Jacobs writes, late in the notes, that “the idea that ‘weakness’ and ineptitude can be vehicles of grace is a major theme in Auden’s poetry in the 1940’s” (85). For the Time Being is neither his best work nor his best exploration of the Christian faith. The Oratorio proves to be the opposite, as evidenced by the fact that the English composer Benjamin Britten declined to write music for Auden’s Oratorio, commenting that it had too many words. Auden is at his best as an intellectual poet who advances densely reasoned and memorably aphoristic verse. The dust cover of this edition includes an assessment by Adam Gopnik, writing in The New Yorker, that judges For the Time Being to be the best of Auden’s four long poems and the “heart of his work,” while at the same time describing the characters as a mixture of the “the participants in the Nativity story … and drunken New Yorkers.” This is curious praise. Such a text calls for repetitions, choruses, and multiple interruptions as one voice follows another. He chose to write not merely a dramatic poem, but also a text to be set to music, drawing on conventions of Greek drama while inserting a narrator and using the “machinery” of Jung’s analysis of human faculties in a way that is broadly comparable to Alexander Pope’s use of the “machinery” of the Rosicrucian spirit world in The Rape of the Lock.
Auden saw himself as Joseph, challenged by the possible infidelity of Mary. Professor Jacobs writes in the Preface that For the Time Being “would become the most explicitly Christian and biblical poem of his career” (vii), and while this assessment may be correct in the sense that the poem offers a version of the Nativity story, one could make a case that Auden crafted a more beautiful and profound statement of his faith in the poems collected as the Horae Canonicae, or Canonical Hours, that he composed a decade or more later.Īuden attempted to convey a perspective on the Nativity while at the same time responding, as Jacobs explains, to the death of his mother, the infidelity of his lover Chester Kallman, the catastrophe of another world war, and his rediscovery of the Christian faith.
Alan Jacobs’ introduction offers deep scholarship on the historical, biographical, and intellectual background of For the Time Being, and his notes give helpful assistance to the reader and scholar without advocating for a particular interpretation. Yeats, while at the same time he spoke forcefully for his Christian faith and worked assiduously to frame a comprehensive understanding of literature, psychology, and politics. Auden had the musical and compositional skills of Robert Frost and W. Reviewed by Thomas Trzyna, English, Seattle Pacific UniversityĬhristian Scholar’s Review is a generalist journal, so the purpose of this review, above all, should be to recommend the poetry of one of the twentieth century’s most talented poets, W.
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