This is an extract
Demon or Gift
In his first days in New York Auden felt a new sense of liberation and power. He arrived in the harbor with Christopher Isherwood on 26 January 1939, in the dead of winter, while a light snow disfigured the public statues. During their voyage, he and Isherwood had spoken aloud for the first time of their disaffection with the mass political movements they had hoped to serve with their poetry and plays. Three days after their arrival, the news came that W. B. Yeats had died at seventy-three. Auden, who was not yet thirty-two, had left England with the half-formed resolution that he would begin his career anew in a new country. He now wrote a memorable and audacious poem on the death of Yeats in which he proclaimed the rebirth of poetry and foresaw in the heroic labors of a living poet the renewal of the world.
Two ideas of poetry contend against each other in “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.” The opening section, with its solemn, meditative, unrhymed verse paragraphs, acknowledges that the most a poet can achieve in the world is to be remembered by his admirers. The closing section, with its drumbeat stanzas and soaring visionary rhetoric, celebrates poetic language as a force more powerful than time or death, and glorifies the poet as a source of sustenance, healing, and rejoicing. The closing argument wins this debate, but the ironies and doubts insinuated by the opening one remain unanswered.
The first published version of the poem drew an absolute contrast between the dying impotence of the poet and the reviving power of verse. This version—it appeared in The New Republic, 8 March 1939—was not yet the poem familiar from Auden’s books: the opening and closing sections had almost reached their final form, but the quietly discursive middle section, where “poetry makes nothing happen” and “Ireland has her madness and her weather still,” had not yet been written.
The opening section transforms traditional elegy into a bleak new mode:
He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the air-ports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
The metaphors point to a world where facts may be counted or measured or reported in news bulletins, where neither poetry nor metaphor is any use. In English elegies, until Auden wrote this one, nature itself mourned the dead while an exclamatory “O” announced the personal grief of the elegist. In Milton’s “Lycidas,” for example:”
How my heart sings 