For much of his career, the poet W. H. Auden was known for writing fiercely political work. He critiqued capitalism, warned of fascism, and documented hunger, protest, war. He was deeply influenced by Marxism. And he was hugely successful. Yet in truth, he wasn’t always as certain as he appeared. “Auden was never comfortable in his role as poetic prophet to the British Left,” his biographer Edward Mendelson wrote. “He was often most divided when he sounded most committed.” Auden worried that his writing was “inflated,” preachy and inauthentic—and he doubted how much it really mattered anyway. “Poetry makes nothing happen,” he once famously said.
In 1939, though, he moved from England to America; the next year, he joined the Episcopal Church and became passionately religious. He grappled with how to keep writing. “I cannot help feeling that a satisfactory theory of Art from the standpoint of the Christian faith has yet to be worked out,” he wrote in 1942. His book The Sea and the Mirror, published in 1944, is part of his resulting oeuvre, which is much more searching, abstruse, and philosophical than his earlier output. A collection of monologues from characters in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, it’s also a meditation on the pitfalls of creative work.
Auden’s preface to The Sea and the Mirror is written in the voice of a stage manager speaking to his production’s imagined critics—a role perhaps comparable to Auden himself, addressing his imagined readers. The circuslike performance he describes is a kind of intelligent artifice, as all art is: It captivates the audience, even makes death and other worldly concerns momentarily fall away. But it’s not real, Auden implies; the charade can’t ultimately solve the viewers’ “wonder” or “terror,” or guide them in moral decision making. He seems to be renouncing the authorial hubris he once displayed.
With this book, he said, he was “attempting something absurd, to show in a work of art, the limitations of art.” Auden wanted to write from a place of intellectual and spiritual humility. Ultimately, he felt that his creations were insignificant in the face of great existential mystery—the silence on the other side of the wall—that we can never fully grasp.
You can zoom in on the page here.