1956
Tuesday, February 22, 2011 at 06:50AM 
The Shield of Achilles
By W. H. Auden
Original Publisher: Random House
Current Publisher: Out of Print
Megan Snyder-Camp writes:
In his 1972 interview with the Paris Review, W.H. Auden stated, “The arts can do nothing. The social and political history of Europe would be what it has been if Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Mozart, et al., had never lived. A poet, qua poet, has only one political duty, namely, in his own writing to set an example of the correct use of his mother tongue which is always being corrupted.”
Against this corruption, Auden sets the precise, searing lines of his tenth collection, The Shield of Achilles. The title refers to Homer’s original ekphrastic image of an engraved shield of war with two very different sides—on one a golden depiction of a peaceful and flourishing city governed by the justice of laws, on the other a chaotic scene in which two warring armies struggle for dominance. These poems by Auden, written in the aftermath of World War II, seek a balance between the opposing scenes Homer describes. Even when not directly engaging the war, the poems in this collection return to this notion of the connection between duality’s two sides, the sea change that turning makes.
Auden’s music, as ever, is sure and deft, and his rhymes accrue discreetly in the mind, on the ear. But his stunning tonal range—his bold shifts between humor, religious inquiry, plain speech, and intricate syntax—is at its height here. Within each poem he weaves a compelling, truly moving work from seemingly disparate strands of engagement, reaching forward and back in time and salting with street talk. This tracked movement of mind brings the reader deeply into the act of creation without losing sight of that made thing, the poem itself. While many contemporary poets have learned such swerves from Auden, the urgency of his turns tracks the waver and lunge of true transformation.
The Shield of Achilles is organized into three parts. The first section, “Bucolics,” uses a series of ecosystems to introduce themes of violence and creation—and the tender thread that binds the two together, even as they struggle apart. In “Streams,” Auden asks, “how could we love the absent one if you did not keep coming from a distance?”
The second part, “In Sunshine and In Shade,” grounds the natural and social imagery of the first part in scenes of political unrest, bureaucratic blindness, and war, in days that wear grittily at their bearings, such as this one from the title poem:
The mass and majesty of this world, all
That carries weight and always weighs the same,
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
And could not hope for help and no help came.
Auden’s rhymes underscore the inevitability and tragedy of such suffering, while condemning the innocent bystander. In “Ode to Gaea,” this section’s closing poem, Auden explicitly invokes such a sea change:
And what […] is natural: it is the old
Grand style of gesture we watch as, heavy with cold,
The top-waters of all her
Northern seas take their vernal plunge,
And suddenly her desolations, salt as blood,
prolix yet terse, are glamorously carpeted
with great swatches of plankton,
Delicious spreads of nourishment
That flipping of the surface's austere and reflective beauty for the deep's teeming, messy richness is the central concern of this volume. The poems in this collection are insistently tied to their day, with references ranging from politics to literature to ephemera, but these tethers are often then shaken, or shrugged, as that dense, sodden mass of what feeds the days, and words, of this work blanches in unaccustomed light.
The third section, “Horae Canonicae,” is composed of a seven-part sequence, set on Good Friday, mirroring the seven-part natural sequence of the first section. Apocalyptic imagery stands in sharp relief to the meditative tone of the earlier sequence.
Auden famously refused the lure of technological innovations like television, preferring a solitary austerity that granted space for the scope of his creations and the unbroken attention they demand. In “Nones,” he describes this work as “...restoring / the order we try to destroy, the rhythm / we spoil out of spite.” In re-reading this collection, I wondered whether it would be possible, in our networked and often-distracted world, to create such a symphonic work today. Certainly this is a work that forces us to look hard at our own days, at the life we make.
Megan Snyder-Camp's first book of poems, The Forest of Sure Things, is a deconstructed domestic narrative set in a small, historically preserved village on the Pacific Northwest coast. Her poems have appeared in Field, the Antioch Review, Smartish Pace, Hayden's Ferry Review, and elsewhere. She recently received an Individual Artist grant from Washington's 4Culture Foundation to support her current work.
(Photo credit: Laura M. Hoffmann)
Poetry Finalists that Year:
- Elizabeth Bishop for Poems– North & South
- John Ciardi for As If
- Isabella Gardner for Birthdays from the Ocean
- Donald Hall for Exiles and Marriages
- Randall Jarrell for Selected Poems
- Adrienne Rich for The Diamond Cutters
- William Carlos Williams for Journey to Love
Poetry Judges that Year: Cleanth Brooks, Richmond Lattimore, Robert Lowell,
Phyllis McGinley, Muriel Rukeyser
The Year in Literature:
- Poems– North & South by Elizabeth Bishop won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
- Randall Jarrell was named Consultant in Poetry for the United States.
Other Information:
- W. H. Auden (1907-1973) was born in York, England.
- In a 1972 interview for The Paris Review, W. H. Auden said that as a child he wanted to be a mining engineer or a geologist. Most of his time, between the ages of six and twelve, was spent drafting plans for lead mines that he wanted to build on the moors of the Pennines in England. “There came a day which later on, looking back, seems very important. I was planning my idea of the concentrating mill—you know, the platonic idea of what it should be. There were two kinds of machinery for separating the slime, one I thought more beautiful than the other, but the other one I knew to be more efficient. I felt myself faced with what I can only call a moral choice—it was my duty to take the second and more efficient one. Later, I realized, in constructing this world which was only inhabited by me, I was already beginning to learn how poetry is written.”
Suggested Links:
- W. H. Auden's 1956 National Book Awards Acceptance Speech for The Shield of Achilles
- Auden's profile at Poets.org
- The W. H. Auden Society's website
Buy the Book
Reader Comments