Auden

I had an easy enough time dying to my potential as a piano player because I hated practicing. So my senior year of high school I finally quit taking lessons (although is that what it really means to die like a grain of wheat? We’ll keep thinking about that). But in college, I discovered another skill that I really wanted to pursue: Poetry.

My junior year I declared as an English major at Wheaton College, and I started trying, REALLY trying, to write poetry. I went to poetry readings whenever published poets visited the school. In my classes I studied Homer, Dante, John Donne, George Herbert. I went through a Haiku phase, where I spent pages and pages copying the same poem over and over, changing a syllable here, changing a word there, trying to hear the difference it made, and why was one way of saying better than another?

I took a creative writing class. I blogged, kept notebooks. I wanted to be good. I wanted to be great. I wanted to write like T. S. Eliot or Emily Dickinson. I wanted to write something true and beautiful and wold-shattering. (I would get hugely frustrated and sad that I didn’t have the talent I wanted).

And then I came across W. H. Auden.

Auden was one of the great influential poets of the twentieth century. By age 20, at the beginning of World War I, he was already a national phenomenon in Britain. The term “Audenesque” was tossed around in literary circles. His poems helped shape the entire national consciousness regarding the war effort.

The man was a poetic genius: any rhyme-scheme, any rhythm, he could trot out the lines, no problem. He would choose the most difficult and constricting poetic forms and come out with these beautiful stanzas that sounded completely natural and gorgeous.

He was famous, he was rich (as poets go), he was changing the world. And then: around age 40, he became a Christian.

It was completely unexpected. Auden was a practicing homosexual. He lived a bohemian lifestyle. At the time he was in a communal house with a group of artists. And the housemates started realizing: Sunday mornings, good ol’ Wystan would ordinarily sleep in until noon. But the past month he kept disappearing and nobody knew where he was going. Turns out he was going to church.

Knowing Jesus changed Auden as a person, definitely. But the thing that struck me, because this doesn’t happen for everybody: knowing Jesus also changed him as a professional.

After his conversion, Auden went through his old poems and rewrote his previously published work. He took some of his most famous poems and deleted the punchlines, because he said they were a lie.

He completely changed his poetic style: he no longer wrote mass-appeal poetry that would shape the entire national consciousness. Instead, he wrote difficult and long poetry that no one could understand, often on religious themes. Or he wrote lyrics to operas. Or he wrote personal poetry, like poems dedicated to couples on their wedding day.

All the critics of his time (although technically the jury’s still out, and history will have the last word) declared that the new, Christian Auden was just a WORSE poet than the old secular Auden.

My professor at Wheaton, Dr. Alan Jacobs, taught us all the above information and emphasized how intentional this was for Auden. How, for him, converting to Christianity totally changed his ethics as a poet. He no longer gave himself free reign to pursue the highest reaches of his art. Instead, he was constantly filtering himself through a new lens: how was his art serving people the way Jesus served?

Auden’s poetry got really quirky in his later years. He wrote about quantum mechanics. He wrote joke poetry. He wrote a poem where each section was about a different room in his house (including the toilet), and dedicated the different sections to different friends. He wasn’t taking himself, or poetry, seriously anymore. It wasn’t this grand project that would change the world and save culture from falling off the cliff. It was fun.

To me this is a fascinating example of a man who had reached the highest place, and willingly, gladly, exchanged it to search for the way to the lowest. If you’ve read My Name is Asher Lev, Auden’s journey is essentially the opposite. Asher was coached and disciplined and urged to sacrifice his religion in order to make great art. Auden sacrificed his greatness as a poet so he could remain true to his religion.

At the time, this encounter with Auden was one of the circumstances that led me to give up poetry. There were other factors, too, like tree branches, and the movie Speed Racer (the live action version). But that’s another story for another time. Short version was: I stopped trying to become a better poet.

I can’t say that I was wasting all this potential, because I really never had the talent to make it where I wanted to go. But for me, it was meaningful that I stopped trying. I’ve still written now and then, for fun, over the years. And sometimes when I come up with something I like, I start daydreaming again about being a rich and famous poet (hah!). But I never write in the same way as I did that year. Never with ambition.

It was so helpful for me to see someone great step away from their greatness for the sake of Jesus. For the sake of the truth. And because of Auden, I think I, to some extent, understand what it looks like to let go of my “potential.” To let go of an upward trajectory in something I care about.

But the thing I still don’t understand is: what does it mean to actually go down? What does it mean to die, like the grain of wheat dies? I think about this in my ministry, in parenting, in my relationships, in my work. I have the feeling like I’m stuck in the middle between these two forces, the one pushing me up, and the one pulling me down. Which means I essentially go nowhere. Because it’s scary, you know? It’s scary to go all the way.