Crying Fire in a Theatre: Auden's Harlequinades

Abstract

This essay examines Auden's growing disillusionment with England during the 1930s, culminating in his leaving for New York in early 1939. Focussing on those poems which were to be published in Another Time (1941), Auden's first collection as an "American" poet, the essay charts Auden's analysis of the poet's responsibility for the creation of a "Just City" through such exemplary figures as Rimbaud, Edward Lear, Matthew Arnold and, most importantly, W. B. Yeats. If sailing for' America saw Auden attempting to escape a certain kind of limiting and parochial Englishness, then it also, this essay proposes, saw him attempting to jettison Yeats's influence, one which Auden came to recognise as providing a negative role model for the complex relationship between public and private selves. These themes, the essay concludes, are most fully worked out in the series of great elegies contained in the third section of Another Time, in which Auden looks at the Just City from the perspective of the exile.