Abstract: This article looks at Robert Graves and W. H. Auden as practitioner-theorists — poet-critics — with reference to their stints as Oxford Professor of Poetry, noting that each felt himself to possess an outsider or liminal status because of their long residence outside England. It examines other similarities as well, similarities to which Graves would not admit, including their mutually held belief in the absolute and ritual nature of poetry, and similarities of attitude (both had a disposition toward provocation). It also probes the unreciprocated animus Graves expressed toward Auden, and finds a favourable critical response to Graves’s audacity among contemporary poets, such as James Schuyler and Philip Larkin, therefore countering the conventional wisdom that while undergraduates applauded Graves’s spirit, seasoned writers deplored it. The article concludes by considering the relation between professing poetry and each poet’s attitude to poetry (including their own poetry) at that time.

 

Keywords: criticism, poetry, poet-critics, literary history, Oxford Professor of Poetry, lectures

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As poetry lost cultural status, ‘professors of poetry’ began to multiply: perhaps an ominous sign, perhaps a means of survival for poets and their art. Yet the original professorship of poetry, founded at Oxford University in 1708, has kept the unique character which makes it a different gauge of vocational confidence. Until 1961, however, this elective post was confined to Oxford alumni; and only since Cecil Day Lewis’s tenure (1951–56) have poets really taken over from scholars who wrote bad or occasional verse. In the nineteenth century the shining exception, the true poet-critic, was, of course, Matthew Arnold. In the twentieth century, the most consequential Oxford lectures before Auden’s, were given by the critic A. C. Bradley. Not only Bradley’s Shakespeare lectures: for instance, his still-fresh inaugural lecture, ‘Poetry for Poetry’s Sake’ (1901), influenced Edward Thomas’s thinking about poetry. Recent poet-professors have usually updated their brief by offering some readings, workshops or other kinds of ‘outreach’. Yet it’s still through statutory lectures that the Professor is mainly required to ‘profess’ in the root sense of the word; that is, to ‘declare publicly’ some thoughts about poetry, perhaps to make a ‘profession of faith’: a vocational pledge to which I will return. Not every poet approached to stand for election has wanted such an opportunity. Two great refusers were William Morris and Philip Larkin. In 1877 Morris insisted that he was ‘not the man to fill the post’. The terms of his refusal still complicate our thinking about poets as critics:

It seems to me that the practice of any art rather narrows the artist in regard to the theory of it … I can scarce call myself a man of letters: and moreover I have a peculiar inaptitude for expressing myself except in the one way that my gift lies. Also […] I have a lurking doubt as to whether […] the Professor of a wholly incommunicable art is not rather in a false position.[1]

Larkin gave a simpler reason for not standing. He feared that the job would entail ‘a lot of sherry-drill with important people’ (perhaps insinuating its aspect as a good career-move). Yet he also echoed Morris when he said: ‘I have never considered literature in the abstract since that blessed day in 1943 when I laid down my pen in the Sheldonian Theatre and sauntered out into the sunshine, a free man’.[2]

I want to compare Graves and Auden as practitioner-theorists — poet-critics — with reference to their stints as Oxford Professor of Poetry. My title, ‘Returned Prodigals’, implies some basic likeness by setting them at the same angle to their poetic homeland, their poetic origins, when they occupied the Chair. Graves, twelve years Auden’s senior, might have stood for election in 1956, when Auden won, but was disqualified, ostensibly by lacking an MA. Auden himself thought that Graves should have had the job then. The politics of the 1961 election, for which Graves had acquired an MA, attracted wide press coverage; F. R. Leavis was also a candidate. In a satirical article, Louis MacNeice likened Graves and Auden as outsiders in another sense:

That either Graves or Leavis is likely to commit absurd generalisations and injustices in his lectures does not really matter. What undergraduates need is provocation. Auden’s whinnying irreverences and enfant terrible eccentricities must have done them more good than crate-loads of scholarship.[3]

Leaving aside the question of audience (Graves’s popular lectures would not only appeal to students), and of whether critics can be as crazy as poets, what matters for MacNeice is style, poet-critical style, rather than content. His familiarity with the styles of Auden and Graves also indicates the special status which their consecutive tenures retain. They were the first modern poets of established reputation and influence to be Professor of Poetry (sadly, Day Lewis doesn’t count), and the history encompassed by their work included the effect on poetry of several wars. Yet absences abroad had made both Auden and Graves slightly unknown quantities. Perhaps Graves’s Clark Lectures in 1954–55 broke or smashed the ice, but also exemplified the ‘eccentricity’ or mystique which will make ‘professor of poetry’ forever an oxymoron. Both poets’ busy freelance lives required them to write vast amounts of prose, including critical prose, but not in any academic mode. Indeed, something else that Graves and Auden share is their critique of academic writings on poetry (see below). When Auden gave a double-edged endorsement to Graves in 1961, he also preferred another kind of ‘scholar’ to Leavis. He told the Observer:

Since […] the chair is such an oddity, it would be cowardly not to take risks in filling it […] If a scholar is to be chosen, why not elect a learned crank, a Baconian or a Rosicrucian? But why not a poet? He may talk nonsense, but it will probably be interesting nonsense. There is only one topic upon which no poet is worth listening to, his contemporaries.[4]

Here Auden finesses Graves’s attack on him in his notorious Clark lecture ‘These Be Your Gods, O Israel!’ — and may seek to avert a repeat performance.[5] ‘Notorious’ is MacNeice’s adjective, but not only his. Despite that attack, and despite aesthetic differences, Auden’s conception of poetry resembles Graves’s in ways that Graves seems unable to admit. For instance, ‘These Be Your Gods’ quotes from Auden’s 1946 Phi Beta Kapa Poem, ‘Under Which Lyre’, without recognising (perhaps in a double sense) that poem’s proximity to the White Goddess. Graves does call the poem a tour-de-force, but as showing Auden’s talent for nothing more serious than ‘light verse’. He also misreads ‘Under Which Lyre’ to condemn Auden’s war-record, or lack of one: Graves had previously said of Auden’s rumoured repatriation in 1945: ‘the rats return to the unsunk ship.’[6] Yet ‘Under Which Lyre’, subtitled ‘A Reactionary Tract for the Times’, defends Muse-poetry against Apollo and Apollo’s capture of the literary academy — a defence boldly spoken at a Harvard graduation. Auden opposes Hermes, ‘our god of dreams’, to ‘Pompous Apollo’ who,

Unable to invent the lyre,

Creates with simulated fire

Official art.

If Auden heretically substitutes a male god or gay god for the goddess, ‘White Aphrodite’ is said to be ‘on our side’.[7] In another Clark lecture, of course, Graves downgrades Arthur Hallam as Tennyson’s inspiration because ‘a Muse does not wear whiskers’.[8] Again, in his inaugural Oxford lecture, ‘Making, Knowing and Judging’, Auden calls poetry a ‘rite’ which ‘pays homage by naming’, and says that ‘it is from the sacred encounters of his imagination that a poet’s impulse to write a poem arises’.[9] Auden’s ‘sacred’ may be more Christian than Graves’s, but fundamentally they were singing from the same hymn-sheet during the post-war years.

Graves and Auden feature together in two letters written by the ‘New York poet’ James Schuyler, who had briefly been Auden’s secretary. In a 1957 letter, having mentioned Auden’s complicated relations with T. S. Eliot, Schuyler says of ‘These Be Your Gods’:

Within the year his other Ideal, Robert Graves, gave him a good going over, I mean in quite a rough way, and a lot of the poems in The Shield of Achilles are written within the dogma of Graves’ White Goddess. Now I bet W. H. A. is good and sore at her.

In 1960, responding to accounts of Graves’s first American tour, Schuyler says that he loves ‘the picture of Graves whomping out’ poems and that ‘the old goat sounds just like Wystan Auden’.[10] Auden never counter-attacked Graves. In his review of Graves’s 1959 Collected Poems (the 1961 US edition) and in three BBC broadcast talks (1962), he honoured Graves’s achievement and called him ‘one of the very few poets’ whose new collections he immediately bought.[11] But his telegram to Graves, telling him to ‘break a leg’ for his Oxford inaugural, was again double-edged. Written in German, the telegram evoked, to quote Edward Mendelson, ‘a passage in The White Goddess about the Star-Son and Serpent, mythical twin brothers who continually destroy and succeed each other’.[12] ‘Star-Son and Serpent’ might be a better title for this essay.

Auden’s and Graves’s motives for seeking the professorship may have included a creative crisis, of which they were not necessarily conscious or which they were unable to diagnose — more on that below. But each had reputational cause to place himself at this ‘odd’ podium of the poetry world. Graves could feel neglected as a poet — he dwells on Fame in his Clark lectures — but found himself consolidating a reputational high. In the 1950s and early 60s, his poetry received laudatory reviews. Both his Romantic-Muse theory and his Apollonian formal practice were influencing young poets: sometimes the same poet in a double whammy. Yet ‘returned prodigal’ is Graves’s own phrase, and calculated to apply beyond the university. The Foreword to his first Oxford Addresses begins: ‘Last winter, after forty years of absence, most of them spent in a Majorcan mountain village, I was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and welcomed home as something of a returned prodigal.’[13] This gives the impression that Graves came to Oxford, brushing pine-needles or vine-leaves out of his hair: a latter-day scholar-gypsy. In fact, he had spent long periods in England during those years, kept in touch with London literati and publishers, and even lectured in Cambridge. Taking on the Oxford Chair fits with how Graves deployed, as much as inhabited, a mix of proximity and distance. Besides giving him imaginative space, this could protect him against aesthetic challenges and bestow a kind of poet-critical license — to trash other poets, for instance. ‘Prodigal’, of course, implies no repentance for any literary sins, especially against father-poets like Yeats. Auden, in contrast, knew himself to be more truly prodigal: he feared, yet sought to face down, the reception he might get in England where his reputation had indeed been damaged by his spending the war in America; also by Leavis’s attacks — as misconceived as Graves’s; and (in 1951) by his name being linked with the spy Guy Burgess. When his inaugural lecture proved a success, Auden wrote that he had ‘won over my enemies’. Yet, according to Edward Mendelson, there was more at stake for Auden in Oxford, more that continued to be at stake, than someone mentioning the war. Mendelson considers that Auden’s ‘highly-publicised return […] unsettled his whole sense of himself and his career’; also that Auden’s essays and lectures during those years evince ‘some of his darkest explorations of responsibility and guilt’, and his poems, ‘some of his deepest meditations on the deceptive powers of poetic language’.[14] I will suggest that, for both Auden and Graves, the Oxford Chair was indeed bound up with professions or questions of faith: faith in their own poetry as well as in poetry.

The three lectures per year of an Oxford tenure (now four years, previously five, originally for life) must exhaust some poets’ critical inspiration: or, rather, what their poetic inspiration impels them to say critically: the one story about poetry that is worth their telling. Inaugural lectures, early lectures, are thus most liable to be professions of faith. Auden’s defining mission in ‘Making, Knowing and Judging’ is to broach a ‘topic […] of general and, if possible, central concern to the verbal Art of Numbers’.[15] Graves’s ‘main reason’ for agreeing to give the Clark Lectures was more negative: ‘a new apostasy from tradition’. He said: ‘someone has to speak out.[16] Yet he did not really ‘speak out’ until his final idol-smashing of Yeats, Eliot and Dylan Thomas, along with Auden. In some lights, Graves’s Clark Lectures, with their historical canter through English poetic tradition, can be read as a warm-up for Oxford, where his inaugural lecture, ‘The Dedicated Poet’, immediately opposed such a poet to ‘the foul tidal basin of modernism’ — no Pierian Spring. Graves’s lecture-title highlights the poet, tranced and entranced by the Muse: John Skelton ‘emotionally aflame’.[17] In contrast, Auden’s title highlights poetry: something ‘made’, ‘a verbal contraption’: an art for which poets educate themselves, if in ‘peculiar’ ways, and which implicates critical ‘judgment’. Yet Graves might not disagree, and Auden does call poetry a sacred ‘rite’. He ends his lecture by affirming that ‘every poem is rooted in imaginative awe’.[18]

Both inaugural lectures quote poets who thought poets the best critics of poetry. Graves quotes Ben Jonson; Auden, the less dogmatic Dryden. Admittedly, Auden is also tempted to think that what poet-critics are ‘really saying is: “Read me. Don’t read the other fellows”’.[19] Perhaps Graves said the quiet part out loud. Yet some positive reactions to his Cambridge and Oxford lectures are worth noting. Philip Larkin ‘to [his] surprise’, enjoyed The Crowning Privilege. He said: ‘I don’t remember anyone saying in a review how exciting it is, in the sense of evoking a thrilling sense of vocation in the reader — the jokes, the insults (all unfair), the sagacity [Larkin agrees with Graves’s dictum that ‘necessary poems are rare’] […] all highly exciting and arousing’. He also calls Graves’s ‘kicks in the rear’ to Auden etc ‘richly earned’.[20] Two years earlier, Larkin had published ‘What’s Become of Wystan?’, his searing review of Auden’s Homage to Clio.[21] Again, Geoffrey Grigson praised Graves’s 1962 Oxford lectures because: ‘He speaks as a poet who writes and publishes poems, not as one of the innumerable dons who have taken to literary journalism ex cathedra, from every mean little salaried cage between Aberdeen and Brighton — or Harvard.’[22] Grigson disliked the merging of academic critic with poetry reviewer; as Larkin disliked the merging of academic critic with poet — in Donald Davie, for instance. Thus Graves had touched a nerve with possibly endangered species: whether ‘necessary poems’ or unsparing poetry reviews in the manner of Grigson’s New Verse. Of course, academic critics of poetry (like me) may now themselves be endangered. But Auden and Graves shared a significant complaint about academic criticism, which applies today in new guises: its drive to categorise poets. Auden notes that critics first ‘classified authors as Ancients […] and Moderns’, then ‘by eras, the Augustans, the Victorians, etc, and now they classify them by decades […] Very soon, it seems, they will be labelling authors, like automobiles, by the year’.[23] Graves wonderfully observes in ‘These Be Your Gods’:

Even I have my niche in the popular text-book: I am briefly mentioned with the Georgian War Poets of 1914–18 (see p. 11), successors to the Imagists (see p. 1), and themselves superseded (see p. 11) by the Modernist Movement of the ’twenties; which merged (see p. 111) into the Left Wing Movement of the ’thirties; which was suffocated (see p. 141) by the 1939–45 War.[24]

Auden and Graves are not only joking. Of course, Graves objected to individual poet-‘idols’ as well as to simplistic academic groupings. Yet Auden hardly felt idolised in the early 1950s, and he still has not shaken off a certain decade. The mis-match between poet and professor is apparent in this context too.

Auden and Graves became Oxford Professors when they had reached, or just passed, the phase which MacNeice characterises in often-quoted lines: ‘This middle stretch | Of life is bad for poets’.[25] Most readers might agree that they wrote few ‘necessary poems’ after the early 1960s. To say this, seems to place their Oxford tenures as perhaps a cause, perhaps a symptom, of creative problems. I prefer symptom, and the last part of this essay will suggest a broadly symptomatic aspect of each professorship. For a poet, the obligation to speak publicly about poetry cannot really avoid a ‘profession of faith’ in some shape or form. Meanwhile, acts of faith, as represented by new poems, may or may not lurk in the background. As noted above, Mendelson links Auden’s Oxford years with his critical ‘explorations of responsibility and guilt’ and poetic ‘meditations on the deceptive powers of poetic language’. This suggests a faith beset by doubts (and hence some weakening of Auden’s Gravesian affinities). It also marks a cross-over between poetry and criticism. The second part of the compound ‘poet-critic’ applies more strictly to Auden than to Graves. ‘Making, Knowing and Judging’ dwells as much on a critic’s credentials as on a poet’s, and Auden is a poet unusually interested in the poet-critic. It might be argued that his own poetry and criticism had been coming together during the previous decade; that the professorship reinforced a convergence not only of theme but also of manner. Auden’s criticism is more statement than analysis: ‘I shall now proceed to make some general statements’, he says in ‘Making, Knowing and Judging’, and he calls part of this lecture ‘a literary dogmatic psalm’: a phrase that fuses poetry and criticism into a multiple oxymoron.[26] Vice versa, so to speak, Auden’s poetry was then tilting towards its discursive pole, even towards verse. Aphorism, an effective critical mode for him before he left England, now straddles his poetry and criticism, as in in ‘Dichtung und Wahrheit (An Unwritten Poem)’ (1959). ‘Making, Knowing and Judging’ distinguishes between a poet criticising other writers, and his inner critic: personified as the ‘Censor’. Perhaps Auden’s own Censor was becoming more a poetic conscience than a judge of poetic quality — the shrewd Schuyler thought he had ‘little faculty for self-criticism’ — as a result of the religious turn which had led him to ‘mutilate’ (Schuyler’s word) earlier poems.[27] Auden certainly qualified for Ezra Pound’s squib, when Eliot took to Christianity, about ‘the psychosis | of those who abandon the Muses for Moses’. In Auden’s Apologies for Poetry Lucy McDiarmid calls ‘the poetics of later Auden’ a poetics ‘of apology and self-deprecation, a radical undermining of poetry itself’.[28] Such a poetics — or anti-poetics — seems unlikely to generate ‘necessary poems’. Perhaps Oxford gave Auden too much time to think: especially about the moral superiority of actual religion to faith in poems as ‘sacred encounters’. His strongest poetic or poet-critical works in the 1950s are surely where the Muses fight back. This is so in ‘Making, Knowing and Judging’ and ‘The Truest Poetry Is the Most Feigning’: an ars poetica poem which reflexively relishes ‘the luck of verbal playing’.[29]

Graves, of course, never abandoned the Muse. But did she come to represent an equally problematic extreme? Graves’s Oxford lectures double-down on the absolutist faith in poetry rejected by Auden. He not only implicitly enshrines himself as ‘The Dedicated Poet’ but damns ‘The Anti-Poet’, no doubt with some contemporaries in mind as well as Virgil. Graves is unusual in his arbitrary consciousness and ‘absurd’ (MacNeice) judgements of fellow-poets, his self-projection as a lone adept: ‘a minority of one’, to quote the Foreword to The Crowning Privilege. None of this should be taken literally, but can lead to Graves’s damaging exclusion from overviews of ‘modern poetry’ — damaging to those overviews, too. Just as he became Oxford Professor, Graves sought creative renewal by turning still more solipsistically inwards: that is, by incarnating his own inspiration: his obsession with, and possession by, ‘The Personal Muse’.[30] He ignored the contradiction implicit in giving physical form to the bemused trance: a rather literal profession of faith. As Auden says in his Oxford lecture, ‘Genius & Apostle’: ‘To have faith in something or someone means that the object of faith is not manifest. If it becomes manifest, then faith is no longer required.’[31] Yet this version of ‘real presence’ worked for Graves until it didn’t. It didn’t, partly because an incarnated Muse was bound to narrow the generic scope of his poetry, which had never really told only one story.

Yeats is the modern poet who most successfully renewed his art as he aged. ‘Myself must I remake’, as he puts it in ‘An Acre of Grass’: a poem that resists the ‘temptation’ of ‘quiet | Here at life’s end’.[32] For all Graves’s flaunted ignorance of later Yeats, he ended his last Oxford lecture by rededicating himself to poetry in a manner that parallels the dialectics of ‘An Acre of Grass’. He read two poems: his notional retirement song, ‘Enjoy your Sunday’, followed by ‘Between Moon and Moon’, which announces a resurgent Muse: ‘She is here again, I sigh’.[33] Unknown to Graves’s Oxford audience, ‘She’ was there too for his final professorial turn. Miranda Seymour tells how Omar Shah was then positioned ‘in the Hindu Kush, dressed in turban and pantaloons and holding up his Afghan sword’. Meanwhile, Cindy Lee, ‘her eye on the clock, was supposed to be standing by in New York, Graves’s emerald engraved with Athena’s owl blazing from her forehead’.[34] No Oxford Professor of Poetry, before or since, has beaten that.

Edna Longley is a Professor Emerita at Queen’s University Belfast. Her books include Yeats and Modern Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Under the Same Moon: Edward Thomas and the English Lyric (Enitharmon, 2017), and she is editor of Edward Thomas: The Annotated Collected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2008) and Edward Thomas: Selected Writings on Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2023).

NOTES