Nox Oculis

Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973)

Poète, dramaturge et critique littéraire américain d'origine britannique, souvent considéré comme le poète de langue anglaise le plus influent depuis T. S. Eliot.

Né à York, fils de médecin, Auden suit des études scientifiques, avant de se tourner vers la poésie. Admis en 1925 au Christ Church College d'Oxford, il réunit autour de lui un groupe d'intellectuels et d'écrivains talentueux (politiquement très engagés à gauche), qui compte dans ses rangs Stephen Spender, Christopher Isherwood, Cecil Day Lewis et Louis MacNeice. Diplômé en 1928, Auden enseigne pendant cinq ans, en Écosse et en Angleterre.

Ses premiers recueils poétiques, Poèmes (Poems, 1930) et les Orateurs (The Orators, 1932), ainsi que sa pièce la Danse de la mort (The Dance of Death, 1933), qui le font connaître, traitent de l'effondrement des valeurs bourgeoises de la société anglaise, multipliant les références croisées à Freud et Marx. Il écrit par la suite trois pièces en vers, en collaboration avec Christopher Isherwood : le Chien sous la peau (The Dog beneath the skin, 1935), l'Ascension de F 6 (The Ascent of F 6, 1936) et Sur la frontière (On the Frontier, 1938). En 1935, il épouse Erika Mann, sœur de Klaus Mann, afin d'échapper à l'Allemagne nazie ; mais son véritable compagnon est Chester Kallman, qu'il a rencontré aux États-Unis. En 1937, il prend part à la guerre civile espagnole comme ambulancier aux côtés des républicains. La même année, il se voit décerner la médaille d'or du roi pour sa poésie. Ses voyages en Islande, avec MacNeice, et en Chine, avec Isherwood, donnent lieu à deux ouvrages à quatre mains, Lettre d'Islande (Letter from Iceland, 1937) et Journey to a War (1939).

En 1939, Auden s'installe aux États-Unis, dont il devient citoyen. Il se consacre à ses activités de poète, de critique, de professeur et de rédacteur en chef. Ses deux ouvrages, Double Man (1941) et Pour l'instant (For the Time being, 1944), font ressortir son intérêt croissant pour la question religieuse, qui aboutit à sa conversion au catholicisme sans que pour autant soit éteinte sa veine satirique. L'Âge de l'angoisse (The Age of Anxiety, 1947), long poème dramatique, lui vaut le prix Pulitzer 1948 pour la poésie. Au nombre de ses œuvres figurent aussi des Collected Poetry (1945), le Bouclier d'Achille (1955), Hommage à Clio, des Collected Longer Poems (1969) et plusieurs livrets d'opéra écrits en collaboration avec Kallman, dont le fameux The Rake's Progress (le Libertin, 1951), inspiré de Willliam Hogarth et mis en musique par Stravinski. De 1956 à 1961, il enseigne la poésie à Oxford, et, en 1972, revient à Christ Church.

En lisant Auden, on ne peut s'empêcher de penser à T. S. Eliot. Comme lui, Auden possède un esprit à la fois distant et ironique, qui s'harmonise sans mal au sentiment religieux. Son intérêt beaucoup plus marqué pour les problèmes sociaux le démarque néanmoins d'Eliot. Doué d'un sens aigu de l'analyse psychologique, et d'un extraordinaire talent lyrique, Auden aura une influence décisive sur les poètes de la génération suivante. Sa maîtrise de la versification, sa rigueur intellectuelle et sa conscience sociale, conjuguées à la fluidité, la diversité et la virtuosité de son style, en font l'une des personnalités emblématiques de la poésie contemporaine.

Tiré de : « Auden, Wystan Hugh », Encyclopédie Microsoft® Encarta® 2000. © 1993-1999 Microsoft Corporation. Tous droits réservés.

Avant de se tourner vers la poésie, Auden, fils de médeçin, fut d'abord attiré par la science. On retrouve d'ailleurs dans plusieurs poèmes cet intérêt envers la science et les questions éthiques qui en découlent.

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After Reading a Child's Guide to Modern Physics

If all a top physicist knows
About the Truth be true,
Then, for all the so-and-so's,
Futility and grime,
Our common world contains,
We have a better time
Than the Greater Nebulae do,
Or the atoms in our brains.


Marriage is rarely bliss
But, surely it would be worse
As particles to pelt
At thousands of miles per sec
About a universe
Wherein a lover's kiss
Would either not be felt
Or break the loved one's neck.


Though the face at which I stare
While shaving it be cruel
For, year after year, it repels
An ageing suitor, it has,
Thank God, sufficient mass
To be altogether there,
Not an indeterminate gruel
Which is partly somewhere else.


Our eyes prefer to suppose
That a habitable place
Has a geocentric view,
That architects enclose
A quiet Euclidian space :
Exploded myths -- but who
Could feel at home astraddle
An ever expanding saddle ?


This passion of our kind
For the process of finding out
Is a fact one can hardly doubt,
But I would rejoice in it more
If I knew more clearly what
We wanted the knowledge for,
Felt certain still that the mind
Is free to know or not.


It has chosen once, it seems,
And whether our concern
For magnitude's extremes
Really become a creature
Who comes in a median size,
Or politicizing Nature
Be altogether wise,
Is something we shall learn.

W. H. Auden, 1968

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The More Loving One

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.


How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.


Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.


Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total darkness sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

W. H. Auden, 1957, tiré de From Homage to Clio (1960)

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Nocturne

Now through night's caressing grip
Earth and all her oceans slip,
Capes of China slide away
From her fingers into day
And the Americas incline
Coasts towards her shadow line.


Now the ragged vagrants creep
Into crooked holes to sleep :
Just and unjust, worst and best,
Change their places as they rest :
Awkward lovers lie in fields
Where disdainful beauty yields :


While the splendid and the proud
Naked stand before the crowd
And the losing gambler gains
And the beggar entertains :
May sleep's healing power extend
Through these hours to our friend.
Unpursued by hostile force,
Traction engine, bull or horse
Or revolting succubus ;
Calmly till the morning break
Let him lie, then gently wake.

W. H. Auden, tiré de The Dog Beneath The Skin (1935)

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This Lunar Beauty

This lunar beauty
Has no history
Is complete and early ;
If beauty later
Bear any feature
It had a lover
And is another.


This like a dream
Keeps other time,
And daytime is
The loss of this ;
For time is inches
And the heart's changes
Where ghost has haunted,
Lost and wanted.


But this was never
A ghost's endeavour
Nor, finished this,
Was ghost at ease ;
And till it pass
Love shall not near
The sweetness here
Nor sorrow take
His endless look.

W. H. Auden

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A Summer Night

Out on the lawn I lie in bed,
Vega conspicuous overhead
In the windless nights of June ;
Forest of green have done complete
The day's activity ; my feet
Point to the rising moon.


Lucky, this point in time and space
Is chosen as my working place ;
Where the sexy air of summer,
The bathing hours and the bare arms,
The leisured drives through a land of farms,
Are good to the newcomer.


Equal with colleagues in a ring
I sit on each calm evening,
Enchanted as the flowers
The opening light draws out of hiding
From leaves with all its dove-like pleading
Its logic and its powers.


That later we, though parted then,
May still recall these evenings when
Fear gave his watch no look ;
The lion griefs loped form the shade
And on our knees their muzzles laid,
And Death put down his book.


Now north and south and east and west
Those I love lie down to rest ;
The moon looks on them all,
the healers and the brilliant talkers,
The eccentrics and silent walkers,
The dumpy and the tall.


She climbs the European sky,
Churches and power-stations lie
Alike among earth"s fixtures :
Into the galleries she peers
And blankly as a butcher stares
Upon the marvellous pictures.


To gravity attentive, she
Can notice nothing here, though we
Whom hunger does not move,
From gardens where we feel secure
Look up and with a sigh endure
The tyrannies of love :


And, gentle, do not care to know,
Where Poland draws her eastern bow,
What violence is done,
Nor ask what doubtful act allows
Our freedom in this English house,
Our picnics in the sun.


Soon, soon, through dykes of our content
The crumpling flood will force a rent
And, taller than a tree,
Hold sudden death before our eyes
Whose river dreams long hid the size
And vigours of the sea.


But when the waters make retreat
And through the black mud first the wheat
In shy green stalks appears,
When stranded monsters gasping lie,
And sounds of riveting terrify
Their whorled unsubtle ears,


May these delights we dread to lose,
This privacy, need no excuse
But to that strength belong,
As through a child"s rash happy cries
The drowned parental voices rise
In unlamenting song.


After discharges of alarm
All unpredicted let them calm
The pulse of nervous nations,
Forgive the murderer in his glass,
Tough in their patience to surpass
The tigress her swift motion.

W. H. Auden, juin 1933, Selected Poems (1990)

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A Walk After Dark

A cloudless night like this
Can set the spirit soaring :
After a tiring day
The clockwork spectacle is
Impressive in a slightly boring
Eighteenth-century way.


It soothed adolescence a lot
To meet so shameless a stare ;
The things I did could not
Be so shocking as they said
If that would still be there
After the shocked were dead


Now, unready to die
Bur already at the stage
When one starts to resent the young,
I am glad those points in the sky
May also be counted among
The creatures of middle-age.


It's cosier thinking of night
As more an Old People's Home
Than a shed for a faultless machine,
That the red pre-Cambrian light
Is gone like Imperial Rome
Or myself at seventeen.


Yet however much we may like
The stoic manner in which
The classical authors wrote,
Only the young and rich
Have the nerve or the figure to strike
The lacrimae rerum note.


For the present stalks abroad
Like the past and its wronged again
Whimper and are ignored,
And the truth cannot be hid ;
Somebody chose their pain,
What needn't have happened did.


Occuring this very night
By no established rule,
Some event may already have hurled
Its first little No at the right
Of the laws we accept to school
Our post-diluvian world :


But the stars burn on overhead,
Unconscious of final ends,
As I walk home to bed,
Asking what judgment waits
My person, all my friends,
And these United States.

W. H. Auden

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Références :

• The W. H. Auden Society : http://www.audensociety.org/
  
• Academy of American Poets - W. H. Auden : https://poets.org/poet/w-h-auden
  
• Poetry Foundation - W. H. Auden : https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/w-h-auden
  
• All Poetry - W. H. Auden : https://allpoetry.com/W-H-Auden
• W.H. Auden Poems : https://mypoeticside.com/poets/wh-auden-poems
• Biography - W.H. Auden : https://www.biography.com/writer/wh-auden
• Interesting Literature - 10 Classic W. H. Auden Poems Everyone Should Read : https://interestingliterature.com/2016/06/10-classic-w-h-auden-poems-everyone-should-read/
• Poem Analysis  - 10 of the Best W.H. Auden Poems : https://poemanalysis.com/best-poems/w-h-auden-poems/

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Bibliographie :

• G. W. Bahlke, The Later Auden (1970)
  
• B. C. Bloomfield and Edward Mendelson, W. H. Auden : A Bibliography 1924-1969 (1972)
  
• Alan Bold (ed.), W. H. Auden: The Far Interior (1985)
  
• Edward Callan, Auden : A Carnival of Intellect (1983)
  
• Humphrey Carpenter, W. H. Auden : A Biography (1981)
  
• M. E. Gingerich, W. H. Auden : A Reference Guide (1978)
  
• John Haffenden, (ed.), W. H. Auden : The Critical Heritage (1983)
  
• Anthony Hecht, The Hidden Law : The Poetry of W. H. Auden (1993)
  
• Alan Levy, W. H. Auden : In the Autumn of the Age of Anxiety (1983)
  
• Edward Mendelson, The Early Auden (1981)
  
• Edward Mendelson, (ed.), W. H. Auden : Plays (1988)
  
• Edward Mendelson, (ed.), W. H. Auden : Collected Poems (1991)
  
• Allan Rodway, Preface to Auden (1984)
  
• A. L. Rowse, The Poet Auden (1988)
  
• G. T. Wright, W. H. Auden (1981)
  

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Oeuvres poétiques :

• Poems (1930)
  
• The Orators (1930)
  
• On This Island (1936)
  
• Spain (1937)
  
• Another Time (1940)
  
• The Double Man (1941)
  
• For the Time Being (1944)
  
• The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden (1945)
  
• The Age of Anxiety (1947)
  
• Collected Shorter Poems, 1927-1957 (1950)
  
• Nones (1951)
  
• The Shield of Achilles (1955)
  
• Homage to Clio (1960)
  
• About the House (1965)
  
• Collected Shorter Poems, 1927-1957 (1966)
  
• Collected Longer Poems (1968)
  
• City Without Walls (1969)
  
• Epistle to a Godson (1972)
  
• Thank You, Fog (1974)
  

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