Alan Jacobs at The Hedgehog Review:
When, on January 19, 1939, W.H. Auden boarded at Southampton a ship bound for New York City, he could not have known that he would never live in England again. But some months earlier, he had told his friend Christopher Isherwood that he wanted to settle permanently in the United States. Almost as soon as he arrived in New York, he began to rethink his calling as a poet, and, moreover, to reconsider the social role and function of poetry. (He also began a spiritual pilgrimage that would lead him to embrace the Christian faith of his childhood.)
His work of this period combined a proclamation of the value of microcultures with a commitment to an intellectual cosmopolitanism. He celebrated the “local understanding” achieved in the informal salon run by a German émigré, Elizabeth Mayer, from her home on Long Island, but what bound the members of that salon to one another was the combination of cultural and national diversity with moral sympathy. In a poem composed immediately after the Nazis invaded Poland in September 1939, he wrote:
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages….
Like God in one ancient definition, “the Just” are a community whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. They are homeless in the world but at home with one another.
More here.
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