Displaced Voices: Post-War Auden

Abstract

The quest forms one of the dominant structures in Auden’s poems. But, as we have seen above, it is never exclusively a personal one, nor is it merely one for political change, a search for spiritual fulfilment or the right ordering of culture, as in the modernist poems of Eliot and Pound.¹ In Auden, as the previous chapters have demonstrated, we find a complex entanglement of all these yearnings. More than merely being intertwined, they actually clash in the search for individual identity as part of a just society. To combine this search for personal fulfilment and a social role with sexual fulfilment is certainly a common topic with poets. In Auden’s case it also represents a continual attempt to come to terms with homosexuality. Though frequently treated in a humorous vein, as in his often obscene short poems, homosexuality has serious implications for the formation of identity in his poems. It is one of the reasons for the blurred distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’. The enemy is always also the potential lover and vice versa. The Other only exists in a close resemblance to the self, and seriously disturbs its conceptualisation. Homosexuality is also a decisive influence behind the images of the secret agent, the traitor, and the spy, all of whom live adapted lives in enemy territory.