Auden (3) ‘A change of heart’

Abstract

Stephen Spender once claimed to find ‘a dualistic idea running through all [Auden’s] work which encloses it like the sides of a box. This idea is Symptom and Cure’.¹ Certainly Auden’s major poems of the thirties often seek both to diagnose and suggest ways of healing psychological and political ills. The ‘dualistic idea’ noted by Spender is evident from the start of Auden’s career. So ‘Sir, no man’s enemy, forgiving all’ (written in 1929) seeks release from ‘the intolerable neural itch’ and asks that the pseudo-Hopkinsesque ‘Sir’ it addresses should ‘look shining at / New styles of architecture, a change of heart’.