4
The purpose of all educational institutions, public or private, is utilitarian and can never be anything else; their duty is to prepare young persons for that station in life to which it shall please society to call them.
W. H. Auden, ‘The Poet as Professor’, Prose Volume IV. 1956–1962,
Edward Mendelson (ed.), 2010, pp. 317–319; Observer,
5 February 1961.1
… Savoury and Newcomen and Watt
And all those names that I was told to get up
In history preparation and forgot
W. H. Auden, ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, 1936.
Under Clio’s former regime – the old one, the eighteenth-century one – in which the modes of classical antiquity were interpreted for the cultural and educational purposes of audiences who had not a word of Greek or Latin, she did not have much interest in where things came from, what their meaning was, and what had made them what they were. The idea that our perspective on the past ‘depends on who’s observing’, that how we interpret it depends ‘on our activities’ (what we’re doing and thinking in the world, right now) was quite alien to her. Then, in the old dispensation, some things happened in the world; Clio’s task was to proclaim those which were notable and deserving of fame. She made a limited number of heroic events and people – men – famous. She did not, as did the young 1787 Historia of the last chapter, consult documentary evidence of these happenings in order to tell her story of famous deeds. She did not, in this way, make history, though she was sometimes depicted with a pen in her hand, and even writing things down in her book; what she told was a story of something that had already been: she recorded and proclaimed events; she doesn’t write them, in the creative or compositional meaning of ‘write’. If she had a voice – other than that of a sarky pipe smoking harridan in some stage-play or other – she used the detached, distant language of a Thucydides; sometimes, because of the kind of event narrated, the tone of voice could suggest to a reader that irony was implied. She did not cry, or weep, at all in her eighteenth-century English manifestations; after the eighteenth century, you would have to be a poet, or at least, not-a-historian, to have Clio weep in your text.
Clio was deserted, abandoned, or went to ground, throughout the long emergence of modern history (history as a way of writing and thinking). The modern muse, if there is one, is named Historia, or History, and she consists of the knowledge that the writing of it is not the same thing as the event described; that History is precipitated out of the Everything of the past, to make a particular kind of narrative and form of analysis, usually in writing. The thing (event, happening, person) is not the same as its narrative. The narrative, which is a History, is something that never was, as it was told, or is told now, in the history book you’re reading.2
The only way to ask questions about a modern manifestation of Clio – about where Auden’s Clio came from – is to use modern Historia’s protocols. The poet will not – certainly did not – tell us where she came from. We (really I mean ‘I’) have to investigate the education of the poet; that is, the ways in which he was taught to understand the world of his childhood and adulthood, the ideas and beliefs provided by the social system he inhabited, and the literature though which these were conveyed. This chapter will investigate Auden’s Clio in the light of the teaching – secular, Christian, and profane – that he experienced, through his own schooling and the schoolteaching he did. It will pay particular attention to his education in the classics and in protestant Christianity, and to the forms of literature, language, and historical writing to which he was introduced. Or to which he may have been introduced. The pursuit ends up at the historian’s usual just-can’t-be-sure. His preparatory and public schools have not preserved curriculum and reading material from the early twentieth century. There has to be the social historian’s usual resort to context: to what preparatory schools in general taught of Greek and God and history and poetry in the first decades of the new century. Auden himself recorded a great deal of his experience of being taught and of teaching, but the modern social history procedure – this isn’t a biography, after all – is to find that information useful only when it can be considered in the light of a more general experience. Perhaps, with only these rackety tools at her disposal, a historian really has no right to ask the questions about Clio and Auden’s Clio, and the poetry and history that make up this book. But she does.
‘I’ve taught everything’, said Auden to one interlocutor in 1947, including arithmetic (‘I once thought of doing a series of arithmetic textbooks’) and ‘Drawing, French, Latin, History … Twelve-year-old boys are the best people to talk to. They’re so intelligent. They get tremendously interested for about five minutes, then forget all about it.’3 Before leaving for the US in 1939 he had taught in two British private schools, Larchfield Academy, Helensburgh (1930–1932), and The Downs School, Malvern (1932–1935); both were independent preparatory schools for boys. He returned to The Downs briefly in 1937 to cover for an absent teacher.4 Sometime during that last summer term he wrote the haunting first-hand testimony to confinement in the classroom – the prison house for teachers and taught – that is ‘Schoolchildren’.5 He published for children during his schoolmastering years; The Poet’s Tongue is still praised as the best of all poetry anthologies for schools. Auden and his co-editor John Garrett arranged the poems they had selected alphabetically by first line; poets’ names were omitted from the main text. This was an arrangement which allowed prayers and limericks, lyrics, and lampoons, Shakespeare and T. S. Eliot, to jostle anonymously for the child’s attention. Auden and Garrett were very clear that as an anthology for the schools, teachers must be addressed first: ‘the study of the classics is diminishing, much of the training in the discipline of language which used to fall to Latin and Greek devolves on the English teacher, and works which make serious demands on understanding or afford material for the study of prosody should be included’.6
The editors’ eschewal of context, historical and authorial, was pedagogically fashionable in the 1930s, under a regime of progressive education that held sway in many state schools until the 1970s.7 I. A. Richards described an originating practice of progressive poetry teaching in Practical Criticism (1929). For some years during the 1920s, in the Cambridge University English School, he had ‘made the experiment of issuing printed sheets of poems – ranging in character from a poem by Shakespeare to a poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox – to audiences who were requested to comment freely in writing upon them. The authorship of the poems was not revealed …’ This was done to provide a new technique for ‘those who wish to discover for themselves what they think and feel about poetry’.8 Much later, Denys Thompson attested to the very great influence Richards’ teaching method had had on the curriculum in state schools; in many of them, ‘knowledge of history, social background, linguistic origins of and Aristotle … ceased to be tested’.9 When at Cambridge himself, Thompson had been a student of F. R. Leavis; together they collaborated on Culture and Environment (1933), a critique of ‘mass’ culture. When Auden reviewed it in 1933, he described it succinctly as ‘a practical text book for assisting children to defeat propaganda of all kinds by making them aware of which buttons are being pressed’.10 He enjoyed all the accompanying books he’d been sent for review, including Leavis’ How to Teach Reading. A Primer for Ezra Pound (1932); ‘our school teaching is far too bookish’, he concluded.
In 1939, in another collaboration, Auden produced the pamphlet Education Today and Tomorrow, a short, well-researched report on the state of the schools (state and private), teachers and teacher training, and the curriculum. Auden and his collaborator, Thomas Worsley, could not think of a ‘worse course than segregating teachers by themselves in those training colleges which are not attached to a university. The teacher should know more about life than other people; his pupils always do.’ A good teacher was made ‘by friendship with all sorts of people, by love affairs, by an active life’. As far as the elementary school curriculum was concerned, one suggestion the authors made was that foreign languages and history were probably unsuitable for 7–11-year-olds, ‘as having no relation with the child’s experience’.11
In 1936, Auden was ‘very much in two minds as to what to do. Whether to go on teaching or not. If I do, I think a secondary day school.’ He told another friend that he was thinking about tutorial work for the Yorkshire Workers Educational Association;12 but he did not teach young adults until the 1940s, when he was employed by several US colleges and universities. His pre-US theories of schooling and learning were based on the experience of young children, including himself, in the preparatory school system from 1915 onwards (1915 was when he started at St Edmund’s preparatory boarding school at Hindhead, Surrey). At the end of his schoolmastering career in 1939 he concluded that:
A teacher soon discovers that there are only a few pupils whom he can help, many for whom he can do nothing except teach a few examination tricks, and a few to whom he can do nothing but harm. The children who interested me were either the backward i.e. those who had not yet discovered their real nature, the bright with similar interests to my own, or those who, like myself at their age, were school-hating anarchists. To these last I tried, while encouraging their rebellion, to teach a technique of camouflage, of how to avoid martyrdom.13
In the US his encounters with young adults in the college classroom were of a different kind, for he did not have his own experience of the British private school or university system as a reference point for the students he encountered. They were, however, constantly present in his mind as he gauged his own reactions to them. In 1941, at Ann Arbor (University of Michigan), he was ‘lonelier and more lost than first days at boarding school’.14 Davenport-Hines reports that at Swarthmore college in 1942 he was very tired of ‘reading “creative” mss, each more infantile than the last’.15 In his poetry teaching at Ann Arbor and Swarthmore College he developed a kind of cloze-procedure for studying poetry: he gave students copies of mimeographed poems unknown to them, with blanks for certain words. They were to fill in rhymes and words of particular stress in order to think about the metrical structure and meaning of the anonymous poem.16 ‘Cloze testing’ or ‘cloze deletion procedure’ was not given a name until the 1950s, but it was a popular literacy technique among English primary schoolteachers in the 1970s, and appears to have been developed as early as the 1820s by the British radical educationalist Samuel Wilderspin.17 Auden may have encountered the technique during his own childhood acquisition of literacy, but his US poetry-teaching procedure also seems to owe much to the pedagogical theory of I. A. Richards, developed in the 1920s.
‘Courses, Syllabi, Examinations, and a Curriculum’ for his teaching at US colleges and at the New School for Social Research, New York, are an appendix to the second volume of Auden’s Prose. At the New School in the fall of 1940, he taught a fifteen-week course on ‘The Language and Technique of Poetry’; syllabus questions included ‘What is the real difference between poetry and prose?’ and ‘How does form contribute to meaning?’. The final examination paper for the ‘Analysis of Poetry’ course taught at Michigan in spring 1942 included ‘19th Century Controversial Prose’ with a quotation from Andersen’s ‘Snow Queen’ (‘little Kay was quite blue with cold’), and the instruction to ‘Write a debate between J. S. Mill, T. Huxley, Matthew Arnold, Carlyle and Cardinal Newman as to the meaning and truth of … [a] parable’.18 ‘The Meaning and Techniques of Poetry’, a course taught at the New School in fall 1948, asked students to ‘Explain the stanza structure of [Auden’s own] “Warm are the still and lucky miles” ’.19 To answer questions about British nineteenth-century intellectual life (or at Swarthmore, to be examined on ‘The History of Ideas 1660–1760’ or ‘Romanticism from Rousseau to Hitler’) students must perforce have acquired some knowledge of European history; but discussion of the historiographical paradigms and theory of history Auden took with him to the US, and what he there acquired, will wait until later in this chapter.
His own school education had provided him with little poetry and less history; what he took with him to St Edmund’s preparatory school in 1915 (8 years) and to Gresham’s public school in 1920 (13 years) has been exhaustively described by Auden’s biographers: fairytales (the nineteenth-century literary artefact it seems, rather than the folktale), the legends of Greece and Rome, the Norse and Icelandic sagas, and poetry (though he once claimed that ‘until my sixteenth year I read no poetry’). ‘Norse mythology always appealed to me infinitely more than Greek’, he recalled in 1947; ‘Hans Andersen’s The Snow Queen and George Macdonald’s The Princess and the Goblins were my favourite fairy stories, and years before I ever went there, the North of England was the Never-Never Land of my dreams.’20 Asked to describe his ideal nursery library in 1952 (‘the books read with passion before acquiring critical notions’), he listed the complete works of Beatrix Potter, Lewis Carroll (both Alices), Andersen (‘The Little Mermaid’ [1837] this time around), some Icelandic Legends or other, Macdonald Fraser’s The Princess and the Goblin, Thackeray’s The Rose and the Ring, Verne’s Child of the Cavern, Ballantyne’s The Cruise of the Cachalot, and Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series. Hoffman’s Struwwelpeter was mentioned with caution; and then Hymns Ancient and Modern and the mnemonic sonnets from Kennedy’s Latin Primer.21 His fondness for books about mine-working, geology, the internal combustion and other engines, featured in his description of a typical home education provided by a liberal, professional upper middle-class family.22 In his ‘Valediction’ of 1975, Stephen Spender connected ‘the intricate, complex, hand-made engines of language he produced’ to the small-scale machinery Auden so loved, as found in Yorkshire mines; or, his poems were like ‘the limestone landscapes of that northern countryside of hills and caves and freshets where he spent his childhood’.23 He actually spent his childhood in Warwickshire suburbia between Birmingham and all ‘these broken things’ of the industrial West Midlands, as his ‘By the Gasworks, Solihull’(1924) attests; but the notion of a poem as a small machinery of language and perception first apprehended in childhood still holds good.24 How he was taught to read, we do not know. As with other middle-class boys of the era, we have to assume it was done at home, by parents or governess, though there is a hint in his brother’s ‘Wystan and I were at the same two preparatory schools’ that they may both have attended, briefly, one of the many small Solihull private schools available to parents like theirs. (They both attended Greshams, but that was a public, not a preparatory, school.)25 There were also the rich resources of Dr Auden’s cultural life available to his children. He belonged to the Solihull Arts and Sciences Association; one of the Audens’ neighbours in Lode Lane was its secretary, and its enticing programme between 1909 and 1911 included a talk on the history of aviation, another by one who had been ‘by pony through Iceland’, and many given by Birmingham University academics, on topics from phonology to the fairytale. But it is unlikely that a father took a 4-year old to any of these.26
Perhaps he was introduced to Kennedy’s Latin Primer in Solihull before he went to preparatory school; according to the few extant accounts of St Edmund’s School curriculum, it certainly preoccupied him once he got there. But much later, editing his Portable Greek Reader (1948), he suggested that stories from classical antiquity accompanied him to school: ‘Once upon a time there was a little boy. Before he could read, his father told him stories about the War between the Greeks and the Trojans. Hector and Achilles were as familiar to him as his brothers … At seven he went to school and most of the next seven years were spent in translating Greek into Latin and English and vice-versa.’ He knew that readers would find it hard to believe that he recounted here, not a fairytale, ‘but a historical account of middle-class education in England thirty-five years ago’.27 Very heavy on the classical languages was St Edmund’s preparatory school, all of Auden’s contemporaries agreed, even those eager to laud the eccentricity of its arrangements and the comings-and-goings of its more than eccentric teaching staff in time of war. There was a Literary Society and briefly a ‘St Edmund’s School Literary Journal’; there were prizes for maths, French, history, scripture, drawing, ‘and even poetry’, though very little curriculum time was devoted to these subjects.28 ‘English, it is interesting to note,’ remembered the headmaster’s daughter, ‘was only represented by two hours of geography and two hours of history a week, out of which a few minutes were devoted to spelling, derivations and synonyms.’29 Auden’s first exposure to the Greek language and Greek verse was between 1915 and 1920, for Gresham’s School, to which he moved in 1920, was ‘a new kind of public school … it had modern ideals and was based on modern curricula; very little Latin was taught and no Greek … progressive but not cranky, it was exactly designed to appeal to cultured parents of the liberal professional classes’.30 Auden described ‘a Classical Side and a Modern side’ at Gresham’s. ‘The latter was regarded by boys and masters alike in much the same way as, in a militaristic country, civilians are regarded by officers, and with the same degrees of inferiority: history and mathematics were, like professional men, possible; the natural sciences … like tradesmen, were not. The Classical Side, too, had its nice distinctions: Greek, like the Navy, was the senior, the aristocratic service.’31 (So Auden did remember being taught some Greek there.)
Auden wrote of the endless translation task of his early school years. It would be useful to know how much Latin and Greek poetry he was required to translate, and what kind of verse forms and metrical systems he may have become familiar with. He remembered with fondness the mnemonic verse of his Latin primer, but for any further insight into his acquisition of poetic technique, we have to rely on what was generally available for teaching purposes, and what was usually taught in the private school system. A catalogue of Latin and Greek textbooks of the period 1800–1970 suggests that between 1841 and 1930 at least (for this a catalogue of extant books only) 110 school readers were available to schools, 22 of which concerned poetry, including the composition of poetry in Greek. In the same period 40 guides to Latin Verse Composition were available, and 224 Latin Readers, 18 of which contained poetry, or poetry and prose.32 There was more information available to a small boy at school about the syllabic arrangement of Latin verse than the stress-timed arrangement of Greek poetry. But it’s almost not worth saying that – as we have little idea of the texts used at Auden’s schools, and whether or not versification was taught. And the important titles available to a school like St Edmund’s School at the beginning of the twentieth century, including W. H. D. Rouse’s Demonstrations in Greek Iambic Verse (1899), T. Y. Sargent’s Models and Materials for Greek Iambic Verse (1899), A. Sidgwick and F. D. Morice’s Introduction to Greek Verse Composition (1906), E. Squire and J. H. Williams’ Exercises for Greek Verse, 1906, and Rouse’s Damon – A Manual of Greek Iambic Composition (1906), all appear to me not to be what you would put before a 10-year-old, then or now. But what do I know, Nelly Dean that I am? Though of course, they may have been used as the master’s (or mistress’s) method book and never handed over to the children.33 Nevertheless, the recipes for writing Latin verse of the period look to be more accessible to young children. And for Latin there was more material available to promote what the cataloguers said was the historical point of their compilation: ‘the very sentences used for translation often reflect, and sometimes foreshadow, the changing social attitudes in which people were learning their Latin or Greek’.34 For Latin acquisition, there was more supporting material about social life than there was for Greek, such as in S. E. Winbolt’s Dialogues of Roman Life (1913, repr. 1930) and Winbolt’s and F. H. Mark’s Roman Life Reader (1910). But poetry in any language was not part of the official curriculum at either of Auden’s schools, and neither was literature in general. This did not prevent its consumption and creation and among the children: ‘I remember the planning of an ambitious historical novel between Auden, Isherwood and myself’, said Harold Llewellyn Smith in 1975. ‘It was to have been in the manner of Harrison-Ainsworth, and its “Gothic” scenario was shamelessly derived from Marple Hall, the ancestral seat of the Bardshaw-Isherwoods.’35 Auden found himself in a new educational world when he came to teach 8–13-year-olds in the 1930s, with the study of the classics much diminished from the time of his own education in them.36
‘I’m going to do am anthology of Greek literature. What do you think I should put in it?’, he asked Alan Ansen in 1947.37 I had hoped to find some trace of what passed through his head as a child, or was inculcated in him by study of the classics between 1915 and 1925, in the choices Auden made for The Portable Greek Reader. He said that for anyone brought up in the way he had been brought up, ‘Greece and Rome are so mixed up with his personal memories of childhood and classroom that it is extremely difficult to look at these civilisations objectively. This is particularly so, perhaps, in the case of Greece …’38 But what he planned for the anthology was different from what it turned out to be. In 1947, he paused not for an answer from Ansen, but continued:
I’m having the sixth and twentieth book of the Iliad, the whole Oresteia (for tragedy), either the Clouds, the Birds, or the Frogs (for comedy), the Sicilian expedition and the Melian dialogue from Thucydides – oh, did Hobbes do a translation? – the story of Polycrates from Herodotus, all the fragments of Heraclitus, Hippocrates’ Airs, Waters, and Places, parallel passages from the Physics and Metaphysics about the unmoved mover, the Timeaus and Symposium of Plato and the Poetics, I think. I don’t know what to do about political ideas. Yes, maybe the Laws would be a good idea. Then I want a short Christian section: the beginnings of John … the Romans, the thirteenth Corinthians and finish up with the Athanasian Creed … I shall have some Euclid, I guess … I’d like to put in a little Oppian.
Alexander Pope’s verse translation of a section of the Iliad appeared in the published text, as did ‘The Book of the Dead’ from the Odyssey. The whole of the Oresteia (in modern translation by George Thomson) was there, as was Aristophanes’ The Birds. He got what he wanted in the case of Thucydides (not Thomas Hobbes’ seventeenth-century translation), but there was no Herodotus in the Reader. The Heraclitus made it as far as ‘The Word’ from an 1892 UK translation, as did the Hippocrates he planned, and the selections from Aristotle. Plato appeared with Timaeus, Phaedo, the Symposium, and the Laws. There was no Poetics included, but selections from Aristotle’s Politics, the Nicomachean Ethics, the Physics, and Metaphysics. Euclid’s Elements came from a 1941 Greek Mathematical Works. There was no Oppian, and no New Testament or other Christian material at all. Extracts from twenty-six authors not mentioned at the planning stage were also included, including Hesiod, Pindar, and Epictetus. Counting the Christian material as one item, only seven of the thirty-seven authors extracted from were named in his original plans.
The Reader is divided thematically into ‘Cosmologies’, ‘The Hero’, ‘Nature’, ‘Man’, and ‘Society’, across which sixty-one extracts are distributed (some authors – Plato, Aristotle, Homer – appear in more than one section). Copyright permissions detailed at the beginning of the Reader suggest that of all the extracts anthologised, only thirteen came from works published after Auden’s school and university days. Only five of the editions of texts for which permission to reproduce was sought are detailed in Thompson and Ridge’s Catalogue, but the vast majority of the authors and works from which Auden extracted had been available in UK editions as textbooks and class readers during his childhood and adolescence. Whether they were so used at St Edmund’s School, or at home in Solihull, we do not know, but all of Auden’s ‘Editor’s Introduction’ displays a long and detailed acquaintance with Greek literature and poetry. He was (still is) highly informative on the irreducible factors of semantics and speech in turning the poetry of one language into the poetry of another. He informs about word order and diction in Greek; he explains that Greek is an inflected language, in which sense does not depend on word position as it does in English. Prosodic difficulties of translation were explained: quantitative unrhymed verse like the Greek was patterned by the ‘weight’ of syllables; in qualitative (English) verse stressed syllables come at regular intervals. He did not say it here, but did elsewhere: that the Old Norse and Old English verse he had been familiar with from early childhood was also based on the patterns of stress-timed everyday language. Here, introducing The Reader, he emphasised translation of poetry of one language into another as ‘an invaluable training for a poet’. He thought that ‘the better a translation is as English poetry, the less like Greek poetry it is (e.g. Pope’s Iliad)’.
His explanation of the little engine of language that is a poem – how it is made and how it works – is, however, a very small part of a long exegesis of Greek culture: the mental habits and social manners of classical antiquity. Statements like ‘Greek poetry is primitive … primitive poetry says simple things in a roundabout way’, and their ‘kind of thinking is as extraordinary to us as any habits of an African tribe’, are read now under the shadow of Orientalism and Orientalism; but Auden believed he was anticipating the reactions of readers in ‘feeling that they were a very odd people indeed’; but ‘[i]t is the unlikeness of the Greeks to ourselves, the gulf between the kind of assumptions they made, the kind of questions they asked’, in which lay the value of attempting to understand. He did not discuss the incommensurability that it is the modern historian’s task to work on and with: that you cannot know the past and that history is something written out of that unknowing. But his assertion that a culture revealed questions asked long ago by people about their own thought – how thinking worked, how there were always other ways of doing that thinking – is a fine poetics of incommensurability. However, the work in which R. G. Collingwood formulated the idea that the historian must strive to re-create the parameters in which past thought occurred had not yet been published.39
By the time Auden entered Christ Church College, Oxford, in 1925, Greek was no longer a university entry requirement.40 He was studying English by the autumn of 1926 and there are very full accounts of his first encounters with Old English poetry, by now a cornerstone of the Oxford English degree.41 It appears that his childhood reading of Northern European literature had been in Norse mythology and collections of Icelandic stories – in prose, not poetry.42 Chris Jones points out that Auden was ‘the first Saxonizing poet to receive a university education which would have been familiar to most British students of English during the twentieth century’.43 Jones also points out that Auden’s enthusiasm for Old English poetry did not translate into the student’s examination success in examination papers that emphasised phonology, spelling form, and dialectal variation. However, as Auden spent so much creative energy in experimenting with its forms and techniques in his own verse, it is relatively easy to trace Old English stress patterns in his work, certainly in the verse-plays he wrote in collaboration in the 1930s. Chris Jones also argues that it was in the 1930s that he learned to use Old English as a resource for his later poetry, ‘discarding it where thin and meagre and preserving it where efficacious’.44 It is possible, thanks to Jones’ work, to see and hear those resources in Auden’s use of alliteration, assonance, and particular stress patterns and rhyme structures associated with Old English. Jones suggests that the strange near-yet-farness of Old English for modern English speakers allows them to experience the full anxiety of estrangement from their ‘Anglo-Saxon, linguistic homeland’ (quite apart from Auden’s anxious inscription of queer estrangement from himself, which is a main theme of Jones’s exegesis). Auden himself commented on these questions of poetics in terms of technique: ‘In general the further away from you in time or feeling that poets are, the more you can get out of them for your own use. Often some piece of technique thus learnt really unchains one’s own Daemon quite suddenly.’45
I have not the tools to ask Jones’ marvellous questions about Latin and Greek influences on Auden’s poetry (or about the Anglo-Saxon, for that matter). My questions are about poetry made as a form of history and a type of historiography. Questions of language and written composition are important for understanding the making and structure of any work of history (where it comes from; out of what philosophies and beliefs the written artefact is made), and I think we do know enough from Auden’s early education in the classics to give his Clio a sharper focus in a wider perspective (though we have not yet exhausted these questions about her origins, or Auden’s understanding of history). The poet appears to contemplate all of this in the beautiful fragment ‘Venus Will Now Say a Few Words’ (1929), which may well be about ‘dead’ languages in general, including Old English, as Jones says; but the striking idea provoked here is the nature of the traces that different languages (and invasions) leave behind: that Latin had to die, that Clio was never in England in the first place, for so very few English place-names reflect the Roman occupation. Jack is English (if not Olde Englishe) in this poem, as is a countryside full of rusting agricultural machinery:
Think – Romans had a language in their day
And ordered roads with it, but it had to die:
Your culture can but leave – forgot as sure
As place-name origins in favourite shire –
Jottings for stories, some often-mentioned Jack,
And references in letters to a private joke,
Equipment rusting in unweeded lanes … 46
But neither the Greek nor the Old English acquired in his youth can be said to have provided the unique tonal quality of the poetry Auden produced in the 1930s. Many of his early poems suggested ‘fatality’, said Geoffrey Grigson: ‘assonances and alliterations coming together to make a new verbal actuality as it might be of rock of quartz, a milieu of the profound Midlands, half aboriginal, half soiled or damaged, half abandoned’.47
Uncovering Auden’s education in history is a simpler task, mainly because there was so little taught at his schools. Two hours a week between 1915 and 1920 at St Edmunds, as Rosamira Bulley recalled, and some of those devoted to English language. St Edmund’s appears to have been a typical preparatory school in this regard: ‘The time spent on historical teaching varies but little in the different schools’ (120 were surveyed), reported A. M. Curteis to the Board of Education in 1900. ‘English history is very properly the starting point’, he said, though half the schools he visited added Greek or Roman history, especially for older boys. In most classrooms a textbook formed the basis of instruction (‘Usually Gardiner’s Outline of English History’). This was supplemented ‘by the use of wall maps and blackboards, sometimes by lantern slides, relief maps and models, in one case even of the rubbing of brasses’. Perhaps each boy in some classes was provided with a copy of the text; but Curteis’ report suggests that many teachers used the class’s sole copy as a method book, dictating sections, or telling ‘stories’ from it to the children. He reported approvingly on oral teaching, and thought it commendable that the majority of schools he visited ‘confined textbooks to “reference” and “revision” ’. The questions he had seen teachers put to the boys were ‘any sane teacher’s method’; nothing wrong with that.48 He had seen satisfactory and innovative work in the history hour: children had been encouraged to ‘think … for themselves’; he had seen debates, lantern slide shows (sometimes connecting history to art or current events); time lines displayed on classroom walls (‘Calendar[s] of Great Events’); some classes investigated a historical ‘event of the day’.
These ‘modern’ interactive methods developed during the early twentieth century; Auden attended school during a great flowering of published social history for children, most of it targeted at teachers of primary-age children in the state system. William Claxton’s Peeps into the Past, or, History without History Books recommended itself to elementary school teachers by reminding them of the HMI who had opined that ‘history as commonly taught therein, of very little value’. Claxton recommended the use of historical artefacts and photographs in the classroom, and museum visits and visits to ‘ancient dwellings’ even if only in the imagination.49 There were at least two dozen reissues of the Piers Ploughman Histories between 1913 and 1937. All of the new history readers were illustrated; some catered for children in the very early stages of literacy acquisition.50 E. M. Tappen’s In Feudal Times. Social Life in the Middle Ages, about the ‘life and habits of thought of the people who lived between the eighth and fifteenth centuries’, had, among other section headings, ‘How to Capture a Castle’, ‘Daily Life in a Castle’, ‘Life in Town’, and ‘Schools and Literature’. ‘Mohammed’, ‘Mohammedans’, and ‘Romance languages’ were to be found in the index.51 Chambers’s Periodic Histories enticed children into the role of researcher with ‘An Unwritten Story’ – a little discourse on historical and archaeological method, and the poetry of ‘a little shoe or a battered toy [found] whilst digging in the sand’.52 Nancy Neimeyer produced Stories for the History Hour in 1917, written for telling, not reading aloud; it was important ‘to put the most important historic truth a child can comprehend into a form which a child can understand’. Although ‘a history story must be as much history as story’, Neimeyer had sometimes thought it best ‘to trust to a suggestion, based on evidence, than to spoil the story for lack of it’.53 For ordinary twentieth-century children in the elementary schools of England, these history primers were no invitation at all to feel that the citizens of ancient Rome or the inhabitants of a Saxon village ‘were a very odd people indeed’.54 Viking warriors and medieval housewives (and there were housewives) were depicted as doing the equivalent of putting the kettle on for a nice cup of tea, or getting up in the morning and looking out of the window (or the aperture screened by pieces of linen soaked in linseed oil; the primers were nothing if not correct in historical detail), or even just walking dully along, showing off their jerkins and cross garters and wimples and aprons.
Reporting on the teaching of history for the Preparatory Schools Association in 1930, E. K. Milliken did not mention teaching material like this. His ‘sturdy friends’ among textbooks were Warner and Martin, The Groundwork of British History and Ransom’s An Elementary History of England, he was fond of Lay’s The Pupil’s Classbook of English History; but he knew that this remote ‘bird’s eye view’ of past events was not so much in favour with present-day educationalists. The choice for preparatory school history must be either British History BC 55–1939, or World History to 1600. As he pointed out, British History had been favoured in the past, ‘and ensures satisfactory results in the History Paper of the Common Entrance Exam’. Still, World History offered ‘a much wider view of a vast field of knowledge’, especially if you didn’t go beyond 1600. He had been touched by the new social history (‘when Social History marches side by side with the most dramatic episodes of Political History, a fascinating combination can be effected’). ‘Legend should be told as legend and myth as myth’, he thought, while ‘the Little Arthurian approach, which even in these times, is dying a hard death with its stories about Alfred’s culinary misadventures and Cnut’s paddling activities, should be utterly eschewed’. And, above all, there was practicality: ‘taking the narrowest and least worthy view of the subject’s value, it is fairly safe to say that even if the History paper in the Common Entrance retains its present requirements, the normal Preparatory school boy can comfortably obtain, by the process of wise selection, forty to fifty per cent in the subject without venturing beyond the Tudor period’.55
There are traces of the history teaching Auden was likely to have experienced. He impressed his friends at St Edmund’s (or they were impressed in later life) by his parodic discourse on an event in medieval religious history: two forms accustomed to sharing a room for prep were housed separately; ‘he dubbed the event “The Great Schism” ’, making comparison with division of the Roman Catholic Church (1378–1415) during which period rival popes sat in both Rome and Avignon.56 It appears that for the main part he studied medieval and what is now called ‘early modern’ history. He remembered an item of what looks to be the ‘Little Arthurian’ history disapproved of by Milliken, in the story of King John gnawing a rush mat in his rage. It seemed to the child that this is just how a St Edmund’s schoolmaster might, unpredictably, behave. There were several history readers available to preparatory schools in which he may have read about The Rage of King John and encountered this bit of ersatz history. York and Tout’s History of England (1910) is a likely source. But though King John is enraged in many readers, and gnaws the floor rushes in some, he never gnaws a rush mat, a form of floor covering promoted to institutions like schools for its hygienic qualities in the early twentieth century.57 And as much as I would like to find the genesis, for example, of Auden’s ‘Roman Wall Blues’ in the miserable voice of Kipling’s 1911 ‘Roman Centurion’–
Legate, I come to you in tears – My cohort ordered home!
I’ve served in Britain forty years. What should I do in Rome?
Here is my heart, my soul, my mind – the only life I know. –
I cannot leave it all behind. Command me not to go!
– the document forbids me to do so; there is no evidence of St Edmund’s school, or of the Auden parents purchasing Fletcher and Kipling’s A School History of England, or that their youngest son ever read it.58
At Oxford, Auden made it clear that he was not interested in modern social and labour history. At some point, between the Natural Sciences degree course he had been admitted to and his settling in the English School, he considered PPE, but ‘to an introvert like myself, the social conditions of the poor in the 19th century as expounded by G. D. H Cole do not click’.59 His own social and political history of the modern period in Britain, frequently expressed in the reviewing work he did, may have been acquired during preparation for the courses he taught at Swarthmore, or other North American colleges, or from the very book that was under review, as with Joseph Bronowski’s book on Blake, of which he wrote in December 1947 that ‘Blake’s lifetime coincided with a period of intense political and economic crisis; weakened from within by the strains of a transition from a mercantile to an industrial economy, and without by the strain of the American and French wars, its social and political beliefs threatened by the ideology of the French Revolution, the social structure of England was nearer collapse than at any time since 1640.’60
More open to view is the religious education Auden experienced. We do not know the form of family prayers conducted by Dr Auden in the family home but there is much information in various biographies of Auden about the religious instruction provided by his mother. We know that however many types of Anglican service Constance Auden sought out for her children in Solihull and the wider county of Warwickshire and in Birmingham, all the liturgy the children were exposed to remained within the Church of England’s very broad parameters. We know that John and Wystan Auden were prepared for confirmation – and the younger boy actually confirmed – at St Edmund’s School, at the age of 14. St Edmund’s advertised its insistence on chapel attendance; the programme of religious training it provided may have been a factor in the Audens’ choice of it for their two younger sons. From its foundation in the 1890s, ‘religion, and in particular a regular pattern of chapel services … underpin[ned] all the school’s other activities … The climax of the chapel year from 1898 until 1986 was the annual visit of the diocesan bishop or his nominee to conduct a confirmation. This was very much a state occasion, with the parents and maybe godparents of the candidates swelling the congregation.’61 John and Wystan and their classmates preparing for confirmation followed the religious curriculum laid down in The Book of Common Prayer: ‘So soon as Children are come to a competent age, and can say, in their Mother Tongue, the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments; and can answer the questions of [a] short Catechism: they shall be brought to the Bishop …’.62 Through the centuries ministers and parents have proceeded with this training in different ways, but most used the question and answer format that the Catechism employs to ensure that a child, out of his or her own heart, understands the articles of faith declared at baptism by its godparents.63 The child committed to heart, probably not the Athanasian Creed (which Auden later wanted for his Greek Reader) but the more commonly used Nicene Creed, though the Athanasian Creed was to be found in the Book of Common Prayer in an authorised form that might be used in churches at the service of Holy Communion. There is extraordinary insight here, into the forms of language, the cadences, and speech rhythms committed to memory by generations of children from the sixteenth century onwards. But we are not to know how this language was remembered and used; all that can be said of the particular child under consideration, is that it does not appear (to me) to provide the phonological and syntactic basis of his poetry. The legacy of all teaching in childhood depends in some degree on the affective relationship between teacher and taught. The eighteenth-century Church of England thought hard about the ways in which its children might be confirmed in their faith, and there were instructions for parents and ministers that were not available in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. So how Geoffrey Gunnell Newman, Curate of Farnham (1913–1917), Chaplain and Assistant Master at St Edmunds School, Hindhead (1920–1921), proceeded with his small class of boys we cannot tell – only know that Auden loved him, because he said so, and remembered loving him for a very long time.64
When Auden’s understanding of history is discussed by modern scholars, he emerges as a proponent of ‘big’ history; of history’s meaning and the philosophy derived from it.65 When we come to his Clio, we shall have to consider his reading of the grand, sweeping teleologies of Western thought that preoccupied him in the 1940s and 1950s. They are, as we shall see, legible in his thought because they were connected to his childhood experience – ‘An Education’ – but more particularly to his thorough grounding in church history. What he knew of the early church, its fathers, teachers, and apostles and of the many great schisms of Western Christianity, allowed him to claim that ‘Christianity, of all religions, attaches a unique importance to history’. He quoted the Apostles’ (Nicene) Creed to make his point: ‘I believe in Jesus Christ who suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried.’ This, he said, ‘expresses the belief that, for God, a particular moment in history when the Jews had reached a certain point in their development … and the gentiles in theirs, was “the fullness of time,” the right moment for the eternal vow to be made Flesh and the Divine Sacrifice to take place’. Little doubt here that there is such a god; but he raised the question: ‘If such a god does exist, then all the historical realities of that time … must have been known to Him as characteristics of the fullness of time.’66 He knew that as a historical creature man experiences needs as desires ‘which are historically conditioned’.67 He could relate church history to social history, as when disapproving of T. S. Eliot’s view of culture: Eliot was wrong to associate its transmission with specific social classes, because since the eighteenth century, in Britain, culture had been transmitted by the church.68 But the modern social historian is wary – warier than she was when Auden was only a poet – for we have learned, after Vico, that sacred history belongs to God; is unknowable, and not our business; that only what’s left over is ours:
In the light of thick darkness enveloping the earliest antiquity, so remote from ourselves, there shines the eternal and never failing light of a truth beyond all question: that the world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind.69
This is the creed of social historians, if they have one.70 I proceed with some anxiety now, knowing that Auden’s Christian God is very close to Clio. And She to Him. And I must so proceed, for as Sean O’Brien says, in a situation where religious belief is impossible or inconceivable for those who might form Auden’s contemporary constituency of readers, ‘it would be a serious loss if it also became impossible to grasp how much his religious thought is bound up with his apprehension of the sometimes ungovernable power of poetic language’.71
1 ‘What is thy duty towards thy Neighbour? … [T]o learn to live and labour truly to get mine own living, and to do my duty in that state of life, unto which it shall please God to call me.’ ‘A Catechism. That Is to Say, an Instruction to be Learned of Every Person, Before He be Brought to Be Confirmed by the Bishop’, Book of Common Prayer.
2 See below, pp. 239–244.
3 Alan Ansen, The Table Talk of W. H. Auden (1989), Nicholas Jenkins (ed.), Faber and Faber, London, 1990, p. 19.
4 In Naomi Mitchison’s encyclopedia for children (see above, p. 73), Auden provided the briefest of contributor identities – a line and a half as opposed to the others’ average of 25: ‘Wystan Auden (born 1907) writes poetry and teaches at a school in Scotland.’ A very nice line portrait was provided by the editor. An Outline for Boys and Girls and Their Parents, Gollancz, London, 1932, p. 851. ‘I have written biographies of most them,’ said Mitchison, ‘but some of them would not let me do that, and others made me cut out what I thought were the best and funniest bits’ (p. 13).
5 For Auden as schoolteacher, Humphrey Carpenter, W. H. Auden. A Biography (1981, 1983), Faber and Faber, London, 2010, pp. 111–178. For a student’s view of his time at the Downs School, John Duguid, ‘Mr Auden, Schoolmaster’, The American Scholar, 69:3 (2000), pp. 81–86. For ‘Schoolchildren’, below pp. 138–139. W. H. Auden, ‘Schoolchildren’, Collected Shorter Poems, 1927–1957, Faber and Faber, London, 1966, pp. 78–79; Carolyn Steedman, ‘Prisonhouses’, Feminist Review, 20 (1985), pp. 7–21.
6 Wystan Hugh Auden and John Garrett, The Poet’s Tongue, Bell, London, 1935; Stephen Burt ‘Wake all the dead!’, LRB Blog, 19 July 2010 www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2010/07/19/stephen-burt/wake-all-the-dead/ (accessed 12 October 2017); W. H. Auden, Prose Volume I. 1926–1938, Edward Mendelson (ed.), Faber and Faber, London, 1996, pp. 109, 195–199, 759.
7 Ronald King, All Things Bright and Beautiful? A Sociological Study of Infants’ Classrooms, Wiley, Chichester, 1979; William Edward Marsden, ‘Contradictions in progressive primary school ideologies and curricula in England. Some historical perspectives’, Historical Studies in Education, 9:2 (1997), pp. 224–236; William G. Raga, ‘Condescension and critical sympathy. Historians of education on progressive education in the United States and England’, Paedagogica Historica, 50:1–2 (2014), pp. 59–75.
8 I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism, Kegan Paul, London, 1929, p. 3.
9 Denys Thompson, ‘The relevance of I. A. Richards’, Use of English, 23:1 (1971), pp. 3–31.
10 F. R. Leavis and Denys Thompson, Culture and Environment, Chatto and Windus, London, 1933; Auden, Prose Volume I, pp. 125–127; orig. ‘A Review of Culture and Environment, by F. R. Leavis and Denys Thompson, and Other Books’, Twentieth Century, May 1933.
11 Wystan Hugh Auden and Thomas Cuthbert Worsley, Education Today and Tomorrow. Day to Day Pamphlets, Hogarth Press, London, 1939; W. H. Auden, ‘Education. By W. H. Auden and T. C. Worsley’, Prose Volume I, pp. 389–424; 416, 417. For the classic statement of the value of the learner’s experience in education, John Dewey, Experience and Education, Collier, New York NY, 1938. Also Evan Kindley, ‘Auden’s Preoccupations. Education and The Orators’, Bonnie Costello and Rachel Galvin (eds), Auden at Work, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2015, pp. 216–230.
12 Carpenter, W. H. Auden, pp. 175, 206.
13 W. H. Auden, ‘Appendices. The Prolific and Devourer’, Prose Volume II, 1939–1948, Edward Mendelson (ed.), Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 2002, pp. 411–458.
14 Carpenter, W. H. Auden, p. 318. The chapter ‘Teacher Again’ (pp. 318–361) is a full account of his US teaching years.
15 Richard Davenport-Hines, Auden, Heinemann, London, 1995, p. 221.
16 Carpenter says that he first used this technique at St Marks College, Southborough, a private Massachusetts school where he was guest teacher in 1939; Carpenter, W. H. Auden, pp. 264, 326.
17 Gail Cohen Weaver, ‘Using the cloze procedure as a teaching technique’, The Reading Teacher, 32:5 (1979), pp. 632–636; Samuel Wilderspin, The Importance of Educating the Infant Poor From the Age of Eighteen Months to Seven Years. Containing An Account of the Spitalfields Infant School, and of the New System of Instruction There Adopted … Second edition, with considerable additions, for the author, London, 1824; Phillip McCann and Francis A. Young, Samuel Wilderspin and the Infant School Movement, Croom Helm, London, 1982; John Howlett, Progressive Education. A Critical Introduction, Bloomsbury, London, 2013, pp. 103–140.
18 Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Snow Queen’ (1844) haunts Auden’s memories of his childhood, though sometimes he said Andersen’s ‘Ice Maiden’ (1861) was his favourite. Finding the frozen little self in these fairytales was not uncommon among twentieth-century British children. See Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman, Virago, London, 1986, for little Kay, quite blue with cold.
19 Auden, ‘Appendices. Appendix III. Courses, Syllabi, Examinations, and a Curriculum’, Prose Volume II, pp. 464–480; 465, 479; ‘Twelve Songs … III’, Auden, Collected Shorter Poems, p. 159.
20 Auden, ‘I Like It Cold’, Prose Volume II, pp. 332–336; orig. House and Garden, December 1947.
21 W. H. Auden, ‘Hic et Ille’, Prose Volume III, 1949–1955, Edward Mendelson (ed.), Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 2008, pp. 323–334; orig. Preuves, May 1952. He certainly did retain the mnemonic verses, all his life: ‘I enjoy rhymes, almost any rhymes’, he told Polly Platt in 1966: ‘He put his head back and closed his eyes, then recited: “Dies in the singular/Common we define/But its plural cases/Are always mascu-line.” He spread his hands out and smiled. “We used to say that in school”.’ Polly Platt and W. H. Auden, ‘Interview: W. H. Auden’, The American Scholar, 36:2 (1967), pp. 266–270; 269. The verse has been repeated in Maurice Bowra, New Bats in Old Belfries. Some Loose Tiles, Wolfson College, Oxford, 2005, p. 54.
22 W. H. Auden, ‘A Literary Transference’, Prose Volume II, p. 42; orig. Southern Review, Summer 1940. For Auden’s childhood reading, Carpenter, Auden, pp. 3–15; Davenport-Hines, W. H. Auden, pp. 6–33. See R. G. Collingwood, Autobiography, Oxford University Press, London, 1939, for a very similar (in class terms) little boy reading everything he could find about ‘the natural sciences, especially geology, astronomy, and physics; [learning] to recognize rocks, to know the stars, and to understand the working of pumps and locks and other mechanical appliances up and down the house’, about ten years earlier than Auden.
23 Stephen Spender, ‘Valediction’, Stephen Spender (ed.), W.H. Auden. A Tribute, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London, 1975, pp. 224–248.
24 W. H. Auden, Juvenilia. Poems 1922–1928, Katherine Bucknell (ed.), Faber and Faber, London, 1994, p. 55. In his address to the dead poet, he told Lord Byron that ‘We lived at Solihull, a village then;/Those at the gasworks were my favourite men’; and that ‘my heart has stamped on/The view from Birmingham to Wolverhampton./ … Tramlines and slagheaps, pieces of machinery,/That was, and still is, my ideal scenery’. W. H. Auden, ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ (1936), Collected Poems, Edward Mendelson (ed.), 1976, Faber and Faber, London, 1991, pp. 81–133; 106, 88–89.
25 John Auden, ‘A Brother’s Viewpoint’, Spender (ed.), W. H. Auden, pp. 25–30.
26 Solihull Parish Magazine, 31:1 (January 1909); 32:9 (September 1912). For George Auden’s wide interests, Minutes of Evidence given before the Royal Commission on Ancient Monuments in Wales and Monmouthshire, Vol. 1 [Cd. 6549], HMSO, London, 1912, p. 119: ‘Mr George Augustus Auden, Apsley, Solihull, Birmingham; M. A., M.D., B.C. Cantab., M.R.C.P., London [Member of the Royal College of Physicians]; Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, Copenhagen; Member of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (Secretary of the Committee for Consideration and Registration of Megalithic Remains in the British Isles), and Member of the Committee for distinguishing the Age of Stone Circles.’
27 W. H. Auden (ed.), The Portable Greek Reader, Viking Penguin, New York NY, 1948, ‘Editor’s Introduction’.
28 Bernard Palmer, Willingly to School. A History of St Edmund’s, Hindhead, The Governing Body of the St Edmund’s School Trust, Hindhead, 2000, pp. 187–195; 74–75; 133, 213, 232.
29 Rosamira Bulley, ‘A Prep School Reminiscence’, Spender (ed.), W. H. Auden, pp. 31–36.
30 Robert Medley, ‘Gresham’s School, Holt’, Spender (ed.) W. H. Auden, pp. 37–43; W. H. Auden, ‘Honour [Gresham’s School, Holt]’, Graham Greene (ed.), The Old School. Essays by Divers Hands (1934), Oxford University Press, London, 1984, pp. 1–12; John Walsh, ‘Auden. The Lost Poems’, Independent, 4 September 2007, www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/auden-the-lost-poems-463874.html (accessed 12 October 2017) for poetry, including Auden’s, at Gresham’s.
31 Auden, Portable Greek Reader, p. 1.
32 William B. Thompson and J. D. Ridge, Catalogue of Greek and Latin School Text Books (1800 onwards). Part One, Dictionaries Grammars Vocabularies Notes and Miscellanea Composition Manuals (Prose and Verse) Readers Selections, University of Leeds, School of Education 1970. Part Two Greek Texts, Notes, Vocabularies, Translations … 1974 (bound as one, separate pagination).
33 As was the case with the Revd Murgatroyd’s teaching of the classics in Slaithwaite school in the second half of the eighteenth century. One text was quite expensive enough for the instruction of generations of children. In fact, Murgatroyd purchased very few and mainly relied on the primers he had acquired in his own youth. Carolyn Steedman, Master and Servant. Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007, pp. 110–130.
34 Thompson and Ridge, Catalogue, p. iii.
35 Harold Llewellyn Smith, ‘At St Edmund’s 1915–1920’; Spender (ed.), W. H. Auden, pp. 34–36. William Harrison Ainsworth (1805–1882) was a historical novelist. Among the forty-two novels he published was The Lancashire Witches (1849). Rookwood (1834) was his best-known transposition of gothic conventions into English social history.
36 ‘Introduction to The Poet’s Tongue, by W. H. Auden and John Garrett’, Auden, Prose Volume I, pp. 195–199.
37 Ansen, Table Talk, pp. 74–75.
38 Auden, Portable Greek Reader, p. 1.
39 Auden was familiar with Collingwood’s pre-1948 work; Collingwood had discussed one of Auden’s stage-plays in The Principles of Art (1938). Edward Mendelson, Later Auden, Faber and Faber, London, 1939, pp. 140–141, 144–145.
40 Robert Currie, ‘The Arts and Social Studies, 1914–1939’, Brian Harrison (ed.), The History of the University of Oxford, Vol. VIII. The Twentieth Century, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1994, pp. 109–138.
41 Chris Jones, ‘W. H. Auden and “The ‘Barbaric’ Poetry of the North”. Unchaining one’s daimon’, The Review of English Studies, 53 (2002), pp. 167–185; also ‘Anglo-Saxon Anxieties. Auden and “The Barbaric Poetry of the North” ’, Jones (ed.) Strange Likeness: The Use of Old English in Twentieth-Century Poetry, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006, pp. 68–121.
42 But Auden described his enchanted meeting with the essays of W. P. Ker, in Oxford, in 1925: ‘what good angel lured me into Blackwell’s one afternoon and, from such a wilderness … picked out for me the essays of W. P. Ker … a kind of literary All Souls Night in which the dead, the living and the unborn writers of every age and in every tongue were seen as engaged upon a common, noble and civilizing task. No other could have so instantaneously aroused in me a fascination with prosody, which I have never lost.’ W. H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays, Faber and Faber, London, 1963, pp. 42–43. Ker provided much information on Danish ballads, Viking culture, and the early historians of Norway: Collected Essays. In Two Volumes, Macmillan, London, 1925, Vol. 2, pp. 63–221. Ten years on, Auden may have remembered Ker’s essay on Byron (Vol. 1, pp. 207–223) and thought the dead poet a suitable recipient of a ‘letter from Iceland’.
43 Jones, ‘W. H. Auden’, p. 1.
44 Jones, Strange Likeness, p. 88.
45 Jones, Strange Likeness, cites ‘Letter from W. H. Auden to John Pudney, dated 28 April 1931. Berg Collection, MSS Auden, 902054’. The letter also included a recommendation that Anglo-Saxon be studied for ‘word order and sentence structure’.
46 Edward Mendelson, Early Auden, Faber and Faber, London, 1981, pp. 81–82; Auden, Collected Poems, p. 44.
47 Geoffrey Grigson, ‘A Meaning of Auden’, Spender (ed.), W. H. Auden, pp. 13–25; 16.
48 A. M. Curteis, ‘The Teaching of History in Preparatory Schools’, Board of Education, Special Reports on Educational Subjects Vol. 6. Preparatory Schools for Boys. Their Place in Secondary Education, HMSO, London, 1900, pp. 207–219; Samuel Rawson Gardiner, Outline of English History, B. C. 55–A. D.-1880, first published in 1881 and brought up to the current year in 1895 and 1899, Longman, London, 1901.
49 William J. Claxton, Peeps into the Past, or, History without History Books, Pitman, London, 1911; Mary Sarson and Mary E. Paine, Piers Plowman Histories, Junior Book II. Greek, Roman, and Old English History (1913), 3rd edn, Philip, London, 1937.
50 Nancy Smith, Hilda Booth, and E. H. Spalding, Piers Plowman Histories, Junior Book I. Stories of Hebrew, Trojan, Early Teutonic, and Medieval Life, Philip, London, 1913, was, said its authors, a book of pictures for the child ‘who cannot easily read to himself’; ‘The explanatory letterpress is simple enough to be read to children by an older person until they are able to read it unaided’; ‘The stories which they illustrate are told in Junior Book 1 of the Piers Plowman Histories’.
51 E. M. Tappen, In Feudal Times. Social Life in the Middle Ages. Told Through the Ages Series, Harrap, London, 1913.
52 Marie Bain, Chambers’s Periodic Histories. Book III. England in the Making (To 1066 AD), Chambers, Edinburgh, 1915.
53 Nancy Niemeyer, Stories for the History Hour. From Augustus to Rolf, Harrap, London, 1917, pp. 6–7.
54 Auden, Portable Greek Reader, p. 1.
55 E. K. Milliken, The Teaching of History, Incorporated Association of Preparatory Schools, Pamphlet No. 3, 1930. Here is a disparaging little comment about Lady Maria Calcott’s Little Arthur’s History of … series, which had first appeared in 1835. The last edition held by the British Library appeared in 1904. For state school history teaching 1900–1944, see David Cannadine, Jenny Keating, and Nicola Sheldon, The Right Kind of History. Teaching the Past in Twentieth-Century England, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2011, pp. 18–101. For women as producers of history for children and school history readers, Bonnie G. Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice, Harvard University Press, Harvard MA, 2000.
56 Llewellyn Smith, ‘At St Edmund’s’, p. 35. Or he could have been referring to The Great Schism of 1054 when the Eastern and Western Christian Churches divided from each other.
57 Carpenter, W. H. Auden, p. 17; F. Powell York and T. F. Tout, History of England, Longman, Green, London, 1910. Also G. F. Bosworth (ed.), Cambridge Historical Readers, Intermediate, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1914. King John’s Rage is all over the internet; see, for example, www.magnacharta.com/bomc/king-john-the-genesis-of-a-sinister-reputation/ (accessed 12 October 2017).
58 C. R. L. Fletcher and Rudyard Kipling, A School History of England, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1911, pp. 19–20, ‘The Roman Centurion Speaks’. There are lovely illustrations here of ‘The Cave People’, ‘The Landing of the Danes’, and twenty-three poems in which historical subjects speak. Of course the Centurion in Auden’s ‘Roman Wall Blues’ is miserable because he wants to go home, but both poems employ the same rhythmic structure, in (mainly) four-beat lines. Auden, ‘Twelve Songs … XI’, Collected Shorter Poems 1927–1957, pp. 93–94. For Auden’s account of Kipling as historian, W. H. Auden, ‘The Poet of Encirclement’, Prose Volume II, pp. 198–203; orig. ‘Review. A Choice of Kipling’s Verse. Made by T. S. Eliot with an Essay on Rudyard Kipling’, New Republic, 24 October 1943. See also Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb, ‘The Fallen Empire’, Costello and Galvin (eds), Auden at Work, pp. 156–178.
59 Davenport-Hines, Auden, pp. 52–53; this cites here a letter written in 1928, long after Auden has settled to English. Marc Stears, ‘Cole, George Douglas Howard (1889–1959)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004. Cole arrived in Oxford in 1925, but it does not appear that Auden heard him lecture when he was making his choice between PPE and English. However, Cole published a great deal and spoke frequently at public meetings between 1925 and 1928. University of Oxford, Nuffield College Library, MSS.GDHC, Papers of G. D. H. Cole in Nuffield College Library, www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/media/2016/gdhcole.pdf (accessed 12 October 2017).
60 W. H. Auden, ‘Mystic – and Prophet’, Prose Volume II, pp. 337–339; orig. review of J. Bronowski, A Man Without a Mask, New York Times Book Review, 14 December 1947. See also Mendelson, Early Auden, p. 184; Auden, Prose Volume I, pp. 744–745.
61 Palmer, Willingly to School, pp. 215–22. Before the formation of the diocese of Guildford in 1927, Hindhead lay in the diocese of Winchester, possessed of a bishop who was perhaps confessionally closer to Constance Auden’s taste than the Bishop of Birmingham. See above, p. 56–57.
62 Book of Common Prayer, ‘19. The Order of Confirmation’.
63 For the confirmation teaching of schoolmaster and cleric John Murgatroyd in West Yorkshire c.1750–1800, Steedman, Master and Servant, pp. 110–130. Had Auden attended the Sunday School attached to St Alphege’s, Solihull, he would have experienced a bang-up-to-the minute question-and-answer teaching method: ‘Instead of the ordinary Children’s Service on Sunday afternoons we shall adopt the method of teaching known as “the method of the Catechism” … three exercises of questioning, instruction, and homily, appealing to the will, mind and heart of the child. I hope that parents will encourage their children to write an analysis of the instruction, as children remember best what they put down in writing for themselves.’ Solihull Parish Magazine, 32:1 (1912), p. 5. He was too young for confirmation instruction in 1912; he may, however, have belonged to the Church Choir before he left St Edmund’s: Solihull Parish Magazine, 33:4 (April 1913), p. 3 thanks Mrs Auden (and three others) for their kind gifts of books for the Choir Boys Library. But little Wystan was only 6 years old; Constance Auden was more likely clearing out for the move to Homer Road.
64 ‘Newman, Geoffrey Gunnel’, Crockford’s Clerical Directory, 1888–1932; UK Crockford’s Clerical Directory online, www.crockford.org.uk/ (accessed 12 October 2017). Tony Sharpe, W. H. Auden, Routledge, Abingdon, 2007, p. 31; Davenport-Hines, Auden, p. 39. Christopher Isherwood, three years older than Auden and also a pupil at St Edmund’s was confirmed not there, but at his public school. Lions and Shadows. An Education in the Twenties (1938), Vintage, London, 2013, p. 8.
65 Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb, ‘Auden in History’, Tony Sharpe (ed.), W. H. Auden in Context, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2013, pp. 181–192.
66 W. H. Auden, ‘Religion and the Intellectuals. A Symposium’, Prose Volume III, pp. 170–176; orig. Partisan Review, February 1950; Tony Sharpe, ‘The Church of England. Auden’s Anglicanism’, Sharpe (ed.), W. H. Auden in Context, pp. 69–78.
67 W. H. Auden, ‘The Things Which Are Caesar’s’, Prose Volume III, pp. 196–210; orig. Theology, November and December 1950; Mendelson, Later Auden, pp. 275–294; 310–392; Teresa Bru, ‘Essaying in autobiography: Wystan Hugh Auden’s and Walter Benjamin’s faces’, Biography, 33:2 (2010), pp. 333–349.
68 Mendelson, Later Auden, p. 302.
69 Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico (1744), trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch, Doubleday, New York NY, 1961, pp. 52–53. See below, pp. 204–205.
70 Joseph Mali, The Legacy of Vico in Modern Cultural History. From Jules Michelet to Isaiah Berlin, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2012, p. 234.
71 Sean O’Brien, ‘Auden in Prose’, Sharpe (ed.), W. H. Auden in Context, pp. 329–336.