Auden’s renewed faith

Pages:38-40
Anita Juneja and Prem Prakash Khatri (Department of English, Singhania University Pacheri Beri, Jhunjunu, Rajasthan)

It was no accident that Auden returned to Christianity shortly after Hitler attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, thus beginning World War II in Europe. The attack and Auden’s thoughts on it furnished the subject of one of his most famous poems, “September 1, 1939.” (Many years later Brodsky wrote a long essay on it, and after our own tragedy on 9/11/2001 one New Yorker recalled that the poem, along with another slightly earlier one, “Musée des Beaux Arts,” “sprang to renewed life……….as the embodiments of our mood, posted on Web sites and subway walls.”1) Before coming to the United States in early 1939, Auden’s varying leftist political convictions included a belief in the natural goodness of humans and the power of reason to bring about a better world. But the mounting attack of Hitler and his followers shook that belief. Auden himself later recalled how a few months after the invasion he went to a theater in a German-American district of Manhattan and saw a German newsreel showing the attack. He was shocked when “quite ordinary, supposedly harmless Germans in the audience…….. [began] “shouting ‘Kill the Poles.’”2 This experience fuelled his already gnawing doubts about the sufficiency of the liberal philosophy that had sustained him earlier in the 1930s. In an article that appeared in January 1941, he wrote, “But the whole trend of liberal thought has been to undermine faith in the absolute: in its laudable, and often successful, efforts to expose and remove particular irrationalities and injustices, it has tried to make reason the judge of whether a pact should or should not be kept.”3