The Poet & The City

In Auden's essay of this name, he picks up themes that Arendt develops in "The Human Condition"--especially in his explanation of the realm of the social (which he calls The Public, following Kierkegaard, and which he connects, as Arendt does, to mass culture) and the labor/work/action distinction (he compares labor to slavery in the Greek world and laments the way in which the contemporary world has flipped the priority from action to labor).

Wystan writes of this essay:

"I thought it was quite interesting because it seems to follow something of the distinction Tocqueville makes about poetry in an aristocratic age versus a democratic age (certainly the judgment about the effect of democracy on poetry is the same), but derive an entirely different political point. Democratic politics is in most every way preferable (the whole essay is quite interesting on this topic--he has a definite sense of loss from the ancient world in particular, but that the loss has been compensated for by many things we shouldn't give up), but the poet has to marshal his own resources in a way democratic life makes very difficult."

I think that Auden's essay is wonderfully interesting. He notes that "the so-called fine arts have lost the social utility they once had." He claims that the contemporary world "fails utterly" at combining "the gratuitous with the utile" and maintains, as Wystan says, that artists must accept this about the contemporary world. The poet, then, must accept that he is no longer a public figure, and not try to maintain that his art, which is gratuitous in the contemporary world, is useful (this corresponds to Arendt's comments on the reversal of the relationship between the vita activa and the vita contemplativa, which I've never been entirely able to make sense of; this is, of course, Arendt's fault, and has nothing with my own inability to read properly). Auden then considers things that make being an artist harder now than they used to be (including the "disappearance of the Public Realm as the sphere of revelatory deeds--and here he is basically plagiarizing Arendt).

What he says about tradition is interesting (and it seems to me that he might be alluding to Eliot's understanding of tradition and his critique of contemporary originality here): "Further, the fact that we now have at our disposal the arts of all ages and cultures, has completely changed the meaning of the word tradition. It no longer means a way of working handed down from one generation to the next; a sense of tradition now means a consciousness of the whole of the past as present, yet at the same time as a structured whole the parts of which are related in terms of before and after. Originality no longer means a slight modification in the style of one's immediate predecessors; it means a capacity to find in any work of any date or place a clue to finding one's authentic voice."

So what does the relationship between politics and poetry in the contemporary world say about democratic politics? When Auden writes, "Poets are, by the nature of their interests and the nature of artistic fabrication, singularly ill-equipped to understand politics or economics. Their natural interest is in singular individuals and personal relations, while politics and economics are concerned with large numbers of people, hence with the human average and with impersonal, to a great extent involuntary, relations," this is not to say that it's good that politics is obsessed with statistics, nor that the politician should ignore singular individuals (granted, he's also not saying that politics is properly ordered when focusing on one person at a time). Okay, so a poet isn't a statesman, because poets like explosions--a) I don't know who wants to make poets statesmen; b) the politics that Auden describes is not a politics of statesmen, but of statistics and crowds; c) a properly ordered social sphere needs critics, as well, which is a role for the poet. Auden writes, "In a war or a revolution, a poet may do very well as a guerrilla fighter or a spy, but it is unlikely that he will make a good regular soldier, or, in peace time, a conscientious member of a parliamentary committee." And yet, an army always needs both regular soldiers and spies. And James Bond is fairly sexy.

So, yes, poets shouldn't rule. But, that's not to say that how politics is ordered in the contemporary world is without problems. Rather, what Auden shows us about the contemporary world that make poetry and art more challenging to produce, still either creates or is created by a problematic political regime.

He proceeds to argue that contemporary politics is concerned with bodies and necessity (labor) rather than with work and action (or the realms in which humans have the potential for immortality). Doesn't the artist's concern with single persons over "everybody getting enough food to eat and enough leisure" offer a corrective to the problem of contemporary politics--the reduction of politics from dealing with the whole person to dealing with the body? Isn't Auden pointing to poetry as a way to get us back to the realm of action, with which politics and people ought to be concerned? This is not to say that we ought to focus only on single persons and ignore the everybody, because we shouldn't--we need politics and we need politics and poetry to be separate. But right now politics isn't concerned with all of the things that it ought to be concerned with, and the existence of poetry is at least one way to point it toward a better path. This leads to Auden writing, "In our age, the mere making of a work of art is itself a political act. ... [Artists] remind the Management of something managers need to be reminded of, namely, that the managed are people with faces, not anonymous members."

I don't think that the question is whether or not Auden sees anything good in democracy (presumably he sees lots and lots of good things, although I don't see him point to them in this essay). The question is, rather, whether or not he is content with democracy as it is, or whether, like Tocqueville, he fears it easily moving toward excesses (or like, Arendt, who doesn't state whether or not the rise of the social has anything to do with democracy itself, but rather just sees it as a problematic fact of the modern world which we ought to address). Okay, so I think it's the latter.