One of the books on my Holiday Reading/Semester Break list is the Selected Poems by W. H. Auden. As I have never studied the life and works of Auden, several things drew me to learn more about him:

  • Required reading for FA23 British Lit at my Alma Mater, Baylor University
  • Auden’s celebration of literature through the ages. In Mendelson’s Introduction of Auden, he states “The shape of his whole career shows traces of an ambitious recapitulation of a thousand years of literary history”(xvii).
  • His Icelandic saga’s (my connecting with Iceland through Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth)
  • Auden’s connections to Goethe in the 1960’s [Goethe: Conversations and Encounters, Italian Journey, thank you Goethe.girl]
  • Auden was Professor of Poetry at Oxford

W. H. Auden and Jean-Paul Sartre, a connection

However, my primary connection with Auden was the inspiration to compose his poem “Memorial for the City,” derived from his encounter with Germany in 1945 while employed as a US government surveyor assessing the impacts of Allied bombing. Additionally, Jean-Paul Sartre’s “What is Literature” played a pivotal role in shaping his perspective on the Occupation of Paris, an event he personally experienced, and the post-World War II aftermath. Sartre emerged as a prominent voice, contributing to the transformation of French literary culture. [see my post] .

Sartre wrote throughout the Occupation of the moral corruption and behavior of the Germans. This living on a day-to-day existence “aided in the ‘New Order in Europe’ which depended upon the passivity of ordinary people to accomplish its goals (Ousby, 41).” 

In his essay “Paris under the Occupation,” Sartre wrote that the “correct” behavior of the Germans had entrapped too many Parisians into complicity with the Occupation, accepting what was unnatural as natural:

The Germans did not stride, revolver in hand, through the streets. They did not force civilians to make way for them on the pavement. They would offer seats to old ladies on the Metro. They showed great fondness for children and would pat them on the cheek. They had been told to behave correctly and being well-disciplined, they tried shyly and conscientiously to do so. Some of them even displayed a naive kindness which could find no practical expression (127).

(see my post Is Paris Burning and Sartre’s Les Mouches (1943) and Huis clos (1944), also written during the Occupation)

“Memorial for the City” by W. H. Auden

As Sartre addressed the societal concerns as a “writer” and “reader” while living in Occupied Paris, Auden’s scope is wider in Memorial for the City which looks at the “idea” of civilizations throughout history. In the first stanza, Auden refers to “Homer’s world” where gods behave, and men die. This world is followed by Pope Gregory’s “New City” in Section II. It has even been suggested that Auden was referring to St. Augustine’s concept of “the City of God” by including an epigraph by Juliana of Norwich as a prescript to the poem in which God is to be found in the bodily part as well as in the spiritual part of man.

According to Mendelson, Auden’s poems “imagined history as the product of unconscious but purposive forces that moved inexorably toward a revolutionary future.” This is seen in Memorial, which could “describe any typical twentieth-century metropolis or depict a visionary yet not unworldly form of human community” (xvi). 

[I could not find any direct references by Auden to the city of Paris during German occupation in my research on Memorial in the City]

My favorite poems by W.H. Auden from Selected Poems:

Funeral Blues

Museé des Beaux Arts

In Memory of W.B. Yeats

The Unknown Citizen

September 1, 1939

Horae Canonicae

New Year’s Greeting [“On this day tradition allots to taking stock of our lives, my greeting to all of you, Yeasts, Bacteria, Viruses, Aerobics and Anaerobics: A Very Happy New Year!”]

Prologue at Sixty: [“The Greek Code-Mind of Honor must acknowledge the happy eachness of all things, distinguish even from odd numbers, and bear witness to what-is-the-case” ]

Now, on to the connection between Goethe and Auden! Exciting.

What are your Auden favorites?

Works Cited

Ian Ousby. Occupation: The Ordeal of France, 1940–1944. New York: Cooper Square Press. 2000.

W.H. Auden Selected Poems. Selected and Edited by Edward Mendelson, New York: Random House, 2007.