W. H. Auden’s “Hermes”

Abstract

With a typical sense of timing (and placement), W. H. Auden signed his “Under Which Lyre”¹ — a commissioned poem — “Harvard, 1946”. Both the year and the placing are resonant of the beginnings of the postmodern era: the Second World War was over and Harvard, as much as any institution, can stand as an emblem of that technology-informed intelligence which has energised the “postindustrial” age. Auden’s “Tract for the Times” was, in fact, less “reactionary” (as he coyly called it) than prophetic. For it sponsors “precocious Hermes”, alluded to in the later “Horae Canonicae” as “any god of crossroads”, against monological, masculinist and rationalising Apollo. In a sense, it is itself a “Report on Knowledge”. And the poem’s playful tone, classical allusions and commitment to the future, as perceived in the present, render it an important aesthetic precursor of the postmodern argument itself. It was not much appreciated in the empiricist England of the coming fifties. Auden, after all, had “betrayed” socialism, wartime England and, indeed, the assumptions of Scrutiny. Philip Larkin, in “What has become of Wystan?”,² ascribed the weaknesses he saw in Auden’s later verse to his loss of English rooting. Put another way, however, Auden had internationalised himself by his American exile — and precisely this gave him a sense of the growing “global village” which would characterise postmodernity and rendered him a truly prophetic writer rather than a provincial reactionary.