The New York Review of Books

In October, 1967, W. H. Auden gave the T. S. Eliot Lectures at the University of Kent in Canterbury. Propriety was abundantly fulfilled; Canterbury was the place of Murder in the Cathedral, Eliot College the first building of the new university, the lecturer Eliot’s friend, a disciple, a poet hardly less accomplished than his master. In the first lecture Auden took up one of Eliot’s themes, martyrdom, choosing for his texts Murder in the Cathedral and Charles Williams’s Thomas Cranmer. In the second, he spoke of the Icelandic sagas, especially the Laxdaela saga, which describes the conversion of the hero Kjartan from paganism to Christianity. In the third, he discussed the nature of opera and described certain interesting problems which arose in his own work as librettist for The Rake’s Progress, Elegy for Young Lovers, and The Bassarids. Finally, he returned to the great matter which he shared with Eliot: the relation between poetry and Christian belief, words and the Word.

The lectures are now published as Secondary Worlds, a title suggested to Auden by a charming paragraph in J. R. R. Tolkien’s essay on the fairy story. In “Tree and Leaf” Tolkien distinguished between the primary world, in which we conduct our empirical and practical lives, and the secondary world, in which the imagination frames its own laws. “To Make a Secondary World,” Tolkien says, “inside which the green sun will be credible, commanding Secondary Belief, will probably require labour and thought, and will certainly demand a special skill, a kind of elvish craft.” Auden has always found these terms congenial. Among the affections of his life he numbers music, opera, oratorio, verse, poetry, artifices, green suns. In the poem “Streams” he speaks of “a sort of world, quite other,/altogether different from this one/ with its envies and passports.” In “Words” he begins:

A sentence uttered makes a world appear
Where all things happen as it says they do.

He delights in music as “pure contraption”; music “which can be made anywhere, is invisible,/ And does not smell.” He prefers myths, legends, sagas to novels: so he recited, at Canterbury, long stretches of Icelandic lore in his own translation. Now with Paul B. Taylor he has translated the Völuspá, one of the greatest Eddic poems, a classic letter from Iceland.

The possession of two worlds is bound to be a happy state, unless each longs to kill the other. Mr. Greenberg argues, in his excellent study of Auden, that “divided consciousness” is “the principal subject matter of his poetry,” and that it “provides the conceptual foundation for his way of looking at things.” So he lists the divided parts: ego, self (a division which Auden discusses in The Enchafèd Flood and elsewhere); body, mind; nature, history; city, island; Caliban, Ariel.

The discussion is illuminating, but I am not sure that it would not be possible to interpret the same evidence differently. The two worlds are not, perhaps, bent upon war. It is a …