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Auden's Marxism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Commentators have mentioned Auden's Marxism for so long now that his indebtedness to Marx threatens to become a critical commonplace through sheer repetition. Yet no one has ever shown that such indebtedness exists. In the 1930's merely to be young, socially conscious, and outspoken was enough to mark one as a Marxist, or at least a “leftist,” and Auden was all these things. But now that the 1930's have passed, and Auden has long since ceased to be either young or a “thirties poet,” the Marxist element in his work deserves a thorough investigation. I propose, therefore, to ask how much Marxism there is in Auden's poetry, where it is found, and what sort of thing it is. Since it is important to discover just how the pattern of his Marxist borrowings changes (if it does) through the years, the first question calls for a chronological examination of his work.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1965
References
1 So far no consideration of Auden's Marxism goes deeper than the very general remarks in Richard Hoggart, Auden: An Introductory Essay (London: Chatto and Windus, 1951), pp. 113–116.
2 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961), p. 111.
3 The German Ideology (New York: International Publishers, 1947), pp. 6, 18.
4 “Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Idealism,” Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955), i, 386. Hereafter referred to as SW.
5 For discussion of this earlier, pre-Marxist phase, to which I occasionally refer in this essay, see my “Social Philosophy in Auden's Early Poetry,” Criticism, ii (Fall 1960), 351–361, and “The Gang Myth in Auden's Early Poetry,” JEGP, lxi (July 1962), 481–495.
6 Page numbers from the following volumes appear in the text: Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1933); The Dance of Death (London: Faber and Faber, 1933); Auden and Christopher Isherwood, The Dog Beneath the Skin (London: Faber and Faber, 1935); Look Stranger! (London: Faber and Faber, 1936); Auden and Isherwood, The Ascent of F6 and On the Frontier (London: Faber and Faber, 1958); Another Time (London: Faber and Faber, 1940); New Year Letter (London: Faber and Faber, 1941).
7 P. 51.
8 Capital, The Communist Manifesto and Other Writings (New York: The Modern Library, 1932), pp. 186–187.
9 “Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Idealism,” SW, i, 398.
10 All publication dates are taken from B. C. Bloomfield, W. H. Auden: A Bibliography (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1964). Dates for first publication refer to first appearance in print, but I refer only to poems included in one or another of Auden's books. Unless otherwise stated in the text, all the poems discussed appear either in 
(poems from 1933 to 1936) or Another Time (poems from 1937).
11 Capital (New York: Modern Library Giant, 1916), p. 564. N.B.: Modern Library publishes two different Capital MSS, one in standard edition, one in giant.
12 Frederick Engels, “The Housing Question,” SW, i, 565.
13 Herr Eugen Duhring's Revolution in Science (New York: International Publishers, 1939), p. 154. Hereafter referred to as Anti-Duhring (the title by which it is usually known).
14 “Theses on Feuerbach,” The German Ideology, p. 197.
15 “1892 English Introduction to ‘Socialism: Utopian and Scientific’,” SW, ii, 100 [my italics].
16 P. 7.
17 Frederick Engels, “Introduction to the Dialectics of Nature,” SW, ii, 75.
18 Auden discusses the phrase in “T. E. Lawrence,” Then and Now (London: Jonathan Cape, 1935), pp. 21–23.
19 “Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Idealism,” SW, ii, 367.
20 Illusion and Reality (London: Macmillan, 1937), p. 188 and elsewhere. The attack was common in the 1930's.
21 “Introduction to Dialectics of Nature,” SW, ii, 75.
22 “Preface to ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’,” SW, i, 363.
23 Capital, The Communist Manifesto and Other Writings, p. 332.
24 SW, i, 247.
25 “1892 English Introduction to ‘Socialism: Utopian and Scientific’,” SW, ii, 100.
26 Anti-Duhring, p. 46.
27 The German Ideology, p. 7.
28 The young Marx claimed that in Hegel “The rich, living, sensuous, concrete activity … is therefore reduced to its mere abstraction” (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 166). Yet later he agreed with Engels that “all this turning of reality into ideas did not prevent the Hegelian system from covering an incomparably greater domain than any earlier system, nor from developing in this domain a wealth of thought which is astounding even today” (“Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Idealism,” SW, ii, 363).
29 Illusion and Reality, pp. 117–118.
30 New Republic, 1 November 1938, pp. 373–374.
31 “Morality in an Age of Change,” Nation, 24 December 1938, p. 689.
32 New York: International Publishers, 1927, p. 154.
33 New York: International Publishers, 1934, p. 57.
34 Adoratsky writes, for instance, that “according to Lenin” dialectic “is absolute and inherent in all phenomena of the external world” (Dialectical Materialism, p. 57). Engels denied that such non-empirical statements had any validity: “Marx does not dream of attempting to prove … the [dialectical] process was historically necessary,” he wrote in Anti-Duhring. “Dialectics is nothing more than the science of the general laws of motion and development of Nature, human society and thought” (pp. 147, 156).