He was a New York poet, after all…

Thanks to Nicole for the photo.

Caliban’s long speech in Chapter III of The Sea and the Mirror (channeling Henry James, as Ashbery’s blurb has it) is a bizarrely counter-intuitive performance of the “natural” in Tempest-ville.  It’s also deeply, subtly, a meditation on the dramatic Muse, explicitly so in the italicized part at the start.  There’s also some hard-to-follow movement of the pronoun “He,” which seems to stand for Ariel, Caliban, and Prospero at different time.  Perhaps our friends at Cutting Ball, currently rehearsing a Tempest w/o either Ariel or Caliban, want to weight in on that slippage?

My favorite passage isn’t the “restored relation” at the end, but the passing hymn to radical difference & change that comes on p47: “the wish for freedom to transcend any condition,” which may be a kind of “nightmare” or also “a state of perpetual emergency and everlasting improvisation where all is need and change.”

Recent times, and political theorists from Schmitt to Agamben, have suggested a political reading of that state of emergency as well.

For me, the shockingly brilliant insight and innovation of The Sea and the Mirror is how Auden asks us to think about Antonio.  He tends to be an afterthought for many readings of The Tempest — an Old World Machiavel who’s easily forgiven & forgotten — but Auden (perhaps writing with 1930s Europe in mind) gives him the choral role in Chapter II, with each lyric ending up as part of Antonio’s “alone.”  Auden’s Antionio ‘s a deeply skeptical, deeply individual poetic creation.  He mocks Prospero’s magic: “What a lot a little music can do.”  He doubts that mercy and book-drowning will have lasting consequences: “they will soon reappear, / Not even damaged.”

Against P’s show-and-tell, Antonio places individual will.  “Your all is partial,” he argues against his brother, “I am I, Antonio / By choice myself alone.”

He gets the last word each time: “choice for himself, burning in the dark for Ferdinand, toasting with Stephano, talking with Gonzalo, playing in his head with Adrian and Francisco, wearing a diadem with Alonso, sailing with the Master and Boatswain, fighting the white bull with Sebastian, laughing with Trinculo, dancing with Miranda.

As “Creation’s O” he is beyond his brother.  Outside of his control.

Where I go, words carry no weight: it is best,

Then, I surrender their fascinating cousel

To the silent dissolution of the sea

Which misuses nothing because it values nothing

Whereas man overvalues everything…

Auden’s great poetic commentary & meditation on The Tempest, which is also very much a poem of a European fleeing Europe during WWII, operates throughout between the dissolving opacity of the sea and the artistic fantasy of the mirror.  It’s a strange and gorgeous poem, though I’m not always sure in re-reading it whether it’s a hymn to the power of art or a lament about human failure.

I suppose that I see the same deep ambivalence in The Tempest as well.

We won’t have too much time at the NYPL on Tuesday to talk about Auden, so let’s bring him online for the next few days.  It’s a poem to chew on.

Here, for your reading pleasure, are three articles by Dr. Kathleen Lubey, one of our department’s specialists in 18th-century literature.  Please read at least two — or if if you’d prefer.  The article on pornography, which emerged directly out of a grad seminar, might be particularly interesting & accessible to those who are not deep in 18c waters.

Lubey on pornography

Lubey on Haywood

Lubey on Addison