All of this is only because I just wanted to say a poet’s words, over and over again, to someone. Poetry may make nothing happen in the world – nothing at all, as W. H. Auden said; it may exist only in the place and time of its own creation, but it moves and matters because it maps onto other minds and experiences in ways quite unintended by the poet.1 You may, if you’re lucky, make something new out of it, as did Terry Frost in 1949 in his painting Madrigal. A student at Camberwell School of Art, he was at home for the vacation (‘A Leamington Lad’ is the title of a 2015 exhibition of his work). He had research to do for an assignment and in Leamington Spa Public Library came across Auden’s poem ‘Madrigal’.2 The exhibition catalogue relates how ‘Frost was attracted [to Auden’s poem] because not only did he feel an empathy with the miners of the Midlands, but it described a miner leaving his work to meet his “Kate” and Frost’s wife was always known as “Kate” in her family’.3 ‘It was pretty obvious he wasn’t coming out of the bloody mine for a cup of tea’, said Sir Terry, much later on.4 The exhibition curator observed that Madrigal ‘marks a significant point in Frost’s career as it was his first abstract work’.5 Lucky Sir Terry to have the chance to make something new out of something so beautiful; to make a new thing that is also beautiful in its turn. And have the ability to do so. Frost’s Madrigal was a thing made in a future that hadn’t happened yet when Auden made his; it is poetry, in its widest meaning, created in a future ten years on from the time of Auden’s making.
This book isn’t about history-poems, poems about historical events, or ‘history-poetry’: no ‘Eve of Waterloo’ or ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ here; no Battle of Minden, a Poem. In Three Books (1769) by the entirely forgotten Sydney Swinney.6 This book will discuss W. H. Auden’s poetry, and other poetry of the modern era; some of it concerns Auden himself. Auden is so much present because I believed, for a very long time, that his poetry could teach me what kind of thing ‘history’ is, and what one is up to when doing it. (‘Doing history’ is an activity, a making of something; ‘doing history’ encompasses the whole activity: thinking about it, the work of imagination in knowing where to look for material, visualising it; researching it, writing it.) The distinction between ‘history’ and ‘historiography’ is important for what follows here; this book is organised by it. The questions put to Auden and other poets are historiographical rather than historical. Byron, for example, wrote historiographically when he versified about the meaning of an event already designated ‘historical’. ‘The Eve of Waterloo’ is an extract from his semi-autobiographical poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the first two cantos of which were published in 1812. Canto III, which includes ‘The Eve’, was written and published after Byron had visited the battle site as a tourist on his way to Switzerland in May 1816, so it was composed a year after the historical ‘Waterloo’ took place. It is not an account of the battle, or an act of personal testimony. It is a re-making of Byron’s witnessing the desolate field of conflict, and about the sorrows of war. It presents an interpretation of the meaning of one particular battle, and war in general. It can be read as a historiographical discussion of a historical event in poetic form, though many other readings are possible – and made. For one historian, noting that in 1812, just before his trip to Europe, Byron delivered his famous speech defending Luddite activity to the House of Lords, it marks the passage of a man from politician to poet.7
So too may Tennyson’s poem be read historiographically, as a cultural artefact produced by a poet who read a newspaper account of the Battle of Balaclava, in October 1854.8 If patriotism were ever attributed to Tennyson, or praise bestowed on the common soldiers blindly following orders, it is no longer so; his poem is now almost universally understood as one of the ways in which mid-Victorian sensibility was taught to encompass the blind stupidity of war. W. H. Auden knew something of this history of reading when in 1943 he opined that Tennyson ‘had the finest ear, perhaps of any English poet; he was also undoubtedly the stupidest; there was little about melancholia that he didn’t know; there was little else that he did’.9 As for poor Sydney Swinney, whom nobody reads, we might want to think of him as a poet writing testimonary history. He served as chaplain during the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) participating in the British army’s campaigns in Germany; he was an eye witness to the Battle of Minden. He gained a contemporary reputation as a poet, published translations of classical poetry and occasional verse and song. His epic poem celebrating British victory over the French at Minden was never finished, as he explained in the 1772 edition.10 The author himself and friends and colleagues did the work of annotating what there was of it; they provided historical context and setting in order to give the reader a more perfect account of an actual historical event, recorded by a witness to it. A reviewer (or perhaps Swinney himself) made apology for his use of the grandest form of all, the epic, but did not discuss its advantages and constraints.11 To eighteenth-century writers and readers it was perfectly obvious that an elevated topic – a victory for the British in a European conflict – demanded the most elevated of all poetic forms. Had they had a discussion about the appropriate form for writing the history of victors (for ‘History to the defeated/May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon’) it would have been interestingly historiographical.12 As it was, Christopher Smart’s puffery simply celebrated Swinney’s ‘EPIC ELEGANCE … Sing on, BRIGHT BARD’, at the poem’s end.13 Listening to a discussion that never took place among the poet and his friends, and once upon a time, I had a mind to call this book ‘Poetry for Historiographers’, but then I would have been read even less than the Revd Swinney has been.
Auden wrote a number of poems about historical events; two are famous for his later renunciation of their historiography. ‘Spain 1937’, quoted from above, was about an event – a civil war – that had already been designated ‘historical’. He had spent time in Spain, was witness to violence perpetrated by both sides during the Civil War. The poem is an act of historical testimony and Auden’s historiographical reflection on the events he described in 1937, and later, when he altered his account.14 He said that his original last lines, in which History can only express pity for the sorrows she records, equated ‘goodness with success’ and that this was a ‘wicked doctrine’. Auden also altered another’ ‘history’ poem, ‘September 1 1939’, both before and after publication. The by-now American Auden sits in a bar on Fifty-second Street brooding on the long European history that has brought her to war. He thinks of Fascism and Martin Luther, of the erosion of the individual in mass society, of imperialism, state power, and psychopaths made masters of the universe: ‘I and the public know/ What all schoolchildren learn,/Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return’.15 He contemplates History, not as a historian, nor indeed as a historiographer, but out of the habit which he told the young women readers of Mademoiselle they ought to cultivate: ‘we were pretty much alike’ he said of his own generation: ‘we learned one thing then of value which we must not forget, namely, to take a serious interest in history instead of thinking only about our own work and having a good time. We began to ask questions about how historical changes occur and to what extent we are each of us responsible, and the fact that our first answers were wrong matters very much less than the development of enough interest to go on asking’. Here, thinking about history – historical knowledge and historical understanding – was described as a kind of civic duty.16 He had known for a long time (as in the second epigraph to this book) that ‘no past dies’, that (in a proposition that will be discussed in Chapters 8 and 9 of this book) nothing is capable of being dispersed, or going away. He also knew that how you tell the past, or write history, depends on what you’re doing and thinking and making (‘on our activities’), right now. The fictional sixth former Dakin in Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys describes the historian’s everyday activities and mode of thinking in a series of questions to his teacher that are acutely poetic: ‘How does stuff happen, do you think? People decide to do stuff. Make moves. Alter things’ – though his author did not put Dakin’s last three in interrogative form.
Historiography is to history as poetics is to poetry. To modern students and scholars – to academics – in the West, ‘history’ means the study of past events and writing of them in narrative form; the narrative embodies an explanation of those events.17 ‘Historiography’ on the other hand, embraces a study of the methodology historians have used in the development of history as an academic discipline and the whole set of works that have clustered around a historical topic. Historians ask: ‘is there a historiography?’ (how many books and articles and arguments are there about the English crowd in the early nineteenth century? On the gendered nature of harvest work in the early modern period? Whatever) rather as sociologists might ask what ‘the literature’ on a topic is. Students in British universities writing a dissertation are often advised to include a historiography chapter or section at the beginning of their work, laying out what has recently been published on their topic, the current state of the argument, and how they intend to advance the field. A second, much older meaning of ‘historiography’ is indicated by the title ‘Historiographer Royal’, which appointment pertained in England from 1660–1737. The Historian-laureate praised and lauded that which is already deemed to be historically significant and worthy of praise. The list of office holders includes two who held simultaneous appointment as Poet Laureate (John Dryden and Thomas Shadwell). It was a salaried appointment, held under royal patronage. A Scottish Historiographer Royal has been in place from 1681 to the present day, with a gap between 1709 and 1763.18 Then, of late, ‘historiography’ has also come to mean something akin to the philosophy of history: there is interest in historians’ own covert or overt philosophy of event, time, and causality; interest in the meaning they ascribe to what they put before you, usually in writing. Historiography is a way of thinking about and analysing a thing (a fairly recent development of the modern world) called History.
‘Poetics’ is the study of the linguistic techniques used by writers making poetry and other literature. Its aim is to disinter the way in which a text works: its internal operation. Sometimes, in accounting for ‘poetics’ as an intellectual activity, the third-century BCE philosopher Aristotle is quoted: ‘I propose to treat of Poetry in itself and of its various kinds, noting the essential quality of each, to inquire into the structure of the plot as requisite to a good poem; into the number and nature of the parts of which a poem is composed; and similarly into whatever else falls within the same inquiry.’19 With what stuff does poetics do its work? It does it with verse, of course, though here in this book by ‘poetry’ I sometimes mean what early modern writers and readers understood by poetry, that is ‘usually verse, sometimes fiction’. Definitions and typologies of poetics emerged before the modern university system established separate disciplinary domains for literature (including poetry) and history, towards the end of the nineteenth century. In the earlier century, in schools, colleges, dissenting academies, and in some of the universities outside Oxford and Cambridge, English and History were commonly taught together.20 Their separation, as forms of composition and understanding, and the traces of their indissoluble partnership, which has lasted from at least the seventeenth century until the present day, are the topics of this book. A poetics of history-writing is also possible, and has been discussed in the modern literature, though the ‘poetics’ in ‘poetics of history’ usually refers to the ideas and ideologies employed in a work of history rather than history as a form of expression or writing.21 The idea of History is indeed beautiful – and poetic: that the past is irretrievably gone, yet still lives; that the written history is precipitated out of the Everything of the past, all of it, in a perpetual act of remaking.22 This idea of history, which emerged in the long nineteenth century, is discussed throughout this book.
It is sometimes said that when historians do take any notice of the written artefacts produced by poets they are more likely to plunder them for content – for quotations to support the historical argument they are making – than they are to pay attention to them as forms of composition. In this way we ‘detach the content of a poem … from its properties of form and genre’. This is a naivety dressed up for misinterpretation, says Blair Worden.23 We’re just asking for it: the ensuing condescension of literary scholars. But, in fact, literary scholars are usually indulgent towards historians attempting to embed literary form and genre in the structure of their historical story. They even appear not to mind very much about historians speaking of poetry, for the ‘history’ in which their attempts are clothed is just more grist to their own critical mill. Historians have been kind as well, when I’ve done a literary turn in print: politely puzzled for example, at my spinning the yarn of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights in Master and Servant. Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age.24 But Nelly Dean as narrator of capitalist modernity has obviously not done much for their reading of proto-industrialisation and domestic service in the Pennine region, c.1780 to 1810. This can only mean that I haven’t done a very good job of making literature matter for the writing of history.
The poetry that threads through this book is W. H. Auden’s. I have loved Auden’s poetry very much, though lately, and as shall be related, have learned that I must care for it in a new way, for the old one will no longer do. I had believed that Auden taught me about history as a written form and cultural activity; about the ways history gets written; about History’s quiddity. But you love for the wrong reasons; or the shape of what you love dissolves as new knowledge washes over it. The poetry lessons remain, however; you go on reciting the Past as if there were one (‘he merely told/the unhappy Present to recite the Past/like a poetry lesson’), which is why this book is about the poetics of history (the poetics of the written ‘history’) and about its poetry.25 Often these thirty years past, I have thought that as a historian I needed permission for my love. It was a comfort, then, that Richard Hoggart appreciated and wrote about Auden and his poetry, for he conferred a kind of licence to do both. He had more right than me though, for he was appointed to Birmingham University’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies as an Auden scholar, and Auden himself appreciated – said he liked – Hoggart’s 1951 study of his poetry, and Hoggart’s own Uses of Literacy.26 And, of course, Hoggart was not a historian. This one has plundered Auden’s Homage to Clio (1960) for epigraphs more times than she cares to remember. ‘Homage to Clio’ – his homage to the Muse of History herself; the title of a poem and of a collection of history-poems – compels me. At the centre of Homage to Clio is Auden’s eponymous twenty-thee stanza poem, conceived and written on the Italian island of Ischia in 1955, published in the same year, and collected together with many of his other ‘history’ poems of the post-War years in 1960.27 Here, the poet reveals the Muse of History as a blankfaced girl, always, forever, present when anything happens – anything at all, at any time – but with absolutely nothing to say. At any moment ‘… we, at haphazard/And unseasonably, are brought face to face/By ones, Clio, with your silence. After that/Nothing is easy’. There are two mysteries here that I have long wanted to fathom. First there is Clio’s silence: she has nothing to say. But in the iconography of the West over the 2000 years, Clio has quite often been depicted with a pen in her hand. When she transmogrified into Historia, the little emblem of history that every jobbing printer had in his shop (‘I’ll have a nice Dignita as a frontispiece, and finish with a Historia. Thank you, my man’), she invariably looked up from the book in which she was writing.28 Is writing not a kind of saying? Is Auden’s Historia silent on the page as well as mute in her person? It seems to be the case that she is. Then, in a striking reversal of the taken-for-granted chronological relationship between Memory and History, the poet entreats the Muse of History (briefly, for these lines of the poem, in guise as the Muse of Time, a conflation later to be discussed) to ‘teach us our recollections’. And yet Western historiography teaches that History (professional, university-based history emerging during the long nineteenth century) usurped the functions of Memory. At the beginning of things, Mnemosyne was the mother of all the Muses (including Clio, History’s own), at least according to some authorities of the Ancient World. Modern historians have believed the old authorities for the main part in giving various accounts of how History (as a way of thinking and as an academic discipline) came into the world, and what its relationship to Memory has been, over the last 300 years or so. Jacques Le Goff used the myth in order to begin his account of how History usurped the functions of Memory, over a very long period of time indeed, but accelerating at the end of the eighteenth century with the early development of history as a subject of inquiry in the academy, and later as information to be imparted to whole populations in European systems of mass education. Le Goff’s 1977 account suggested that History in its modern mode is just one more technology of remembering.29 Recently, the chronological relationship of memory to history has been less insisted on;30 but Auden’s suggestion that History – or Clio – or his expressionless girl – might teach us how to perform the everyday cognitive activity of remembering has always struck as something to understand. Or to try to understand. The supplication to Clio to teach us our recollections – our memories – could as well be a description of history’s function in the modern era, for formal, academic history does provide much of the material by which we remember, individually or collectively, things of which we have no direct experience: the Second World War for example, or the films our great-granny enjoyed in the 1930s; except that here, Auden addressed the Muse of Time, not Clio the Muse of History and subject of his poem; and Time, as he once famously observed, can do nothing but say I told you so.31
I thought Auden’s poetry to be so historiographically acute and beautiful that sometimes I could see no way forward for my own writing but to carry on repeating his words, until the end of my days.32 I knew that he never set foot in a local record office, never entered the portals of the National Archives (in his lifetime, the Public Record Office); but he understood, I believed, what history was, and what history meant. I read his fabulous and frequent musings of the post-War years as meditations on the meaning and philosophy of History, that is of history as a made and fashioned thing, rather than as historians’ quotidian activities among documents, files, and registers.33 I thought Auden’s history-poems to be about Clio – History herself – asking questions about what she, herself, is: with his Clio I dimly made out ‘history’ as a way of thinking, and a way of writing; as a cognitive and literary form of the Western world that emerged on the long road to European modernity.34
Auden was particularly important for thinking about the relationship between the extraordinary and the everyday as experienced by historical actors and in the histories written about them. (How does stuff happen, do you think? People decide to do stuff …). When social historians (like me) use the terms ‘experience’ and ‘everyday life’ they do so in order ‘to side with the dominated against those who would dominate … to invoke … those lives that have traditionally been left out of historical accounts, swept aside by the onslaught of events instigated by elites’, says Ben Highmore.35 ‘Everyday’ has been my shorthand. How else could I read Auden’s ‘Makers of History’ (1955), but as an exegesis on Clio’s affection for the workers of the world? The poem tells that she loves ‘those who bred them better horses,/Found answers to their questions, made their things’. You must emphasise them and their as you recite: they are the owners and exploiters, the high-ups; ‘the cold advisors of yet colder kings … who scheme, regardless of the poor man’s pang’; those for whom others labour.36 And it is so satisfying to see poets – house-poets, minstrels, balladeers, and laureates in royal households – kept like servants for the task of writing: to see ‘Even those fulsome/Bards they boarded’ as the workers.37
Auden’s poetry shadowed my most recent book about one of those workers, a Nottinghamshire stockingmaker in the era of Luddism. Writing An Everyday Life, I made a memo to myself: whatever happened, I must not do a ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ with the framework knitter Joseph Woolley on whose diaries the book is based. Auden’s poem of that title inscribes a particular relationship between grand, large-scale historical events and the everyday. In ‘Musée’, in an art gallery, someone (perhaps the poet himself) muses on how the old masters always got the relationship between the ordinary and extraordinary just right. Ordinary life carries on whilst the extraordinary (a boy falling out of the sky) is a scarcely noticed backdrop. Meals are eaten, roads are walked, windows are opened and shut by people who, if they knew what History was being made just out of their line of vision, might not want it to happen at all. Whatever happens – whatever disaster, failure, suffering, astonishing event occurs – there always must be some ‘who did not specially want it to happen’.38 It is a poem you want to put before every undergraduate student of history, to demonstrate the idea of historical contingency. Practically, as a writer – a historian – I did not want to say that Joseph Woolley the stockingmaker wanted or did not want the Luddite rebellion ‘to happen’, for I simply did not have enough information about him to come to a conclusion either way. More philosophically, I thought that to ‘do a Musée’ would be to place the extraordinary thing (Luddism in a time of state-sponsored terror; a boy falling out of the sky) at the centre of the frame, with the small, unconsidered, less important lives and happenings enacted at the periphery of the grand narrative centre of a History. To have done that would be to say that Luddism was historically significant but that Joseph Woolley was not. To have written in that way would have been to do a ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’.
In modern social theory the Everyday is: ‘someone walking dully along’, opening a window, having their tea, or setting up a knitting frame: performing a routine of some kind that has been done a thousand times before. It is not reflected on, or subjected to analysis by the performer or historical subject, because it is a conceptual framework in the observer’s mind, not the mind of those walking, or putting the kettle on, or drinking with Joseph Woolley down the Coach and Horses public house, Clifton, Nottinghamshire in 1801. But there is a corrective to the social-theory ‘everyday’, in historian Michel de Certeau’s description of the way in which ordinary people (all of us) theorise everyday life. He said they were and we are ‘unrecognized producers, poets of their own acts, silent discoverers of their own paths in the jungle of functionalist rationality’.39 Just noticing it, thinking about it, day dreaming, perhaps writing about it, is a poetic act.
In the 1770s, philosopher and language-theorist James Beattie described the relationship between the everyday, the extraordinary, and the writing of them both (which he called ‘poetic arrangement’) in the following way:
I hear a sudden noise in the street and run to see what is the matter. An insurrection has happened, a great multitude is brought together, and something very important is going forward. The scene before me … is in itself so interesting, that for a moment or two I look in silence and wonder. By and by, when I get time for reflection, I begin to inquire into the cause of all this tumult, and what it is that people would be at; and one who is better informed than I, explains the affair … or perhaps I make it out for myself, from the words and actions of the persons principally concerned. – This is a sort of picture of poetical arrangement …40
He did not mean that he wrote verse, or poetry, out of what he saw, heard tell, and thought about (though you might, and some of the examples used in his essay were epic poems). ‘Poetical arrangement’ described the intentional organisation of the experience of an event. It suited the ‘order and manner in which the actions of other men strike ones senses’ and was thus ‘a more exact imitation of human affairs’ than the historical arrangement he then went on to discuss. The formal organisation of his poetic telling was a product of thinking about it; his active ‘reflection’ on it. He made (in this instance) no distinction between telling and writing (though writing is strongly implied throughout these passages). ‘Just noticing’ is the poetic act; the event takes on meaning by the observer working out ‘what it is that people would be at’ as they do stuff … make moves. Alter things.
When Beattie had finished describing the extraction of the extraordinary from the everyday as a primary poetic act, he went on to speculate about how a historian might write up the disturbance in the street. A historian, said Beattie, would behave differently; she would provide a different kind of explanation. He would begin his narrative not with the noise in the street, but with context, perhaps ‘the manners of … [the] age’ and a description of the political constitution of whatever country he or she was writing about. Then he would introduce a ‘particular person’: birth, parents, social circumstances – a full biography of the life events that shaped his subject as someone of particular viewpoint and opinion. The historian will have in mind a cumulative event (the thing to be explained), like the revolution which was Beattie’s implied example. The historian (unlike the poet) has stepped away from the window, focused in imagination on one particular person, one ‘turbulent spirit’, one rebel or revolutionary. She will then provide an account of how her historical subject got acquainted with ‘other turbulent spirits like himself’, and how later found himself rioting in the street. And so the narrative will proceed, ‘unfolding, according to the order of time, the causes, principles, and progress of ’ – whatever was being described. The purpose of it all would be to explain the already-given event or person. History-writing like this, said Beattie, is ‘more favourable to calm information’; but the poetical method has the advantage as far as the pleasures of ‘the passions and imagination’ are concerned.41
By invoking the Aristotlean distinction between historical and literary composition, Beattie indicated how very much the differences between them preoccupied eighteenth-century commentators. One recent translation of Aristotle’s Poetics (c.330 BCE) describes the differences between poet and historian like this:
The distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse. You might put the work of Herodotus into verse, and it would still be a species of history; it consists really in this, that the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history.42
For the eighteenth-century critic, the distinction between prose and poetic composition was the least interesting difference between a historian and a poet.43 They concentrated on the lessons about time and futurity that the distinction provided: ‘the object of the poet is not to relate what has actually happened, but what may possibly happen, either with probability, or from necessity … [the historian ] relates what actually has been done’, said one.44 In Beattie’s ‘picture of poetical arrangement’ all is hustle and bustle; in his story of what is happening, the rioters in the street are inseparable from the poet at the window, who is perpetually on the edge of telling about what is going on, or busy asking questions about what he will, any moment now, make into the story of it. The poetical arrangement teeters on the edge of a future in which it will already have been told (perhaps it never will be; perhaps the not-being-told is equally the future). The historian, on the other hand, already knows what is to be told, for he has in mind explaining something that has happened. So Beattie differed from his contemporaries in the quiet conviction that the questions he addressed were about writing, and in his concern for actual poets and actual historians doing the writing (or the telling).
By the end of the eighteenth century, the comparison between poetry and history was a commonplace of magazine and educational literature: the allure of one, the dullness of the other were laid out for many readerships: ‘their difference, according to [Aristotle] … is not in the form, or stile, but in the very nature of the things. But how so? History only paints what has happened, poetry what might have happened.’45 But the line between the two was there to be traversed: some contemporary songsters were delighted to contemplate mash-up history and poetry.46 No mash-up, though, for 1813 readers of The Lady’s Magazine: for them, the independent provinces of History and Poetry had been demarcated so clearly that they could hear Clio being told that
’tis thine to bid us be historical,
And write of wars, and plagues, and queens, and kings;
Not in poetic style, or allegorical,
As the fond Love-Muse sings,
But in plain prose: – then bid me be a proser;
Else to write history would be a poser.
The ladies should aim to do better than the eighteenth-century historians: ‘Teach me to beat Hume, Smollet, Belsham, Rapin,/Or even him who wrote the “Cheats of Scapin” ’. The last, Thomas Otway, whose farce was first staged in 1676, was really not-a-historian (‘him Thalia taught the farce to scribble’) but the ladies and the Muse were meant to know enough of poesie ‘for the rhime’s sake, to raise no quibble’ at his inclusion on the list.47 These eighteenth-century perspectives on history and poetry are useful for understanding Auden as a poet and as a historical thinker.
In the following account of Auden’s history-poems, you have to do all three of the things suggested by Auden and Beattie: put the kettle on and ignore the boy falling out of the sky; go to the window and involve yourself, if only in imagination, in what is happening in the street; turn away and meditate on how stuff happens: how, and out of what earlier histories, Auden wrote his history-poems. You will be neither historian nor poet as you do these things; rather just somebody or other trying to make something else – something new – out of the material of the world.
As a historical thinker, Auden worked within the framework of Christianity. I had not known, until very recently, how much there is to understand of the Christianity he returned to in the 1940s, and the eschatological, or at least, grand-theory, histories he read before the production of the ‘history-poetry’ discussed here.48 The long and short of it was that my earlier belief that Auden taught me about history as a literary form, as a form of understanding and about the ways history gets written, had to be abandoned. Auden actually said that the Clio to whom he paid homage was, in fact, not Clio or Historia at all. He told several friends – it’s on the record and repeated in several handbooks and guides to his poetry – that she was, in fact, the Virgin Mary, and had been so since 1955.49 I’d read that ten years ago, and insouciantly dismissed it: what did I care about the intentions of poets? That’s the intentionalist fallacy, isn’t it? – an error I was warned at school against committing. The point was, surely, that the poem existed as a statement about the meaning of history: that Clio was a historiographical statement of W. H. Auden? And even if she wasn’t the Muse of History, I could write about her as if she were. That was before I had encountered Auden’s return to Anglicanism at the end of the 1930s (in its Episcopal form, for he was now resident in the New York, though not yet a US citizen). In October 1940, while he was still recommending secular orthodoxies in his prose, says Edward Mendelson, he quietly began attending the local Episcopal church and rejoined the Anglican Communion he had left at 15.50
Auden read so very much grand-theory history, popular in the 1920s, 1930s, and then again in the 1950s, that I had to do so as well. He does not appear to have cared very much for Spengler and Toynbee, which would at least have given me a foothold; the ‘big’ historians he cared about were equally grand but less well-known philosophers of Western history.51 Now – my duty as a historian! – I must attempt to understand Auden as a Christian, a Christian poet, and a Christian philosopher of time and history. Edward Mendelson provides a brilliant means for relating Auden’s Christian history to the Marxist history and related teleological and purposive historical thinking he appeared to espouse in the 1930s. I had first learned of Auden’s apostasy in this regard from E. P. Thompson, had accepted Thompson’s figuring of Christianity as the cause and culprit of Auden’s defection; I had been able to go blithely on my way, quoting the bits of Auden that suited my purposes, as I always had.52 But the realisation that I was actually going to have to read Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy’s Out of Revolution (1938) and Denis de Rougement’s Love in the Western World (1940), Charles Cochrane’s Christianity and Classical Culture. A Study of Thought and Action from Augustus to Augustine (1940), and Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Nature and Destiny of Man (1941), provoked much anxiety. It was not knowing what kind of thing they are that troubled me. It was different with Auden’s influences from Kierkergaard or indeed from The Confessions of St Augustine. Mendelson tells us that in 1954, just before the Homage to Clio cycle of poems was composed, Auden was reading Augustine; Auden wrote about Augustine undertaking the first serious analysis of the experience of time, and about Augustine’s distinction between natural and historical time ‘which Christianity encouraged if it did not invent’.53 I had read – been taught to read – Being and Nothingness and The City of God as historical texts, examples of Western thought, aspects of cultural history. But Auden’s was so very Christian a historiography; the reading list inscribed theology as historiography; and because it is theology as historiography, it is so resolutely Western–Occidental in its understanding of the past, that my spirit … withered and died. It wasn’t that I had no experience of making this kind of attempt. I worked very hard (and willingly so) at understanding what the Revd John Murgatroyd (1719–1806), of Slaithwaite, West Yorkshire, understood of his Anglican God, so that I might tell how he was able to give houseroom and love and care to his household servant’s little bastard daughter (how that stuff happened). And he loved little Eliza’s mother Phoebe Beatson too, and not in a different register, but out of the love God had inscribed on all his Creatures.54 Murgatroyd’s motions of the heart were a product of Christian caritas and the West Riding Enlightenment. But one reviewer at least of Master and Servants thought I didn’t do a very good job; that an unbeliever couldn’t possibly have done a good job of understanding a broadly latitudinal Anglican in the early Age of Atonement. (I tried to put John Murgatroyd’s theology in place for the period from about 1740 to the early years of the new century.)
Edward Mendelson uses the term ‘purposive’ for the kind of Marxist history he says that Auden stopped reading c.1940, and also for the grand-theory history, like Rosenstock-Huessy’s, that he took to after that.55 ‘Purposive’ is an apposite term for the last, for in much Christian thought, the course of past events is seen as goal- directed: they are events with somewhere to go, and some final meaning to demonstrate. More generally, ‘purposive’ is a term quite widely used by literary critics discussing historical work, but is generally avoided by historians unless they are having a good laugh at the ridiculousness of states and governments seeking to manipulate ‘the lessons of the past’ for their own purposes.56 The grand-theory, purposive histories that Auden read and enjoyed from the late 1930s onwards were so demanding of my understanding – I was so inadequate a reader of them – that I failed to notice, for a very long time, that he also possessed the ordinary, everyday political and social history of anyone educated beyond elementary school level in the twentieth-century UK. He had the same historical story of the industrial revolution, the scientific and French revolutions; of Romanticism in relation those revolutions in manners, thought, and politics; of the Decline of Feudalism; of the English Civil War, the Rise of the Gentry; the transmission of culture in English society by the eighteenth-century Church of England … as me; or as anyone who sat through history lessons between about 1900 and 1980, in school or university. He learned of new work in social and political history through the books he reviewed. In 1952, for example, using a taken-for-granted knowledge of the historical past in Britain, he told his overseas readers about the debt social reform in England owed to religion: ‘the British Labour Party for example … [is] closely associated with the Evangelical movement’. To support this argument he discussed Britain’s and Europe’s different conceptions of ‘revolution’, and conducted a brisk survey of political history from the Tudors to the execution of Charles I.57 He bemoaned those undergraduates (‘and not stupid ones’) who insisted that ‘Pickwick Papers was written in the 1890s … lack of any sense of historical order is just as great an obstacle to the enjoyment and understanding of literature as a tiny vocabulary’.58 He also discussed the methodologies of cultural, social and literary historians, as shall be later discussed; but it is true that this was done in his prose writing, not in his poetry, and that most critics have disinterred Auden’s ‘big’ history rather than his commentary on the social and the cultural variety – or the small.
Auden’s disavowal of Marxist history and historiography has been emphasised, but he retained one of its fundamental perspectives right through to the 1960s, in his discussions of poiesis. Poiesis (Ancient Greek) derives from the term ‘to make’. The verb signifies an action that both transforms and continues the world in and out of which things are made. It is what Karl Marx had in mind when he declared in 1852 (as in one of the epigraphs to this book) that ‘the social revolution … can only create its poetry from the future, not from the past’, and in the same work, that ‘Men make their own history…’. In 1939, Auden wrote about the immense contribution Marxism had made ‘to our understanding of history, in its emphasis on Man the Maker, the producer of wealth, as opposed to the obsession of earlier historians with Man the Politician, the consumer. It has made us realise that history is made up of an immense number of individual acts of which by far the greater number are not acts of warfare or diplomacy, but acts of physical work with physical materials, earth, stone, metal, etc., and that it is Man the Maker who is the prime cause of historical change, for he creates wealth for the consumption of which Man the Politician struggles.’59
This account of Auden’s history poetry – of Auden as a theorist of history; of Auden the historiographer – avoids biography for the main part. There is so much brilliant accounting for Auden’s life, his poetry, and his sexuality, that it would be stupid to attempt to add to it. I have tried to keep myself on the straight and narrow of my quest: to understand what theory of history is expressed in his poetry; and why it is so expressed. I am interested in his conventional historical education as a child and adolescent, not just because I’m a historian bound to think ‘context’ in the way James Beattie described in the 1770s, but because it may add something to new accounts of how the common historical imagination is made in different times and places. These are questions put in Alison Landsberg’s Engaging the Past. As in much recent public history, Landsberg follows history to the places where it is made outside the academy: in film and among film audiences and in television docudrama (though not to primary school classrooms, or to poetry writing, which in this book are sites of history’s making). When Mendelson said that historical thought was an essential element of nearly everything Auden wrote during the mid 1950s, he raised the same kind of questions as Landsberg, though he never thought of Auden as an ordinary historical thinker, nor of Auden doing everyday ‘history-in-society’ as described by Jorma Kalela.60 And then, as she must, and right now, Clio makes her entry, stage right, points to her book in which she writes everything down; all of it; everything; draws my attention to the time line there inscribed (she may or may not be the Queen of Heaven but she is certainly Queen of the Time Line) and then points – still mute – to the words: ‘Cold War’. Auden has to be considered as a poet of the Cold War, in double exile, from England and from the US, writing in his Ischian and Kirschstetten summers, all the way through the 1950s and 1960s.
There is a ghost of the history that Auden did not live through – of what he missed – that may haunt this book as it has haunted the writing of it. The ghost is all that frames a common post-War experience in the UK. He left in 1939. Conscription, the site of battle, the home front, bombing, Blitz, and rationing; all of these are frequently mentioned in the literature as what he did not experience. He was never a citizen of the British Welfare State; his Cold War was a US Cold War, not a British one. But far more significant for the Auden story of history and poetry, are the absent battles of the books, the bitter wranglings of the clerisy in 1950s and 1960s Britain. He may have read the excoriating attacks from the Old World, and from the old and new left, and new-New Left, on the revisions he made to his political poetry of the late 1930s.61 But he never had to sit in a small claustrophobic room (university seminar room, one for public meetings hired out by the hour, the private function room of some pub or other) and listen to the Boy Marxists explain to him, in patient and exhaustive detail, exactly why his position was so very incorrect. But I think he did not read the charge list drawn up against him, by E. P. Thompson, for example, in regard to ‘Spain’.62 I wish he had written another ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, thirty years on from the first, in 1966, say, to tell how later experiences rewrote his earlier autobiographical and political entry in Clio’s book.
This book is about poets who have written (historiographically speaking) about history, about the poetics of the very idea of ‘history’ itself, the long persistence of the philosophy that separates one from the other; and about the choices there have been, in different times and places, of ‘telling what had been’.63 In the end, we might discover more about what it is we do when we write history, and read it, too. But before the utility of the ancient opposition of poetry to history is discussed, we shall consider some really useful knowledge about poetry, for historians.
1 W. H. Auden, ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats (d. Jan 1939)’, Collected Shorter Poems, 1927–1957, Faber and Faber, London, 1966, p. 142.
2 ‘Madrigal’ was first published in New Verse, 30 (June 1938) as part of the documentary script ‘Coalface’. See below, pp. 55, 150.
3 Chris Stephens, Terry Frost, Tate Publishing, London, 2004, p. 17, quoted Chloe Frost (ed.), Sir Terry Frost R. A. (1915–2003). A Leamington Lad. Catalogue published to accompany the exhibition held at Leamington Spa Art Gallery and Museum, 24 July–11 October 2015, Warwick District Council, 2015, p. 28.
4 Stephens, Terry Frost, p. 17.
5 Exhibition Notes, Sir Terry Frost R. A. (1915–2003), A Leamington Lad, Leamington Spa Art Gallery and Museum, 2015; Madrigal, 1949, Oil on Canvas, Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum.
6 Sydney Swinney, The Battle of Minden, A Poem. In Three Books … Enriched with Critical Notes by Two Friends, and with Explanatory Notes by the Author, Dodsley, London, 1769–1772. The Battle of Minden (1 August 1759) was a decisive engagement of the Seven Years’ War.
7 ‘The Eve of Waterloo’ is part of Canto III, stanzas 21–28. It was not anthologised – did not exist as a separate entity – until the 1830s. Philip Shaw, Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2002, pp. 165–191; Carla Pomarè, Byron and the Discourses of History, Ashgate, Farnham, 2013; John Beckett, ‘Politician or poet? The 6th Lord Byron in the House of Lords, 1809–13’, Parliamentary History, 34:2 (2015), pp. 201–217.
8 Stefanie Markovits, The Crimean War in the British Imagination, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009.
9 W. H. Auden, ‘Introduction to A Selection from the Poems of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’ (1943), Prose Volume II. 1939–1948, Edward Mendelson (ed.), Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 2002, pp. 203–212.
10 M. John Cardwell, ‘Swinney, Sidney (1721–1783)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004.
11 Swinney, Battle of Minden, p. 121.
12 Auden’s first version of ‘Spain’ (1937) from which he later removed these lines. See below, p. 149.
13 Christopher Smart, ‘VERSES TO THE AUTHOR on his POEM’, Swinney, Battle, p. 129. There were only two books published, not the three of the title. Book 2 has a half-title and a preface dated 1772.
14 E. P. Thompson, ‘Outside the Whale’ (1960), The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, Merlin, London, 1978, pp. 1–34; Edward Mendelson, Early Auden (1981), Faber and Faber, London, 1999, pp. 304–332; Humphrey Carpenter, W. H. Auden. A Biography (1981, 1983), Faber and Faber, London, 2010, pp. 217–218; Scott Hamilton, The Crisis of Theory. E. P. Thompson, the New Left and Postwar British Politics, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2011, pp. 65–77.
15 Mendelson, Early Auden, pp. 324–330; Richard R. Bozorth, ‘American Homosexuality, 1939–1972’, Tony Sharpe (ed.), W. H. Auden in Context, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2013, pp. 99–106.
16 W. H. Auden, ‘Then and Now: 1935–1950’, Prose Volume III. 1949–1955, Edward Mendelson (ed.), Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 2008, pp. 164–168; orig. Mademoiselle, February 1950.
17 Hayden White, ‘The Historical Text as Literary Artifact’, Robert H. Canary and Henry Kozicki (eds), The Writing of History. Literary Form and Historical Understanding, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison WI, 1978, pp. 41–62; Paul A. Roth, ‘Narrative explanations. The case of history’, History and Theory, 27 (1988), pp. 1–13; David Carr, ‘Narrative explanation and its malcontents’, History and Theory, 47:1 (2008), pp. 19–30; Tobias Klauk, ‘Is there such a thing as narrative explanation?’, JLT 10:1 (2016), pp. 110–138.
18 See the illuminating interview with the Historiographer Royal of Scotland: Fiona Watson, ‘Interview: Chris Smout (Historiographer Royal)’, History Scotland, 1 (2001), pp. 61–66.
19 Aristotle, The Poetics, trans. S. H. Butcher, Section 1, Part I; The Internet Classics Archive, classics@classics.mit.edu (accessed 12 October 2017).
20 Blair Worden, ‘Historians and poets’, Huntingdon Library Quarterly, 68:1–2 (2005), pp. 71–93.
21 Robert F. Berkhofer Jr, ‘The challenge of poetics to (normal) historical practice’, Poetics Today, 9:2 (1988), pp. 435–452; Philippe Carrard, Poetics of the New History. French Historical Discourse from Braudel to Chartier, Johns Hopkins University Press, Maryland MD, 1992; Jacques Rancière, The Names of History. On the Poetics of Knowledge, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis MN, 1994; Philippe Carrard, ‘History as a kind of writing. Michael de Certeau and the poetics of historiography’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 100:2 (2001), pp. 465–483. For history as a genre of writing, see Devoney Looser, British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670–1820, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD, 2000; Anders Ingram, Writing the Ottomans. Turkish History in Early Modern England, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2015.
22 David Carr, Narrative and History, Indiana University Press, Bloomington IN, 1986; Carolyn Steedman, Dust, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2001, pp. 142–170.
23 Worden, ‘Historians and poets’, p. 76.
24 Carolyn Steedman, Master and Servant. Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007, pp. 193–216.
25 W. H. Auden, ‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud (d. Sept. 1939)’, Collected Shorter Poems, pp. 166–170.
26 Richard Hoggart, Auden. An Introductory Essay, Chatto and Windus, London, 1950; Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy. Aspects of Working Class Life, Chatto and Windus, London, 1957; Simon Hoggart, ‘Foreword’, Sue Owen (ed.), Rereading Richard Hoggart. Life, Literature, Language, Education, Cambridge Scholars, Newcastle, 2008, pp. xii–xiii. Also Appendix ‘Letter from W. H. Auden to Richard Hoggart, 7 January 1958’, idem, pp. 175–177.
27 W. H. Auden, Homage to Clio, Faber and Faber, London, 1960.
28 As in various editions of Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia, or, Moral Emblems, from 1603f.; The English Emblem Book Project, Penn State University Libraries, https://libraries.psu.edu/about/collections/english-emblem-book-project/ripa-toc (accessed 12 October 2017).
29 Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory (1977), Columbia University Press, New York NY, 1992, pp. 81–90.
30 Joan Tumblety (ed.), Memory and History. Understanding Memory as Source and Subject, Routledge, Abingdon, 2013.
31 W. H. Auden, ‘If I Could Tell You’ (1940), Collected Shorter Poems, p. 201.
32 Carolyn Steedman, ‘The Poetry of It (Writing History)’, Angelika Bammer and Ruth- Ellen Joeres (eds), The Future of Scholarly Writing. Critical Interventions, Palgrave Macmillan, New York NY, 2015, pp. 215–226.
33 ‘Historical thought was an essential element of almost every poem Auden wrote in 1955’. Edward Mendelson, Later Auden, Faber and Faber, London, 1999, pp. 390–392.
34 The most succinct and resonant account of these processes, of heart and mind and writing, remains Franco Moretti’s Way of the World. The Bildungsroman in European Culture, Verso, London, 1987, pp. 3–75.
35 Ben Highmore (ed.), The Everyday Life Reader, Routledge, London and New York NY, 2002, p. 1; Carolyn Steedman, An Everyday Life of the English Working Class. Work, Self and Sociability in the Early Nineteenth Century, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2013, pp. 265–266.
36 W. H. Auden, ‘Makers of History’, Collected Shorter Poems, pp. 297–298; probably written a few weeks before ‘Homage to Clio’, says Edward Mendelson, Later Auden, p. 397. For the ‘cold advisors’, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Political Essay on the Existing State of Things (1811), p. 11; http://poeticalessay.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/# (accessed 12 October 2017).
37 W. H. Auden, ‘Makers of History’, Homage to Clio, Faber and Faber, London, 1960, pp. 30–31.
38 W. H. Auden, ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, Collected Shorter Poems, p. 123.
39 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, Berkeley CA, 1984, p. xviii.
40 James Beattie, ‘On Poetry’, Essays. On Poetry and Music, as they affect the Mind. On Laughter, and Ludicrous Composition. On the Utility of Classical Learning, William Creech, Edinburgh and E. & C. Dilly, London, 1776, p. 104.
41 Beattie, Essays, p. 105.
42 The Poetics of Aristotle, translated by Ingram Bywater, with a preface by Gilbert Murray, is in the public domain: www.authorama.com/the-poetics-10.html (accessed 12 October 2017). Also Aristotle, Poetics, trans. and intro. Kenneth McLeish, Nick Hern Books, London, 1998, pp. 13–14.
43 Henry James Pye, A Commentary Illustrating the Poetic of Aristotle, by Examples taken chiefly from the Modern Poets. To which is prefixed, a new and corrected edition of the translation of the Poetics, John Stockdale, London, 1792, pp. 25–28 (‘The Object of Poetry and How It Differs from History’).
44 Pye, A Commentary, p. 25.
45 ‘It is the end of oratory to persuade, of poetry to please, and history to instruct by the recital of true events’, The Freemasons’ Magazine; or, General and Complete Library, Vol. 5, London, 1793; Vicesimus Knox, Essays Moral and Literary, 13th edn, Vol. 1, London, 1793, p. 211.
46 Or to ‘Jumble together music, poetry, and history’, as in The Apollo. Being An Elegant Selection of Approved Modern Songs, Favourite Airs From Celebrated Operas, &C. To Which Are Prefixed, Twelve New and Original Songs (Never Before Published) Written to Beautiful & Familiar Tunes, for the author, Bath, 1791, p. 167.
47 Mr. J. M. Lacey, ‘Invocations, Serious and Comic’, The Lady’s Magazine; Or Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex, Appropriated Solely to Their Use and Amusement, 44 (1813), pp. 192–193. For Rapin, below, pp. 224–225. William Belsham was a contemporary political historian. Thalia is the Muse of Comic Poetry.
48 Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb, ‘Auden in History’, Tony Sharpe (ed.), W. H. Auden in Context, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2013, pp. 181–192.
49 Stan Smith (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004, p. 62.
50 W. H. Auden, ‘Introduction’, Prose Volume II, p. xx.
51 Gottlieb, ‘Auden in History’, pp. 181–182.
52 Thompson, ‘Outside the Whale’, pp. 1–34.
53 Mendelson, Later Auden, p. 309.
54 Steedman, Master and Servant.
55 Mendelson, Early Auden, pp. 306–314, 324; Later Auden, pp. 306–307, 390–392, 420.
56 ‘Purposive history of this kind is as beguiling as necromancy and as about as reliable, too’, says Anthony Hopkins, ‘The Real American Empire’, James Belich, John Darwin, Margret Frenz, and Chris Wickham (eds), The Prospect of Global History, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2016, pp. 146–159.
57 W. H. Auden, ‘Portrait of a Whig’, Prose Volume III, pp. 273–285. This first appeared in British Council, English Miscellany. A Symposium of History, Literature and the Arts, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura for the British Council, Rome, 1952.
58 W. H. Auden, ‘Speaking of Books’, Prose Volume III, pp. 571–573, orig. New York Times Book Review, 15 May 1955.
59 W. H. Auden, ‘Appendices. Appendix I. “The Prolific and Devourer” ’, Prose Volume II, pp. 411–458.
60 Mendelson, Later Auden, pp. 390–392; Jorma Kalela, Making History. The Historian and the Uses of the Past, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2012, pp. 24–49.
61 Lin Chun, The British New Left, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1993; Dennis Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain. History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies, Duke University Press, Durham SC, 1997.
62 Above, Note 52.
63 George Eliot draws attention to ways of telling the past in Book I, Chapter 11 of Middlemarch (1871–1872): ‘Herodotus, who also, in telling what had been, thought it well to take a woman’s lot for his starting-point.’ The ‘also’ signals herself, the author, who took several women’s lot as starting point for her historical novel, set ‘forty years since’ (in the novel ‘lot’ signifies both destiny and dowry). Written in the late 1860s, Middlemarch concerns 1820s Coventry and Warwickshire in the lead-up to the Great Reform Act of 1832. Passage of the reform bill through Parliament structures the text. See Carolyn Steedman, ‘Going to Middlemarch: History and the novel’, Michigan Quarterly Review, 40:3 (2001), http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0040.310 (accessed 12 October 2017). Sir Walter Scott thought sixty years a more appropriate distance than forty from which to write about the past. He discussed this in the Introduction to Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since (1814).