from irregular free verse to the stately, marching rhythms of the third section  performs the dignity of elegy even as its content denies it. Auden even adopts Yeatsian stylistic patterns in the poem's final section, an act of imitation that constitutes a form of homage. The pervasive alliteration of words associated with death and loss  dark, dead, deserted, disfigured, disappeared, dying, day  creates, through sound, a mood of mourning that the poem's surface statements refuse to declare openly. The deconstructive lens thus reveals the poem as both more ambivalent and more generous than it first appears.

D. The Closing Political Imperative

Despite having argued that poetry makes nothing happen, Auden ends the poem with a series of urgent imperatives addressed to the poet: follow right to the bottom of the night, persuade us to rejoice, make a vineyard of the curse, teach the free man how to praise. This apparent contradiction between the claim of political impotence and the final call to action is, arguably, the poem's central complexity. As Madlool and Jadwe observe, the third section of the poem effectively reverses the poem's earlier marginalization of Yeats by assigning him a posthumous moral and political mission (Madlool and Jadwe 11518). Even after formally laying Yeats to rest, Auden addresses the poet as if he were alive, with work to do.

The political landscape against which these imperatives are issued is stark. Intellectual disgrace stares from every human face, and the seas of pity lie locked and frozen in each eye. In the nightmare of European political collapse, poetry is not offered as a solution  but it is offered as a necessity. The poet cannot transform history, but he can, through the farming of a verse, keep alive the human capacity for reflection, grief, praise, and joy. This is a diminished but not negligible role, and Auden insists upon it with something approaching desperation.

 

V. Comparative Analysis: Common Threads

Placed side by side, "September 1, 1939" and "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" reveal a remarkably coherent set of preoccupations. Both poems position the poet as a diagnostician of historical illness rather than a hero or propagandist. Both reflect Auden's Freudian inheritance and his conviction, as Haider notes, that genuine political transformation requires a change of heart rather than mere structural or political action (Haider 33). Both grapple with the tension between art's moral purpose and its historical impotence. Both were written in the same year, against the same backdrop of European political catastrophe.

The poems differ significantly in tone and mode. "September 1, 1939" is anxious, confessional, and direct in its political diagnosis, while "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" is elegiac and formally restrained, working through indirection and structural complexity. Yet both arrive at something like the same conclusion: the individual poetic voice, powerless to change history, is nonetheless obligated to speak  to undo the folded lie, to teach the free man how to praise. Poetry, for Auden, is not propaganda but witness: the honest, unflinching articulation of what history is doing to human beings.

Miller's biographical-contextual framework adds an important further dimension to the comparison. In both poems, Auden operates under the dual pressure of public expectation and private vulnerability. His position as an unofficial laureate required him to address the political crisis of 1939, while his identity as a homosexual man in a homophobic era required him to encode personal concerns within historical and cultural frameworks. The result, in both poems, is a writing of exceptional density and resonance  public in its address, personal in its concerns, and politically honest in its refusal of both easy consolation and easy despair.

 

VI. Conclusion

Auden's poetry of 1939 represents one of the most searching engagements in the English literary tradition with the question of what poetry can and cannot do in the face of political catastrophe. "September 1, 1939" and "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" neither retreated into purely aesthetic formalism nor descended into political polemic. Instead, they hold open the difficult space between art's limitations and its moral necessity, insisting that the poet's task is not to make history but to bear witness to it, diagnose its failures, and keep alive the human capacity for reflection, grief, and praise.

The critical frameworks applied in this essay  deconstructive reading, transitivity analysis, New Historicism, and biographical criticism  converge on a shared recognition. These poems are richer, more ambivalent, and more politically courageous than any single reading can fully exhaust. The hidden glorification of Yeats revealed by Madlool and Jadwe, the encoded personal-political commentary identified by Miller, the linguistic enactment of historical indifference traced by Farooq et al., and the anti-war moral argued by Haider all illuminate different facets of a body of work that remains, more than eight decades after its composition, urgently relevant to any serious engagement with the political responsibility of literature.

Auden's ambivalent position  acknowledging that poetry makes nothing happen while insisting nonetheless that the poet must sing, persuade, heal, and teach  is not a contradiction but a mature and honest account of art's place in the world. It is an account that refuses both the grandiose claim that poetry can change history and the defeatist withdrawal from any political engagement at all. In this refusal, Auden speaks not only to the crisis of 1939 but to every era in which human beings must decide whether and how to raise their voices in the face of political darkness.

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