Auden Poetry

We are all gathered here to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of W. H. Auden’s birth. Roughly fifty years ago, the great English poet did also pay a particular homage: to Clio. The muse ofpoetry like the rest, Clio is also and more specifically the muse of history in Greek mythology. Etymologically speaking, “Clio” is the one who ‘recounts’ and ‘makes famous’. In “T the Great”, a poemcollected in Auden’s volume titled Homage to Clio (1960), we are told that the mysterious Mr T, the figure of the cruel dictator and “[a] synonym […] for what is harmful”, “cannot win Clio’s cupagain”, his name reduced to an anagram in one of those crossword puzzles the poet was so partial to. (1966, 299, 300) T (that is, Tamburlaine the Great) and, by extension, his replacements in the record ofhistorical ignominy (“N” and “S”, standing for Napoleon and Stalin, respectively, according to Jonathan Fuller) are erased from Clio’s book of those worthy of historical fame. By honouring Clio in his1960 volume of poems plus the prose piece “Dichtung und Wahrheit”, Auden transforms the traditional description of the muse and, along with it, articulates his view of what is historically valuable,of what history truly is. In “Secondary Epic”, the poetic voice reproves Virgil for falsifying through prophecy the history of Rome and making imperial greatness a permanent state, something belied bythe passage of time and the eventual fall of the Roman Empire. This violation of historical truth, convenient to himself and to those in power (“to serve your political turn”), hurts the inspiringmuse, who, though unnamed, one can draw the conclusion it is Clio in view of the poem’s major theme: “No, Virgil, no:/Behind your verse so masterfully made/We hear the weeping of a Muse betrayed”. (Auden1966, 297) Great poets can, therefore, be biased, subservient, untruthful historians. Understood in this context, what is perhaps Auden’s most famous line, “For poetry makes nothing happen” (“In...