The real story behind our species' clinging to immaturity is much sadder. It has to do not with man's reluctance to know about death but with his not wanting to hear about life. Yet innocence is the last thing that can be sustained naturally. That's why poets—especially those who lasted long—must be read in their entirety, not in selections. The beginning makes sense only insofar as there is an end. For unlike fiction writers, poets tell us the whole story: not only in terms of their actual experiences and sentiments but—and that's what's most pertinent to us—in terms of language itself, in terms of the words thev finally choose.
An aging man, if he still holds a pen, has a choice: to write memoirs or to keep a diary. By the very nature of their daft, poets are diarists. Often against theii own will, they keep the most honest track of what's happening (a) to their souls, be it the expansion of a soul or—more frequently—its shrinkage and (b) to their sense of language, for they are the first ones for whom words become compromised or devalued. Whether we like it or not, we are here to learn not just what time does to man but what language does to time. And poets, let us not forget, are the ones "by whom it [language ] lives." It is this law that teaches a poet a greater rectitude than any creed is capable of.
That's why one can build a lot upon W. H. Auden. Not only because he died at twice the age of Christ or because of Kierkegaard's "principle of repetition." He simply served an infinity greater than we normally reckon with, and he bears good witness to its availability; what's more, he made it feel hospitable. To say the least, every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language. W. H. Auden would do very well on both counts, if only because of their respective resemblances to hell and Limbo.
He was a great poet (the only thing that's wrong with this sentence is its tense, as the nature of language puts one's achievements within it invariably into the present), and I consider myself immensely lucky to have met him. But had I not met him at all, there would still be the reality of his work. One should feel grateful to fate for having been exposed to this reality, for the lavishing of these gifts, all the more priceless since they were not designated for anybody in particular. One may call this a generosity of the spirit, except that the spirit needs a man to refract itself through. It's not the man who becomes sacred because of this refraction: it's the spirit that becomes human and comprehensible. This—and the fact that men are finite—is enough for one to worship this poet.
Whatever the reasons for which he crossed the Atlantic and became American, the result was that he fused both idioms of English and became—to paraphrase one of his own lines—our transatlantic Horace. One way or another, all the journeys he took—through lands, caves of the psyche, doctrines, creeds—served not so much to improve his argument as to expand his diction. If poetry ever was for him a matter of ambition, he lived long enough for it to become simply a means of existence. Hence his autonomy, sanity, equipoise, irony, detachment—in short, wisdom. Whatever it is, reading him is one of the very few ways (if not the only one) available for feeling decent. I wonder, though, if that was his purpose.
I saw him last in July 1973, at a supper at Stephen Spender's place in London. Wystan was sitting there at the table, a cigarette in his right hand, a goblet in his left, holding forth on the subject of cold salmon. The chair being too low, two disheveled volumes of the OED were put under him by the mistress of the house. I thought then that I was seeing the only man who had the right to use those volumes as his seat.
1983
A Commencement Address
Ladies and gentlemen of the Class of 1984:
No matter how daring or cautious you may choose to be, in the course of your life you are bound to come into direct physical contact with what's known as Evil. I mean here not a property of the gothic novel but, to say the least, a palpable social reality that you in no way can control. No amount of good nature or cunning calculations will prevent this encounter. In fact, the more calculating, the more cautious you are, the greater is the likelihood of this rendezvous, the harder its impact. Such is the structure of life that what we regard as Evil is capable of a fairly ubiquitous presence if only because it tends to appear in the guise of good. You never see it crossing your threshold announcing itself: "Hi, I'm Evil!" That, of course, indicates its secondary nature, but the comfort one may derive from this observation gets dulled by its frequency.
A prudent thing to do, therefore, would be to subject your notions of good to the closest possible scrutiny, to go, so to speak, through your entire wardrobe checking which of your clothes may fit a stranger. That, of course, may turn into a full-time occupation, and well it should. You'll be surprised how many things you considered your own and good can easily fit, without much adjustment, your enemy. Yon may even start to wonder whether he is not your mirror image, for the most interesting thing about Evil is that it is wholly human. To put it mildly, nothing can be turned and worn inside out with greater ease than one's notion of social justice, civic conscience, a better future, etc. One of the surest signs of danger here is the number of those who share your views, not so much because unanimity has the knack of degenerating into uniformity as because of the probability—implicit in great numbers—that noble sentiment is being faked.
By the same token, the surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even—if you will—eccentricity. That is, something that can't be feigned, faked, imitated; something even a seasoned impostor couldn't be happy with. Something, in other words, that can't be shared, like your o^ skin: not even by a minority. Evil is a sucker for solidity. It always goes for big numbers, for confident granite, for ideological purity, for drilled armies and balanced sheets. Its proclivity for such things has to do presumably with its innate insecurity, but this realization, again, is of small comfort when Evil tri^phs.
Which it does: in so many parts of the world and inside ourselves. Given its volume and intensity, given, especially, the fatigue of those who oppose it, Evil today may be regarded not as an ethical category but as a physical phenomenon no longer measured in particles but mapped geographically. Therefore the reason I am talking to you about all this has nothing to do with your being young, fresh, and facing a clean slate. No, the slate is dark with dirt and it is hard to believe in either your ability or your will to clean it. The purpose of my talk is simply to suggest to you a mode of resistance which may come in handy to you one day; a mode that may help you to emerge from the encounter with Evil perhaps less soiled, if not necessarily more triumphant than your precursors. What I have in mind, of course, is the famous business of turning the other cheek.
I assume that one way or another you have heard about the interpretations of this verse from the Sermon on the Mount by Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, .Martin Luther King, Jr., and many others. In other words, I assume that you are familiar with the concept of nonviolent, or passive, resistance, whose main principle is reaming good for evil, that is, not responding in kind. The fact that the world today is what it is suggests, to say the least, that this concept is far from being cherished universally. The reasons for its unpopularity are twofold. First, what is required for this concept to be put into effect is a margin of democracy. This is precisely what 86 percent of the globe lacks. Second, it is common sense that tells a victim that his only gain in turning the other cheek and not responding in kind yields, at best, a moral victory, i.e., something quite immaterial. The natural reluctance to expose yet another part of your body to a blow is justified by a suspicion that this sort of conduct only agitates and enhances Evil; that a moral victory can be mistaken by the adversary for his impunity.