In his birth centenary tribute to the distinguished poet, W H Auden, the author shows that, like many poets declared by Shelley as unacknowledged legislators of the world, Auden too sought the Utopia the Good Place but at first was attracted by the Communist experiment in Soviet Russia. During the 1930s, he was disillusioned with the economic wasteland in England and sought refuse in the socialistic El Dorado. But like most intellectuals of Europe, he realized that the experiment was a God That Failed. And yet he did not allow his disappointment sap his enormous vitality, although he was convinced that man was more than a number. He was certainly involved in the political consciousness of his time, but eventually he came to realize that the proper function of poetry is to tell the truth, to disenchant, to disintoxicate. The achievement of Auden relates to his ability to present the political, the psychological and the spiritual converging in a happy harmony.
How
to make a world better place for men to live in, has
fascinated the minds of thinkers, philosophers and writers
in every age. From Plato to the present day, men have
been thinking and writing about what the world would
be like if men could create an earthly paradise. Plato's
Republic, Thomas More's Utopia and other
such works are sometimes visions of good and possibly
attainable systems-social, economic, political-and at
other times, fantasies of a desirable but unattainable
perfection. The urge to write utopias is a constant
product of social idealism, revulsion at inefficiency,
waste and disorder, and a desire to do something about
these evils even though the envisioned remedies are
of a magnitude which engenders as much pessimism and
frustration as reforming zeal. It is, perhaps in this
light that P B Shelley, the undisputed revolutionary
idealist stated, "Poets are the hierophants of
an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic
shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words
which express what they understand not; the trumpets
which sing to battle and feel not what they inspire;
the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are
the unacknowledged legislators of the world."(Shelley,
1951)
W
H Auden's quest for the ideal `Good Place' made him
journey through innumerable societies starting with
the Greek to his own contemporary England. The Great
Depression of 1929 made him realize that the diseased
society could be diagnosed in economic terms. With the
English middle-class being greatly affected by the mass
unemployment, and with hunger taking on more hands every
month, Auden was naturally led to see in the vision
of Stalinist Russia a viable cure for all social maladies. |
