8
Our hill has made its submission and the green
Swept on into the north: around me,
From morning to night, flowers duel incessantly,
Colour against colour, in combats
Which they all win, and at any hour from some point else
May come another tribal outcry
Of a new generation of birds who chirp,
Not for effect but because chirping
Is the thing to do. More lives than I perceive
Are aware of mine this May morning
As I sit reading a book, sharper senses
Keep watch on an inedible patch
Of unsatisfactory smell, unsafe as
So many areas are: to observation
My book is dead, and by observations they live
In space, as unaware of silence
As Provocative Aphrodite or her twin,
Virago Artemis, the Tall Sisters
Whose subjects they are. That is why, in their Dual Realm,
Banalities can be beautiful,
Why nothing is too big or too small or the wrong
Colour, and the roar of an earthquake
Rearranging the whispers of streams a loud sound
Not a din: but we, at haphazard
And unseasonably, are brought face to face
By ones, Clio, with your silence. After that
Nothing is easy. We may dream as we wish
Of phallic pillar or navel-stone
With twelve nymphs twirling about it, but pictures
Are no help: your silence already is there
Between us and any magical centre
Where things are taken in hand. Besides,
Are we sorry? Woken at sun-up to hear
A cock pronouncing himself himself
Though all his sons had been castrated and eaten,
I was glad that I could be unhappy: if
I don’t know how I shall manage, at least I know
The beast-with-two backs may be a species
Evenly distributed but mum and dad
Were not two other people. To visit
The grave of a friend, to make an ugly scene,
To count the loves one has grown out of,
Is not nice, but to chirp like a tearless bird,
As though no one dies in particular
And gossip were never true unthinkable:
If it were, forgiveness would be no use,
One eye for one would be just and the innocent
Would not have to suffer. Artemis,
Aphrodite, are Major Powers and all wise
Castellans will mind their p’s and q’s,
But it is to you, who have never spoken up,
Madonna of silences, to whom we turn
When we have lost control, your eyes, Clio, into which
We look for recognition after
We have been found out. How shall I describe you? They
Can be represented in granite
(One guesses at once from the perfect buttocks
The flawless mouth too grand to have corners,
What the colossus must be), but what icon
Have the arts for you, who look like any
Girl one has not noticed and show no special
Affinity with a beast? I have seen
Your photo, I think, in the papers, nursing
A baby or mourning a corpse: each time
You had nothing to say and did not, one could see,
Observe where you were, Muse of the unique
Historical fact, defending with silence
Some world of your beholding, a silence
No explosion can conquer but a lover’s yes
Has been known to fill. So few of the Big
Ever listen: that is why you have a great host
Of superfluous screams to care for and
Why, up and down like the Duke of Cumberland,
Or round and round like the Laxey Wheel,
The Short, The Bald, The Pious, The Stammerer went,
As the children of Artemis go,
Not yours. Lives that obey you move like music,
Becoming now what they only can be once,
Making of silence decisive sound: it sounds
Easy, but one must find the time. Clio,
Muse of Time, but for whose merciful silence
Only the first step would count and that
Would always be murder, whose kindness never
Is taken in, forgive us our noises
And teach us our recollections: to throw away
The tiniest fault of someone we love
Is out of the question, says Aphrodite,
Who should know, yet one has known people
Who have done just that. Approachable as you seem
I dare not ask you if you bless the poets,
For you do not look as if you ever read them
Nor can I see a reason why you should.
1955, 1960.
This is transcribed from the first appearance of the poem, in the journal Encounter, in November 1955.1 The Encounter-Clio (Clio II) arrives in a silence even more portentous than that of Clio I: the poets appearing in this issue have no bylines as do the other contributors; the editors do not mention Auden or his poem. They had much to say about Hugh Gaitskell, about to become leader of the Labour opposition, about the common man having to make up his mind about what he wants from Labour and politics in general, and a plangent sadness that eight years after war, the New Jerusalem has not been built, at least not in architectural terms. This particular issue of Encounter has received the most attention over the years for its inclusion of Alan Ross’ ‘U and non-U. An essay in sociological linguistics’. This was a version of his earlier philological exposition of class-based British speech (‘U’ stands for ‘upper-class’) made comprehensible to ‘the lay reader’, and shortly to be made famous by Nancy Mitford.2 But only in retrospect does the linguistic company Clio II keeps in Encounter appear significant.
There are minor variations (of punctuation, capitalisation, and spelling) between Encounter-Clio and the version published in the eponymous collection of 1960, and between that and its appearance in the Collected Shorter Poems, 1927–1957 (1966). Oddly, the version in the volume Homage to Clio, published by a UK house, uses US spelling, which the others do not, though Edward’s Mendelson’s edition of the Collected Poems (1971, 1996) which, he says, presents all as Auden would have wished, was also published by Faber but uses US spelling.3 Clio’s second appearance (after the first, in Encounter) was in the US-published Old Man’s Road, which employs British spelling.4 There are seven of Auden’s 1950s ‘history-poems’ here, the publishers explaining that the poet has just returned to England to take up the Chair of Poetry at Oxford having completed The Old Man’s Road ‘on the eve of departure’ from New York. The pamphlet may be a series of reflections on ‘the nature and process of history’, but is not at all a valedictory address to New York: the old man’s road runs through an entirely English terrain of old cathedrals, new town halls, and housing developments in smart suburbs; a Romano-Briton, on the eve of withdrawal from the British Isles, reflects on the last hot bath to be had for a thousand years.5 It is a kind of returnee’s homage to his own old country, and perhaps and particularly a rumination on the hot-water situation in austerity Britain.
The revisions and alterations Auden made to the poems in Homage to Clio have been minutely discussed; but there is little account of what the minor changes meant; probably not much, beyond the proof-reader’s and copy-editor’s pen.6 So it is a real surprise to hear and see Auden read ‘Homage to Clio’ on YouTube, in a film dated 1960.7 Here Clio is pronounced Cly-o by Auden (in the correct Greek manner), not Clee-o, as is now common. An extraordinary accent: a discombobulating mixture of public-school classy/mid twentieth-century BBC (very ‘U’, in contemporary English-English terms) and some completely unexpected short vowels: ăfter, not ‘arfter’ for example, and then another vowel elongated in the ultimate of posh strangulation: ‘that’ to sound rather like ‘thet’. If I didn’t know he had spent a quarter of a century in the US, I might detect the West Midlands or even the Pennine ridge, though not North Yorkshire, where baby Auden spent only the first eighteen months of his life.8 But what do I know? Only as much as the socio-linguists tell me.9 He also more interestingly, and nowhere else but in this reading, has Clio defend ‘each world of her beholding’, rather than the casual, ‘some [any-old] world’, as if there are now many of them, each individual though unspecified, and known to her. It is very beautifully done; the RP tone of the BBC Home Service newscaster gives it an elegant and stealthy authority, though I should listen to the commentators who have observed the way in which the poet plays syntax against structure: ‘as if what the sentences could not possess were far more important than what they could make manifest’.10 Susan Young ah-Gottlieb puts this point more minutely: ‘even in the smallest units, there emerges a difference between the temporal measure that structures the poem and the time of its audible expression. Auden’s decision to use only internal rhyme, rather than endrhymes … reinforces this divergence, so the resulting metrical pattern remains silent’.11 Voiced, it moves with suave certainty towards its end. It opens with a very long utterance that works its way through to the first line of the third stanza; sentences are ‘driven beyond obvious stopping points because, in deference to Clio, they are committed to pursuing what has to remain incomplete’.12 It does sound – on YouTube – driven, though urbanely so; a voice moves lightly, swiftly to the end. It is said that at the formal level the metrical and thematic patterns of the poem come from a fissure in its perceptual field, in the same way as Clio is seen but not heard. Auden may have modified a Greek verse form as adopted by Horace, but so modified it that its ‘classical origins [are] not recognisable’.13 (The any-old jobbing historian will ask: if it can’t be seen and can’t be heard, what is the point of asking where it comes from?)
What is perceptually salient to English-speaking readers with the page in front of them, is the poem’s syllabic structure: ‘Twenty three quatrains alternate between lines of eleven and nine syllables with remarkable consistency.’14 And yet, as has been observed above, English speakers tend not to hear syllabic organisation. Metre is a form of measuring out the time of a verse; Latin measures were formally defined patterns of syllables, which were pronounced long or short, but always lightly stressed.15 But, however English-language verse is structured, it is heard according to the stress accent of the language itself. I cannot hear the syllables in Auden’s reading of ‘Homage to Clio’, but I can hear the poet moving in measure, to an end that the poem has already predetermined. The effect is uncanny; ‘uncanny’ as a description of the somatic state in which you say of the unfamiliar and unknown, I have been here before.16 Moreover, syllables used to structure a form of verse organise the language in a linear fashion. The verse moves in one direction, without the pauses that metre and rhyme provide, where the illusion is of brief stops or delays, as words respond to their partners in verse, or even take a step back. In Auden’s articulation, however, this poem is already always is at its end. We will return to Horace, and what Auden appears to have done to his Clio, towards the end of this chapter.
There are illuminating accounts of the composition of ‘Homage to Clio’, and its relationship to Auden’s philosophy (or favourite philosophers) of history. A description of ‘Iscia: 1948–57’, not only clarifies but moves, in locating all the ‘history’ poems on the island: the first place he ever lived in which he ‘acquired a sense of belonging to a community’.17 Does the poet sit in his garden, early morning, at sun-up perhaps, reading and not reading his book, as he watches the foliage darken as the sun moves across the terrain, up the surrounding hills? Auden gardened in Ischia, as he had done in his Solihull boyhood.18 Clio does not really appear in the poem; but she manifests herself to the poet’s mind, in a garden. Some have the poem as a summation of his decades-long reflection on nature of history, the role of the poet in history, ‘and the proper procedures for the historian’.19 Or it is read as the summation of Auden’s theories of history: he offers tribute to ‘ “the merciful silence” of historical choice’; gives thanks for the ability to make such choices, for ‘without the unique historical facts that Clio defends, human life would consist only of an instinctive struggle for survival’. The unique historical ‘facts’ are, possibly, individual human lives.20 Unique individuals rather than impersonal structural forces are the proper concern of history.21 Or should it be ‘historians’? Or ‘history writing’? It has been and will be a persistent problem that literary scholars and critics will not – cannot – say what History is, or what it was, in the period 1920–1970. For any halfway competent working historian, reading the critics’ comments on Auden’s ‘history’ is like trying to grasp mist.
Then, in another perspective on the poem, Clio is the feminine principle of grace: ‘her deep, unspeaking attention is a sacred space … where maternal love gives being and meaning to a son’s existence’.22 All agree, more or less, that this Clio is not the goddess of classical antiquity, nor the replacement for a Marxist (or marxian) view of history that Auden may just possibly have entertained in the 1930s, but rather a Christian theology of time and human existence, inflected by the grand-narrative history he read throughout the 1940s, and by the philosophies of Kierkergaard and Nietzsche.23 But then, to completely efface the conventional and unconventional Clio, is the poet’s view of the matter: he told several contemporaries and friends that she was in fact the Madonna, who ‘gave the timeless and bodiless an existence [in Christ], and brought silence to decisive sound’.24 He discussed the ensuing ‘Anglican problem’ with one friend, asking her if one ‘can … write a hymn to the Blessed Virgin Mary without being “pi”? The Prots don’t like her and the Romans want bleeding hearts and sobbing tenors. …’25 Auden’s Christianity – ‘a complex of Anglo-Catholic, existential, and neo-orthodox views’ – was, by several contemporary accounts, well enough understood for this to be apparent to readers of the 1950s and 1960s – for his problem not to be the mystery it is to later audiences.26
What has entranced me about ‘Homage to Clio’, over thirty years, are its paradoxes. Above all there was the paradox of the Muse’s perfect silence: the very idea of a history that is silent; that has ‘nothing to say’. Only much later, when I learned of Clio’s classical function as the Proclaimer, did I add irony to paradox. Paradoxical silence allowed me, on many occasions to start something or other (a lecture, a piece of writing) with the observation that with nothing to say, Clio has everything to write. A quotation from ‘Homage’; a few images of Clio, massive in marble with a pen in her hand, and I could discourse upon history as a form of writing. My intention was always to understand ‘history’ as a form emerging in Western modernity; as a form thinking and feeling (a cognitive form) and as a written form with its own procedures and poetics. I did quite a lot of this in the 1990s, repeating, in a very minor key, some major historiographical statements (history of history-writing) of the period.27 But all the paradoxes in the world will not help me now, with my Clio-who-never-was.
And now there are some new contradictions about the Madonna-Clio, though they are not of the philosophical kind. ‘[W]hat icon/Have the arts for you?’. Well, plenty, if the statues and frescos of the Muse pursued across Europe by eighteenth-century gentlemen scholars are anything to go by.28 But there’s no point now in my imagining Auden nipping over on the ferry from Forio to Naples for a good look round the National Archaeological Museum, not least because the last guidebook to detail its ever-changing stock of Clios was published in 1909, and it is not at all clear which statues of her, if any, were there in the 1950s.29 ‘Icon’ is a giveaway; this is no classical muse, but a figure from some other system of thought, believed to be worthy of veneration; a devotional representation of a holy figure. So I haven’t had time to be exasperated at Artemis’ granite bottom (no time to say triumphantly: The Greeks didn’t work in granite! – though the Egyptians did, it seems …) for she and her Tall Sister Aphrodite are no more present in the poem than half-sister Clio: they are made of the wrong material. The layers of my assumptions have been peeled away too rapidly to make any jokes.
In June 1955, the BBC Third Programme (Radio 3) broadcast three lectures by Auden under the general title of ‘The Dyer’s Hand’. Poetry – what it was – and the poetic process would be discussed, and the series would conclude with the problems of writing it in a technological age. Programme notes in the Radio Times told listeners that ‘Though nearly all poems written in the last nineteen hundred years … are the joint product of the Poet and the Historian, the collaboration is one of uneasy tension’; in the first lecture ‘Mr. Auden defines the subject-matter of poetry with the help of two portraits, one of the essential Poet and the other of the essential Historian’.30 Third Programme listeners were assumed to be highly literate: nowhere was the source of the general title given as Shakespeare’s Sonnet 111: ‘my nature is subdued/To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand’. If you knew that, you would know that the speaker was to appear as craftsman; a working poet; as one of the Makers the other Clio, Social-History Clio, loved.
Mendelson says that ‘Historical thought was an essential element of almost every poem Auden wrote in 1955 … and almost all his prose’ and that in the BBC lectures he focused on ‘the millennia-old debate between poet and historian’.31 He used two types (‘two Theophrastian sort of character sketches’; how erudite you had to be, to listen to Radio 3!),32 named the Poet and the Historian.33 The Poet believes that the world of nature, including human beings, is pre-ordained; the Historian, on the other hand, is only interested in human beings because he believes that individual human futures are dependent on the choices people make, for which they are individually responsible. The Poet thinks in terms of a present moment; ‘the historian is interested in the present only as it relates the past to the future’.34 This first lecture proceeds by comparison of the dispositions, beliefs, and writing styles of the two types. This Historian is not one of the actually-existing kind, whose work might be noted in the current issue of the Annual Bulletin of Historical Literature, although this actually-existing one is interested in the irony (and Auden does not say that the Historian can’t deal in irony) that the Bulletin reported for 1955 that ‘there was no epoch-making contribution to the philosophy of history during the year’.35 It did refer to many journal articles in the field, by Spiegel, Lefebvre, and Wollheim, and singled out one book for praise: ‘in the field of historiography Herbert Butterfield’s Man on his Past. The Study of the History of Historical Scholarship … is a learned and stimulating exposition of the origins of the notion of a history of historiography’. The 1955 editor may not have listened to the Third Programme, or he may have thought it perfectly obvious that Auden was not talking about historiography, or the philosophy of history, or even history as the ecumenical and broad minded ABHL conceived it, but about some kind of moral philosophy of human nature.
In the Third Programme broadcasts, Auden compared the writing of poetry with the writing of history: ‘The Historian’s method of story telling … is very different from that of the Poet’, he said. The Historian usually tells stories in prose, for he has a ‘distrust of formal verse as falsifying the truth’; when he does use verse, it is in ‘a homely, not an elevated style’. In comparison with the Poet, he leaves a lot out: ‘He rarely tells you where things happened, or describes the landscape. If natural objects play a role in the story, he is not specific; he will say … “Then Hans came to a tree” … where the Poet would have said “Then he came to a tall oak” … Sometimes, indeed, he does not even bother to provide the hero’s name, but will begin with ‘ “A certain man was about to be married”.’36 The Historian knows the ways of comedy; the Poet does not: ‘To the Poet comedy is synonymous with satire: only inferiority causes laughter; in the Historian’s tales, on the other hand, it is often the comic character who is superior.’ For the Poet ‘anything which has a history, which changes, contains an element of non-being, which resists poetic expression’. Modern poetry is obscure, he said, because it ‘means and cannot help meaning, something more than what it expresses’; the reader is perforce required to play a creative role that ‘the reader of ancient poetry is spared’. Edward Mendelson says that Auden’s central theme in the 1950s ‘was the troubled relations in literature, language, and society, between the Poet and the Historian … In the collaboration between Poet and Historian that produced his own poems, he evidently believed that he had made himself into a better poet by encouraging the Historian – and by restraining the Poet who had dazzled his early readers.’37
Auden had in fact been working with his types ‘Poet’ and ‘Historian’ for several years. In 1950, he expressed an aversion to ‘absolute systems of historical interpretation’ in a review of The Recollections of Alexis de Tocqueville. He quoted extensively from the Recollections to emphasise that de Tocqueville believed that ‘chance does nothing that has not been prepared beforehand. Antecedent facts, the nature of institutions, the cast of minds, and the state of morals are the materials.’ He wondered: had de Tocqueville been taught Thucydides as a boy? For his whole approach to the Revolution of 1848 was startlingly similar to that of the great historian of the Peloponnesian War. They both used, said Auden, a ‘historical method … derived from medicine’, in which there is a norm: good health; a healthy state of society. Then comes an attack (Auden explored it in a very long analogy); the historian is a physician, watching for symptoms.38 He thought de Tocqueville’s ‘extraordinary, perhaps unique, merit as a historian is that he combines in equal measure the philosopher’s capacity for drawing general conclusions and the novelist’s eye for the particular and grotesque’.
His binary for analysis in an article entitled ‘What Is Poetry About?’ was Nature and History. These he discussed in 1954 in a review of Marie Bonaparte’s edited work The Origins of Psycho-Analysis. Freud, said Auden, was the genius who had ‘determined that mental events are not natural, but historical, to be approached by the method of the historian’. He explained that in the historical order every event is unique and related to others by the principle of analogy, not, as in the natural order, by the principle of identity, which means that they are not quantitatively measurable: ‘to say that A is the cause of B means in the historical order is to say that “A provides B with a motive for occurring” … A makes B possible or likely but not inevitable’. In the inorganic order, change is reversible; it is cyclical in the organic order: ‘in the historical realm, change is irreversible’.39 He adopted Freud’s thesis that imagined events may operate in the unconscious and have effect in the same way as a ‘real’ ones, by claiming that ‘in history a deliberate lie, a mistaken notion, are as real and important as the truth’. In November 1955, after ‘Makers of History’ and ‘Homage to Clio’ were in print, he expanded his account of Freud as a historian: ‘the life of the mind cannot be studied by the quantitative methods suitable to the study of brain events, for it is a historical life to be studied by the principles which govern historical research’; this individual life contains subjective and objective elements, both of which the historian must pursue. ‘The objective or “scientific” side of the historian’s work consists in trying to find out what actually happened in the past. In this research he must eliminate so far as possible his personal hopes and fears and never accept second-hand evidence, like the accounts of previous historians, when there is available first-hand evidence, like documents contemporary to his period, by which to check the former.’ In assessing the importance of their data, all historians (including Freud) are governed by the same general principle: ‘the importance of an historical event is in proportion to its causal effect upon subsequent historical events which includes its influence upon later interpretations of the past’.40
He worked hard at providing an alternative vocabulary to the historians’ conventional ‘cause’ (as in ‘high food prices and scarcity caused riots’).41 One of his first analogies for historical method and historical interpretation was music. ‘What is music about?’, he asked in 1951. It was about choice. ‘A succession of two musical notes is an act of choice; the first causes the second not in the scientific sense of making it occur necessarily, but in the historical sense of provoking it, of providing it with a motive for occurring. A successful melody is a self-determined history: it is freely what it intends to be yet is a meaningful whole not an arbitrary succession of notes.’42 In a 1950 lecture he had laid out the difference between the ideas of cause and motivation: ‘Temporal or secular events may be divided into two classes’ he said: there are natural events and historical events. The historical are unique, not out of necessity, or according to some law, but ‘voluntarily according to provocation’; they may then function as the cause of subsequent events in that ‘the former provides them with a motive for occurring’.43 He said on this occasion that ‘the relation of history and nature … is a problem which has fascinated me for at least ten years’.44 By the time Auden wrote his history-poems, History was for him neither a strict science nor pure art, says Mendelson. What he spoke and wrote about was what he labelled ‘voluntary history’, the effect of the free choices of individuals. It was the opposite of ‘purposive Hegelian-Marxist History’. Historians were interested in choices people made in the past. History did not merely concern but was the subjective, psychological, and moral realm.45 And he, the poet and person, was in History: ‘Life, as I experience it in my own person … is … a continuous succession of choices between alternatives.’ Time, in his experience was ‘not … a cyclical motion outside myself but of an irreversible history of unique moments which are made by my decisions’.46 History, for this poet, always had somewhere to go, and sailed on, calmly or otherwise.
Auden’s use of ‘fact’, and ‘historical fact’ is difficult to interpret fifty years after the furore about facts and ‘historians and their facts’.47 Historians now prefer to limit themselves to ‘event’, though may well use the everyday ‘fact’ for something incontrovertible, like ‘it rained in the Waterloo region the night before the battle. That’s a fact.’ According to Auden, controversy (maybe: how heavily did it rain? Did it soak the battlefield to a sea of mud?) requires prose. ‘So does history, as distinct from myth. For the essential point about a historical fact is how and when it actually occurred, not how it ideally might have occurred.’ He explored this question with a discussion of the novel: ‘The novel differs from the epic or the tale in that it is an imitation of history: however unnaturalistic his technique, the novelist fails if he does not convince us while we are reading that his characters are historical characters, that this is what they actually said and did. The novel as a literary genre could not appear until men had become conscious of the peculiar nature of history.’48 He contemplated social and cultural history by analogy with the novel. In 1956, he quoted approvingly C. S. Lewis on literary historians, as we have seen: their business was not ‘the past as it “really” was … but with the past as it seemed to those who lived it’.49 The literary historians he spoke of here might well now be designated cultural historians; their problem was ‘background’ or context, for ‘In giving the general historical background, the problem for the … historian is deciding where to stop. Everything that happens is in some way relevant to what is written.’50
In 1963, under the title ‘This and That’ (‘Hic et Ille’) he appeared to have historians rather than the Historian in mind as well as the spectrum of kinds of history-writing that did yet have a name: ‘History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.’ To ask a question was itself an implied historical act or ‘fact’: it is ‘to declare war, to make some issue a casus belli’. Now there was ‘history proper’ in the definitional melee: proper history was ‘the history of battles, physical, intellectual or spiritual’; he thought that ‘the more revolutionary the outcome, the greater the historical interest. Culture is history which has become dormant or extinct, a second nature. A good historian is, of course, both a historian in the strict sense and a sociologist.’51 The idea of ‘social history’ was available in 1963 (the year in which Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class was published); the US publication Historical Abstracts, inaugurated in 1955, had ‘Social History’ as a category heading from its first issue.52
But there is little point in looking for traces of the Social-History Clio of ‘Maker’s of History’ in ‘Homage’. She is not the same Muse; she has changed, utterly. Clio II has nothing but her silence. She does not love, or even care, as does the first. Clio I was enthusiastic about workers, artisans, and poets; this Clio nurses the pre-sentient and she mourns the dead, whose main attribute is thus, as a condition of their being, a silence to match hers. The poet may say that she must care for the screams – of what? Babies? History’s victims? – but they go on and on, or round and round; it really is not clear that Clio cares. Artemis, most famous for her virginity, had no children (though in some variants of the myth, she was protectress of women in childbirth); who then, in this poem, are her children? And are there Clio’s children present in ‘Not yours’? If children she has in this poem, then they are not the Hyacinthus, for example, that some authorities had her bear; they are the unique individuals who came into being by motive, not cause; they come into being like music: they are entities which embody their own ‘self-determined history … [are] freely what … [they intend] to be’; meaningful in this way, even though dead. But these dead Clio II cannot make famous, or proclaim, for they are as silent as she. Clio is not here.
Her absence is probably best measured by her most likely poetic source, Horace’s twelfth Ode:
Quem viram aut heroa lyra vel acri
tibia sumis celebrare, Clio,
quem deum? Cuius recinet iocosa
nomen imago
aut in umbrosia Heliconis oris
aut super Pino gelidove in Haemo?53
In 1742, as we have seen, first lines were translated as ‘What man, what hero, wilt thou chuse, to celebrate his rising fame,/And consecrate in verse his name?’ and in 1793 as ‘What man, what hero, wilt thou chuse,/ Theme of thy lyre, immortal muse?/ What god shall Clio praise?’.54 The answer to this question was in the dedication to the Ode. In 1830, William Smart did the Odes into prose ‘for Students’ and, helpfully, his translation of the twelfth is reproduced below.55 It was dedicated by Horace, the ex-military man now in rural retirement, to Caesar Augustus (c.23–13 BCE) – with whatever degree of irony need not delay us here, except to note that the Emperor was greatly interested in armies and fleets.56 And that Horace’s Clio disappears pretty smartish from Ode XII, for it is Homage to Caesar, not to the Muse, who is absent from Horace’s Ode for as long as it takes for her to arrive in Auden’s ‘Homage’. Indeed, Horace’s may not be Clio in the first place, for at least one modern commentator thought that Horace did not know or did not heed the functions assigned to the several Muses (some trouble about that shrill pipe/lyre, or which Muse is responsible for choral odes and which for songs …).57
Clio, as historian or as history, has never been in Auden’s ‘Homage’, and I have been finding her there, unseasonably, all these years. But perhaps we should agree with Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb, and take more notice of the other name given her by Auden: Muse of Time. ‘The time of historical existence cannot be measured according to the circular movements of clock or calendar but is, instead, given only when it is found,’ says Gottlieb. The malaise of historical existence is ‘the absence of “the time”, understood … as Christological kairos’.58 In the New Testament kairos is to do with the time of God’s purposes, as in ‘the kingdom of God is at hand’ (Mark I, 15). Or it is used to signal an opportune moment or ‘season’. The time that Auden says we must find is God’s time. In her contribution to the Tribute to Auden, Ursula Niebuhr remembered his reading of Kierkergaard and Tillich – ‘we lent him The Interpretation of History’ – in which Tillich made use of ‘ “the time”/kairos: for him kairoi were crises in history which demanded an existential decision from human beings’. The coming of Christ was the best example of kairos.59
There is also much to say about Auden’s reading of Nietzsche, particularly, in Gottlieb’s account, his ‘Use and Disadvantage of History for Life’. In Nietzsche’s text, a leaf of memory flutters by. The writer is unhappy in his historical existence, as the animals around him are not. In ‘Homage’, Auden changes the leaf into the book he is reading as the poem opens. ‘If the past were crystallized into a leaf that somehow remains in the present, then the nexus of cause and effect would be unbreakable’; Auden breaks the chain by having Clio as the muse of time itself, in which there will be movement, and an ending. If we can learn from our recollections, we may see that each event could have been otherwise; we can break the (historian’s) iron welding of cause to event. The past ceases to be a closed book, but an open one, like the one Auden holds in his hands.60 Gottlieb concludes her tour de force by remarking on the Nietzsche Auden quoted in The Viking Book of Aphorisms (1962): ‘By seeking after origins, one becomes a crab. The historian looks backwards; eventually he also believes backwards.’ Gottlieb claims that Auden’s final appeal to Clio (‘teach us our recollections’) is a plea for this not to happen to him; a plea not to come to believe backwards; please God, not to become a historian.61 Impossible now, after Derrida, not to read into the commentary, and perforce the poem, Derrida’s long and convoluted quest to inscribe what the historian’s search for beginnings and origins really means: Archive Fever, with all its obsessions and compulsions.62
Thing is, I’m a Vico girl. Auden hinted that he may have been a Vico Boy when, in his farewell to the South, to Ischia – ‘Good-Bye to the Mezzogiorno’ (1958) – he invoked his ‘sacred meridian names, Vico, Verga,/Pirandello, Bernini, Bellini’.63 Pausing not to ask about the company Giambattista Vico keeps here, what on earth could Auden have read of his in 1955, when he wrote his two Clios? The slow translation history of Vico’s New Science (1744) is notorious. Edmund Wilson had made much of French historian Jules Michelet’s astonished reading of Vico in the 1820s, in To the Finland Station (1940), and Auden reviewed Wilson’s book in the year it was published.64 Michelet had made Vico’s writings available in French, but there was no widely available translation into English until 1961.65 Auden must have read Vico in Italian. After Michelet, many historians have been as amazed and entranced as he was at his ‘oration of rare literary clarity’ (above, p. 123), after which – after his observation that the social world had been made by men and women – Vico continued with:
Whoever reflects on this cannot but marvel that the philosophers should have bent all their energies to the study of the world of nature, which, since God made it, He alone knows; and that they should have neglected the study of the world of nations, or civil world, which, since men had made it, men could come to know.66
Adoption of this perspective was made an emblem of the new social history in the 1960s and 1970s.67 We cared less about why Vico sought to restore to historical thinking the traditional distinction between sacred and profane – for if God made all, including civil society, then men cannot have done so. There were arguments, then and now, that Vico attempted to evade censorship by insisting that God had made special interventions, in the Jewish past, for example.68 But accounts of sacred history and the time of God in Vico no more delayed us than they did Karl Marx, whose equally beautiful and plangent (and so hackneyed that one can scarcely give oneself permission to quote it) ‘Men make their own history …’ is a companion to Vico’s and taken as one of the founding principles of social history.69
A prose work allows the reader a certain freedom to take from it what is desired, or needed, whether it be a set of propositions about sacred history or the agency of human beings in making the social world. A poem, an intricate little machine of thought and language, will not let you do that. I have been reading the wrong Clio in ‘Homage to Clio’ for a very long time; and wilfully so. I had no permission from the text to make my reading. I could have worked these things out for myself, twenty years ago. Clio II is not History, or about history, or about doing history. She is about some other form of time that isn’t historical time; she is – about – Christian time.70 And I simply do not have the emotional or devotional ticket that might take me to the end of her line. There are other realms of historical thinking where I can get on with the job of working out how stuff happened. How people decided to do stuff. Made moves. Altered things. A realm in which we all know that what is made out of the past depends on who’s doing the observing, and that what we think about it depends on what we’re actually doing, which is writing this history (some history or other), right now. I shall ignore Mr Irwin, calling after me that he doesn’t know what I’m talking about.
1 Encounter, 5:5 (November 1955), pp. 30–31. For recent assessments of the journal’s Cold War role: Hugh Wilford, ‘ “Unwitting assets”? British intellectuals and the Congress for Cultural Freedom’, Twentieth Century British History, 11:1 (2000), pp. 42–60; The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War, 1945–1960, Cass, London, 2003; Sarah Miller Harris, The CIA and the Congress for Cultural Freedom in the Early Cold War. The Limits of Making Common Cause, Routledge, Oxford and New York NY, 2016, pp. 111–128. Also, below, p. 192, fn 23.
2 E. G. Stanley, ‘Ross, Alan Strode Campbell (1907–1980)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004. Nancy Mitford (ed.), Noblesse Oblige. An Enquiry Into the Identifiable Characteristics of the English Aristocracy, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1956, contained Ross’s and Mitford’s essays on the topic and John Betjeman’s ‘How To Get on in Society’, among other light-hearted frolics in the field of socio-linguistics.
3 Homage to Clio, Faber and Faber, London, 1960; Collected Shorter Poems, 1927–1957, Faber and Faber, London, 1966, pp. 307–310; Collected Poems (1976), Edward Mendelson (ed.), 1991, pp. 610–613, noted as composed in June 1955 here. The Encounter version is with British spelling.
4 W. H. Auden, The Old Man’s Road, Voyager Press, New York NY, 1956; no pagination. ‘The Old Man’ is God, says the W. H. Auden Encyclopedia, David Garrett Izzo (ed.), McFarland, Jefferson NC and London, 2004, with very great authority. Maybe He is; but if so, Auden says that we may walk His road as we wish: He’s left it to those who don’t know about its purpose and never ask anything at all about its history, or History in general.
5 The Old Man’s Road includes: the title poem; ‘The Epigoni’; ‘Makers of History’; ‘The History of Science’; ‘Merax and Mullin’; ‘C. 500 A. D.’ (titled ‘Bathtub Thoughts’ in collections of Auden’s poetry); and ‘Homage to Clio’.
6 Y. S. Yamada, ‘W. H. Auden’s Revising Process (VI). Homage To Clio (1960)’, Annual Report, Faculty Education, Iwate University, 40:2 (1981–1982), pp. 1–18, available: https://iwateu.repo.nii.ac.jp/?action=pages_view_main&active_action=repository_view_main_item_detail&item_id=11931&item_no=1&page_id=13&block_id=21 (accessed 16 October 2017). But see the comments on Auden’s revisions in Hannah Sullivan, ‘ “Still Doing It By Hand”. Auden and the Typewriter’, Bonnie Costello and Rachel Galvin (eds), Auden at Work, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2015, pp. 5–23.
7 The YouTube clip is dated 1960; Edward Mendelson, in W. H. Auden, Prose Volume IV. 1956–1962, Edward Mendelson (ed.), Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 2010, p. 874, says that Auden read ‘Homage to Clio’ and talked with Anne Fremantle on the CBS television religious series Look Up and Live on 1 March 1959; the broadcast was the first of a series of four, entitled ‘This Bent World’, ‘on the problems of Christianity today’.
8 ‘Homage to Clio (Recorded in 1960)’ by W. H. Auden’, 4 January 2016, Uploaded by LPKvideoDesigns: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gwe2V-mvhgs (accessed 24 May 2016). For Auden’s accent, ‘Măster/Māster’, ‘Letters’, London Review of Books, 31:24 (17 December 2009).
9 Arthur Hughes, English Accents and Dialects. An Introduction to Social and Regional Varieties of English in the British Isles (1996), 4th edn, Hodder Arnold, London, 2005; Suzanne Romaine (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol.4, 1776–1997, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998; David Crystal, The Stories of English, Penguin, London, 2005. Meeting Auden in New York in 1958, Edmund White thought that after two years in post as Professor of Poetry, Auden had ‘reverted to the Oxford way of speaking to an extent that made him partially unintelligible’. The Fifties. From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period, Leon Edel (ed.), Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York NY, 1986, p. 528.
10 Charles Altieri, The Art of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Modernism and After, Blackwell, Malden MA and Oxford, 2006, p. 152.
11 Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb, ‘Auden in History’, Tony Sharpe (ed.), W. H. Auden in Context, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2013, pp. 181–192; 186.
12 Altieri, Art of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, p. 152. An astute listener to the recorded collection The Voice of the Poet: W. H. Auden [With Book] (Audio CD, Audiobook) Random House, 2004 (which does not contain a reading of ‘Homage to Clio’) says that ‘Auden’s recitation follows the cadences of the meter, not the sense of the lines. Very old-fashioned.’ But wonderful, he hastens to add. And an important fragment of evidence that ordinary readers of poetry do look for lines. See above, pp. 133–134.
13 Gottlieb, ‘Auden in History’, pp. 186–187.
14 Gottlieb, ‘Auden in History’, pp. 186–187.
15 Joseph Dane, The Long and the Short of It. A Practical Guide to European Versification Systems, Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame IN, 2010; B. W. Fortson, ‘Latin Prosody and Metrics’, J. Clackson (ed.), A Companion to the Latin Language, Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, 2011.
16 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ (1919), Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 17, Hogarth Press, London, 1955, pp. 217–252.
17 Edward Callan, ‘Ischia: 1948–57. Nature and History’, Auden. A Carnival of Intellect, Oxford University Press, New York NY, Oxford, 1983, pp. 218–237.
18 Well. He wrote about picking soft fruit and turning over the soil in ‘The Robin’ (1924); W. H. Auden, Juvenilia. Poems 1922–1928, Katherine Bucknell (ed.), Faber and Faber, London, 1998, pp. 55–56.
19 Gottlieb, ‘Auden in History’, pp. 181–192.
20 Edward Mendelson, Later Auden, Faber and Faber, London, 1999, pp. 393–404; ‘The European Auden’, Stan Smith (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004, pp. 55–67; 62. Humphrey Carpenter, W. H. Auden. A Biography (1981, 1983), Faber and Faber, London, 2010, pp. 397–398; John Fuller, Auden. A Commentary, London, 1998, p. 464.
21 Edward Mendelson, Early Auden (1981), Faber and Faber, London, 1999, pp. 309–314 for Auden’s earlier philosophy of History.
22 Janet Montefiore, ‘Auden among Women’, Sharpe (ed.), W. H. Auden in Context, pp. 107–117; 115.
23 Young-ah Gottlieb, ‘Auden in History’; Frederick Buell, W. H. Auden as a Social Poet, Cornell University Press, Ithac NY, 1973, pp. 77–158; Justin Replogle, ‘Auden’s Marxism’, PMLA, 80:5 (1965), pp. 584–595: ‘between 1933 and 1938 Marx and Engels contributed to Auden’s profoundest ideas about man. They encouraged him to abandon his exclusively psychological view of human behavior … laid the foundation for a conception of human existence, that incorporated into and transformed by Christian theology, became the central theme of his later poetry’ (595); Christopher Caudwell, Illusion and Reality. A Study of the Sources of Poetry (1937), Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1946, pp. 116, 122, 283; Justin Quinn, ‘Auden’s Cold War Fame’, Costello and Galvin, Auden at Work, pp. 231–249.
24 On this point, Robert Bloom, ‘W. H. Auden’s bestiary of the human’, The Virginia Quarterly Review 42:1 (966), pp. 207–233; esp. 222–225.
25 Fuller, Commentary, p. 465; Mendelson, Later Auden, p. 396. He enclosed a typescript in a letter to J. R. R. Tolkien (14 June 1955), telling him that ‘it is really, as you will seen, a hymn to Our Lady’. Carpenter, W. H. Auden, p. 397, Note 1. It is, of course, possible to discuss the poetics and philosophy of ‘Homage to Clio’ without focus on the discovery that it is a Christian poem if you can find it in yourself to believe it ‘based on a conflict between how specific gods represent totally different attitudes towards experience’. Altieri, Art of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, p. 149.
26 Frederick P. W. Mcdowell, ‘ “Subtle, various, ornamental, clever”. Auden in his recent poetry’, Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, 3:3 (1962), pp. 29–44; Justin Replogle, ‘Auden’s intellectual development, 1950–1960’, Criticism, 7:3 (1965), pp. 250–262; Buell, W. H. Auden as a Social Poet, pp. 188–189. Buell helpfully remarks that the question of Auden’s faith may well lie ‘permanently beyond the reach of literary criticism’.
27 Carolyn Steedman, ‘La Théorie qui n’en est pas une, or, Why Clio doesn’t care’, History and Theory, Beiheft 31 (1992), pp. 33–50; ‘About ends. On how the end is different from an ending’, History of the Human Sciences, 9:4 (1996), pp. 99–114. Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History (1975), Columbia University Press, New York NY, 1988; Philippe Carrard, ‘History as a kind of writing. Michel de Certeau and the poetics of historiography’, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 100:2 (2001), pp. 465–482; Jacques Rancière, The Names of History. On the Poetics of Knowledge (1992), University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis MN, 1994. See also Frank Kermode’s remarks on history-as-writing in History and Value, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1988, pp. 108–127.
28 See above, Chapter 3.
29 Illustrated Guide to the National Museum in Naples. Sanctioned by the Ministry of Education, Richter, Naples, 1909.
30 ‘What is Poetry About?’, 8 June, repeat 13 June; ‘The Poetic Process’, 15 June, repeat 20 June; ‘On Writing Poetry Today’, 22 June, repeat 27 June. Genome BETA Radio Times 1923–2009. Auden, ‘The Dyer’s Hand’, Listener, 53, 54, 55 (16, 23, 30 June 1955). The lectures are reproduced in W. H. Auden, Prose Volume III. 1949–1955, Edward Mendelson (ed.), Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 2008, pp. 536–568 and discussed pp. 768–771. They were written in early April 1955 in New York and recorded at the BBC in the same month. Auden and Kallman were presumably stopping off in London en route to Iscia.
31 Mendelson, Later Auden, p. 390.
32 Theophrastus’ (371–287 BCE), Characters contains thirty brief sketches of character types, thus providing a summary of aspects of human nature.
33 The Poet and the Historian can be thought of as ideal-types: Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, trans. by E. Schils and H. Finch, Free Press New York NY, 1949, pp. 89–95.
34 Auden, Prose Volume III, pp. 536–547.
35 ‘Philosophy of History: Historiography’, Annual Bulletin of Historical Literature, 41 (publications of the year 1955), George Philip for the Historical Association, London, 1956, p. 5.
36 W. H. Auden, ‘The Dyer’s Hand’, Prose Volume III, pp. 536–568, broadcast details Note 30.
37 ‘In arguing the case for the Historian, he was recommending a future for himself, not prescribing a set of rules for other writers.’ Prose Volume IV, Introduction, p. xxi.
38 W. H. Auden, ‘A Guidebook for All Good Counter-Revolutionaries’, Prose Volume III, pp. 190–196; orig. pub. The Nation, 8 April 1950. Auden’s practice of reviewing by extensive quotation, noted by Stefan Collini of the recently published volumes V and VI of The Complete Works (1963–1973), was established very early in his writing career. ‘He does very little that could be called literary criticism … Quoting can, of course, be a form of criticism, though Auden rarely comments on the passages he excerpts, and says little about the verbal texture of the writing he discusses,’ says Collini. ‘Uncle Wiz’, London Review of Books, 37:4 (16 July 2015), pp. 36–37.
39 W. H. Auden, ‘The Freud-Fleiss Letters’, Prose Volume III, pp. 472–477. Review of Sigmund Freud, The Origins of Psycho-Analysis. Letters to Wilhelm Fliess. Drafts and Notes, 1887–1902, Basic Books, New York NY, 1954; orig. Griffin, June 1954.
40 W. H. Auden, ‘The History of an Historian’, Prose Volume III, pp. 596–601. Review of Ernest Jones, Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, Vol. II; orig. pub. Griffin, November 1955.
41 W. H. Walsh, ‘Historical causation’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society New Series, 63 (1962–1963), pp. 217–236; Joe Scott (ed.), Understanding Cause and Effect, Learning and Teaching About Causation and Consequence in History, Longman, London, 1990.
42 W. H. Auden, ‘Some Reflections on Opera as a Medium’, Prose Volume III, pp. 250–255; orig. Tempo, Summer 1951.
43 W. H. Auden, ‘Nature, History and Poetry’, Appendix III, Public Lectures and Courses, Prose Volume III, pp. 636–653.
44 Auden, Prose Volume III, p. 648.
45 Mendelson, Later Auden, pp. 391–292.
46 Mendelson, Later Auden, pp. 392, quoting W. H. Auden, ‘At the End of the Quest, Victory’, New York Times, 22 January 1956, www.nytimes.com/books/01/02/11/specials/tolkien-return.html (acccessed 16 October 2017).
47 Inaugurated in 1961 with the publication of E. H. Carr’s What Is History? the argument about facts has been conducted by philosophers of history rather than by practising academic historians. But see Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History, Granta, London, 1997. E. H. Carr, What is History? With A New Introduction by Richard J. Evans, Palgrave, Basingstoke, 2001; Martin Bunzl, Real History. Reflection on Historical Practice, Routledge, London and New York NY, 1997, pp. 27–43; Beverley Southgate, History: What and Why? Ancient, Modern and Postmodern Perspectives, Routledge, London, 1996, pp. 58–85; Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth About History, Norton, New York NY and London, 1994; Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988.
48 W. H. Auden, ‘Introduction to Poets of the English Language’, W. H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson (ed.), (1950), Mendelson (ed.), Prose Volume III, pp. 103–154. Auden’s point about the history of historical consciousness is made at brilliant length by Franco Moretti, The Way of the World. The Bildungsroman in European Culture, Verso, London, 1987.
49 Above, pp. 181 W. H. Auden, ‘Stimulating Scholarship’, Prose Volume IV, pp. 6–12; orig. review of Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, The Griffin, March 1956.
50 W. H. Auden, ‘Just How I Feel’, Prose Volume IV, pp. 77–82 orig. review of H. S. Bennett, Chaucer and the Fifteenth Century, and E. K. Chambers, English Literature at the Close of the Middle Ages, The Griffin, April 1957.
51 W. H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays, Faber and Faber, London, 1963, pp. 94–106; 97.
52 Historical Abstracts, 1775–1945. A Quarterly of Historical Articles Appearing Currently in Periodicals the World Over, 1:1 (1955). The ABHL has never used ‘social history’ as a category heading.
53 Horace, Q. Horati Flacci. Carminum Liber I, With Introduction and Notes by James Gow, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1949, pp. 12–14.
54 Virgil, The Works of Virgil. Containing His Pastorals, Georgics and Æneis. Translated into English Verse; by Mr. Dryden. In Three Volumes, J. and R. Tonson and S. Draper, London, 1748; John Dryden, The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Esq. In Three Volumes. With the Life of the Author, Apollo Press, Edinburgh, 1794; Virgil, Virgilii Maronis Opera. Interpretatione et Notis Illustravit Carolus Ruæus, … Jussu Christianissimi Regis, Ad Usum Serenissimi Delphini. Juxta Editionem Novissimam Parisiensem. Huic Editioni Accessit Index Accuratissimus, Antè Editis Longè Locupletior, C. Bathurst and twelve others, London, 1777; The Lyric Repository: A Selection of Original, Ancient, and Modern, Songs, Duets, Catches, Glees, and Cantatas, Distinguished for Poetical and Literary Merit; Many of Which Are Written by Dr. Johnson, Peter Pindar, J. Johnson, London, 1788; James Brown, Odes, Elegies, Songs, &c, for the author, Bristol, 1786; Thomas Broughton, An Historical Dictionary of All Religions from the Creation of the World to this Present Time. … Compiled From the Best Authorities …, C. Davis and T. Harris, London 1742; Horace, The Odes, Epodes, and Carmen Seculare of Horace. Translated Into English Verse. By William Boscawen, Esq, John Stockdale, London, 1793.
55 William Smart, Horace Literally Translated, for the Use of Students, Whitaker, Teacher, London, 1830. ‘CLIO, what man or hero will you undertake to celebrate on the lyre or shrill pipe? What god? Whose name shall sportive echo repeat, either on the shady borders of Helicon, or upon Pineus, or on cold Haemus. – Whence the woods crowded to follow tuneful Orpheus, retarding the rapid falls of rivers and the swift winds by the craft of his mother Calliope, and so sweet as to draw listening oaks with his tuneful strings. What can I sing before the usual praises of the Father, who governs the affairs of men and gods, who governs sea and land and the world with changing seasons? – Whence nothing is produced greater than he, neither flourishes any thing like him, or second to him; yet Pallas hath occupied the honours next to him. Neither will I be silent of thee, Bacchus, bold in battles; and of thee virgin Diana, inimical to savage beasts; nor of thee Phoebus, formidable for thy sure dart. I will sing also Hercules, and the sons of Leda [Castor and Pollux] the one distinguished for excelling on horseback, the other on foot; whose benign constellation, as soon as it hath shone forth to sailors the troubled surge flows from the rocks, winds fall and clouds disappear, and the threatening wave subsides on the sea, because they willed it so. I am in doubt whether I shall first commemorate after these Rhamnales, or the peaceful reign of Numa, or the magnificent badges of Tarquin the elder, or the noble death of Cato. Grateful will I celebrate in choicest verse Regulus and the Scauri, and Aemilius Paulus prodigal of his great soul when Hannibal conquered, and Fabricius. Hard poverty, and an inherited farm with a household adapted to it, raised this man useful in war, and Curius with his rough hair, and Camillus. The fame of Marcellus grows, like a tree in stealing-on time. The Julian constellation shines among all, like the moon among smaller stars. Son of Saturn, author and preserver of the human race, to you the protection of great Caesar is committed by the fates; you shall reign, with Caesar as your second. He, whether he shall subdue with a just victory the Parthians hanging over Italy, or render subject the Seres and Indians on the east coast, shall rule the wide world with equity, inferior to you alone – you shall shake Olympus with your mighty car, you shall hurl your hostile thunders at the polluted groves.’
56 W. H. Auden, ‘Epitaph on a Tyrant’ (1939), Collected Shorter Poems, p. 127.
57 Horace, Q. Horati Flacci (James Gow), pp. 40–41.
58 Gottlieb, ‘Auden in History’, p. 187
59 Ursula Niebuhr, ‘Memories of the 1940s’, Stephen Spender (ed.), W. H. Auden. A Tribute, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London, 1975, pp. 104–118; 106; Paul Tillich, The Interpretation of History, Scribner, New York NY, 1936.
60 Gottlieb, ‘Auden in History’, pp. 191–192; Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On the Use and Abuse of History for Life’ (1874), Thoughts Out of Season, Allen and Unwin, London, 1937; The Untimely Meditations Parts I and II, Digireads, pp. 96–133.
61 W. H. Auden and Louis Kronenberger, The Viking Book of Aphorisms. A Personal Selection, Viking Press, New York NY, 1962, p. 238. Nietzsche is quoted under the heading ‘History’, which contains 114 aphorisms. Rosenstock-Huessy provides two of these; only sixteen are provided by those who could be considered card-carrying historians. One of the editors was mighty fond of Jacob Burkhardt: he provided nine.
62 Jacques Derrida, ‘Archive Fever. A Freudian impression’, Diacritics, 25:2 (1995), pp. 9–63; Mal d’archive. Une impression freudienne, Editions Galilée, Paris, 1995, Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz, University of Chicago Press, Chicago IL, 1996. For a not entirely serious account of ‘real’ Archive Fever, see Carolyn Steedman, Dust, University of Manchester Press, Manchester, 1992, pp. 17–37.
63 Auden, Collected Shorter Poems, pp. 338–341.
64 Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station. A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (1940), Doubleday, New York NY, 1953; W. H. Auden, ‘Who Shall Plan the Planners?’, Prose Volume II. 1939–1948, Edward Mendelson (ed.), Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 2002, pp. 88–89. Review of Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station; orig. Common Sense, November 1940. Auden may not have read The New Science at all; but The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, trans. Max Harold Fisch, Thomas Goddard Bergin, Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY, was published in 1944.
65 Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch, Doubleday, New York NY, 1961. M. Donzelli, ‘La Conception de l’Histoire de J. B. Vico et son Interpretation par J. Michelet’, Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française, 53:4 (1981) pp. 633–658. For the English-language translation history of Vico’s works, Giambattista Vico, Keys to the New Science. Translations, Commentaries, and Essays, Thora Ilin Bayer and Donald Phillip Verene (eds), Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY, 2009, pp. 199–204.
66 Joseph Mali, The Legacy of Vico in Modern Cultural History, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2012, p. 6; Vico, New Science (1961), pp. 52–53; Southgate, History, p. 119; Hayden White, Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe (1971), Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD, 2014, pp. 135–162.
67 ‘Take Marx and Vico and a few European novelists away, and my most intimate pantheon would be a provincial tea party: a gathering of the English and the Anglo-Irish.’ E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory, Merlin Press, London, p. 109; Richard Fieldhouse and Richard Taylor, E. P. Thompson and English Radicalism, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2013, p. 2.
68 David Bebbington, Patterns in History: A Christian Perspective on Historical Thought, Regent College, Vancouver, 1990, pp. 97–107; M. C. Lemon, Philosophy of History. A Guide for Students, Routledge, London, 2003, p. 153.
69 For differences between Vico and Marx over the question of ‘making’, Terence Ball, ‘Vico and Marx on “Making” History’, Reappraising Political Theory. Revisionist Studies in the History of Political Thought, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1994, pp. 212–228, esp. 220–225. For ‘Men make their own history’ (quoting it is just about possible in a footnote), ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ (1852): ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before … they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.’ www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm (accessed 16 October 2017).
70 John R. Hall, ‘The time of history and the history of times’, History and Theory, 19:2 (1980), pp. 113–131.