5 - The European Auden

Summary

In 1948 Auden began summering in Italy, partly because he wanted to write a different kind of poetry from the kind he had been writing in America. In 1958 he began summering in Austria, partly because he wanted to write a different kind of poetry from the kind he had been writing in Italy. From his arrival in New York in 1939 until he left for his first Italian journey in April 1948, his poems had focused on the existential crises of the inner life. A comment he later made about Søren Kierkegaard could apply with little exaggeration to his own work in the 1940s: 'a planetary visitor might read through the whole of his voluminous works without discovering that human beings are not ghosts but have bodies of flesh and blood' (Pilgrims, p. 42). The poems he wrote after he arrived in Italy for the first time celebrate human flesh, not for its beauty, in which Auden now takes almost no interest, but for its ordinariness. And because they celebrate human flesh they also mourn over human blood.