The Plural of Us: Poetry and Community in Auden and Others by Bonnie Costello

Author:Bonnie Costello [Costello, Bonnie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Literary Criticism, Poetry, Subjects & Themes, Politics, Modern, General
ISBN: 9780691172811
Google: 0W-YDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2017-10-10T00:59:40.659000+00:00

Whatever else Auden’s The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on The Tempest is about—the limits of art, the dualities of power, the need for grace, the Second World War, and the dangers of gesamtkunstwerk, “l’affaire C”—it is about audience and the poet’s relation to audience. The issue of art’s relation to audience frames The Sea and the Mirror, and the “Commentary” creates a context for the addresses, soliloquies, and asides that follow and precede these framing passages. Art may be frivolous—and the emphasis on “trucs” in this work suggests the extent to which Auden has moved away from thinking of his work as serious intervention into history—but it is still a means of imagining community, potential community, not the indigenous, vernacular-specific one that Larkin yearns for.21 Like Shakespeare’s original, this is a metafictional work, though in this case we have drama hosted by lyric poetry and prose instead of lyric poetry inside of drama. The audience collaborates to embody “the real,” a direct, dialogical challenge to the artist’s solipsism and withdrawal from the world. Auden embodies this challenge not only in the dialectic of Ariel and Caliban but also in the generic shift from poetry to prose in chapter 3, where the first-person plural prevails.

But what or who is the audience, The Sea and the Mirror implicitly asks, and in what ways might the audience for art present potential community in other spheres? Is an audience an undifferentiated mass or crowd, Stevens’s “a million people on one string,”22 or a multiplicity of single, invisible listeners, drawn close to the mind of the performer? Or is it an ordered, hierarchical cross-section of society, from groundlings to royals? A “mob of men” or a congregation joined together out of common love for something outside itself? What is the special social presence of audience, and how is it different from other kinds of human collectivity? And what is the nature of the special human relationship between performer and audience? Does the performer see the audience as an antagonistic “Them” or a companionable “We”? Does the artist convene audience, or does audience compel art? Or is the relationship reciprocal? How does the relationship to audience differ from, or model, other kinds of human connection? The Sea and the Mirror is a “Commentary” in the form of a poetic representation of a drama; how do the two (or three) generically determined kinds of audience, one standing behind the other but in different spatial, temporal, and conceptual relations to the text, merge and collapse the inside/outside logic of their auditory frameworks? We can think about Caliban’s speech as a postproduction talkback, but the tag “Commentary” frames the entire work, complicating our position in relation to the drama.

“All we are not stares back at what we are” (SM 6)—the eloquence and compression of the statement masks its complexity. The simplicity of its chiasm tricks us (pronouns are tools for linguistic sleight of hand) into accepting something deeply ambiguous. Who or what exactly are “we”? In one

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