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Content

1.  Introduction: A Concise History of the “City Motive 3  4

2.  Analysis of Basic Themes in Memorial for the City  4

2.1.The  Introduction to the Poem  4

2.1.1.  The Title 4  5

2.1.2.  The Epigraph by Juliana of Norwich 5  6

2.2.  Section I: Different Views on the World 6  7

2.2.1.  The Naturalistic World of Homer  7

2.2.2.  The War and the Camera 7  9

2.2.3.  The Christian View: Redemption of the “Post-Virgilian City 9  10

2.3.  Section II: A Brief History of “Cities  10

2.3.1.  The “New City 10  11

2.3.2.  The “Sane City and its Counterpart: The “Sinful City 11  12

2.3.3.  The Secular City 12  13

2.3.4.  The “Rational City  13

2.3.5.  The “Glittering City and the “Conscious City 13  14

2.4.  Section III: The Post-War, “Abolished City  14

2.4.1.  The Barbed Wire: Destruction and Division of Civilizations 14  15

2.4.2.  The Image behind the Mirror: “Hope and “Flesh 15  16

2.5.  Section IV: Redemption via the Body  16

2.5.1.  The Voice of the Flesh: Examples of Weakness 17  18

2.5.2.  Metropolis Fated: Rejection of Present Order and a Prophecy  18

3.  Conclusions: Problematic Concepts and Open Questions 19  20

4.  References  21

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1.  Introduction: A Concise History of the City Motive  

  The origins of a critical view on the focal points of civilizations may be traced back in history very  

  far. Perfect examples of ancient critique on urban life may be found in the Old Testament, e g. the  

  depiction of the civilizations of Babel, Sodom and Gomorrah. The metaphorical content of these  

  examples seems fairly clear: the reader is confronted with societies that either directly challenge the  

  authority of God or don’t follow his Commandments and are therefore punished by a divine father  

  figure, which restores the natural and spiritual order. However, from the beginning, the city motive  

  may also be seen as well as a means of discourse on mankind’s cultural and social output. But  

  modern city poetry is of course different from the ancient accounts of God’s wrath, which lead to  

  catastrophes for one city or the other. Its roots are to be found in the works of major eighteenth  

  century poets, e g. William Blake’s London, in which he seems to recognize a new form of disorder  

  being at work within the city limits. The nineteenth century brought forth poets like Wordsworth,  

  who carried on to work on the theme but showed a different attitude towards the city. Because of its  

  ever growing dimension, it was then perceived as a totally new and symbolic phenomenon, which  

  raised philosophical questions about the state of society and the poet’s role within this complex. The  

  tone of the responses to these questions was for the most part uncertain and personal. Finally,the  

  twentieth century gave birth to a new kind of urban literature and poetry, with a symbolic meaning  

  of the city motive, which was as varied as the ethnical, religious, social and political shades of the  

  human community it referred to. Nevertheless, two tendencies may be observed within modern  

  poetry and prose, the first one dealing with the content of the city symbol: “ When the city ceases to  

  be a symbol of art and order,’ writes Lewis Mumford, it acts in a negative fashion: it expresses and  

  helps to make more universal the fact of disintegration ’ “ 1 The second one is the mode major poets  

  such as T S. Eliot in his famous The Waste Land attempt to cope with the reality of the twentieth  

  century city: a controlling framework of myth, literature and history is employed in order to deal  

  with the chaotic nature of their theme. Both points are to some extent true particularly for Auden’s  

  later works. In what he seems unique is his intention to create an “idea of place instead of directly  

  referring to one or the other reality of a city. “Auden attempts to establish the “idea of a city as  

  something that can be poetically separated from its physical existence 2 In the poems of the 1930 ’s  

  which focus on real places the “idea consists in the combination of different aspects of a city and a  

  concluding judgement on it. Dover 1937 may be seen as a perfect example of this structure:  

1  Johnston (1984 : 246 )  

2  Johnston (1984 : 232 )  

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Steep roads, a tunnel through chalk downs, are the approaches;

A ruined pharos overlooks a constructed bay; The sea-front is almost elegant; all the show Has, inland somewhere a vague and dirty root: Nothing is made in this town. 3

This “idea” of place is even further abstracted by Auden. It is shaped into a concept, which may either be employed to describe any typical twentieth century metropolis or to depict a visionary yet not totally unworldly form of human community. An example of the latter one is Auden’s “Just City”. It occurs in poems as different as Spain 1937 and New Year Letter and is to be seen as a product of his then political idealism. Later on he develops other such “ideas”, e.g. “the moderate Aristotelian city” in For the Time Being. To analyse such concepts and illumine basic themes in Memorial for the City shall be the predominant task the author of this paper tries to fulfil.

2. Analysis of Basic Themes in Memorial for the City

2.1. The Introduction to the Poem

Already the introduction to the poem, the title and the epigraph by Juliana of Norwich, gives the recipient food for thought. Although at first glance its basic content seems rather clear, some questions may appear after having read and re-read the whole body of the poem, e.g. Why is a memorial erected? For what city? What is the connection between the epigraph, the title and the poem? In the following passage I will try to offer some possible answers to these crucial questions.

2.1.1. The Title

The riddling title of the poem, constructed of the two fairly neutral terms “Memorial” and “City” is not easy to understand. “Memorial” here seems to be employed as a nominal means of depicting the basic reason for the artist to write his poem. Per definition a memorial is there to remind people of something which is gone. The object to remind us of is the “City”. But what is meant by this term is not easy to be revealed. Auden seems to have in mind what I’ve already indicated in my introduction: an abstraction or “idea” of human community. In fact, the poem offers various such “ideas”. So, the question is: Which one does he refer to in the title? Basically, there are arguments for two different readings. The first and more indirect one may be seen in the concept that the whole body of past “ideas”, whether they are morally good or not, constitute a present one, which would

³ Johnston (1984: 230-231).

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not be as it is without its historical stages of development. Following this string of thought, the “Memorial” is erected in order to remind people of the history of the “City”. In support of this reading it could be said that one of the major sources of influence on Auden was Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy’s oeuvre. Particularly his overview of European history entitled Out of Revolution seems to have had a strong impact on the artist. In a step by step movement, Rosenstock-Huessy tried to reconstruct the history of the European revolutions, which brought about major shifts in human history and lead to crucial changes in society. He tried to show that by continually questioning the structure of the human community, linear progress had been made and an ever new, more reasonable view on reality had been reached. The second possibility of reading is connected with the epigraph by Juliana of Norwich, with the “City” meaning St. Augustine’s concept of “the City of God”. If this is intended by Auden, then why does he, who by the time he wrote the poem had already converted to the Roman Catholic faith, erect a “Memorial” for a religious “idea”? Does he believe it to be past and gone? A fairly obvious reason could be seen in the possibility that Auden believes his present to be influenced exclusively by secular, utilitarian and technocratic concepts and therefore tries to remind his contemporaries of an “idea” which may transcend the historical reality of time and place. Within this context, a more complex reading is linked to a particular notion of historic time, which consists in a close relationship between past and future. The “Memorial”, in itself a historical “event”, forces the recipient into an act of memory. “Liberating the past from the future is contradicted, as such, by memory itself: for the past has been constantly imbued, and even haunted by the spectre of the future.” ⁴ Or, as Walter Benjamin put it in his Angelus Novus: “History is an angel moving backwards into the future.” ⁵ In other words, to be occupied with the past, to move back, means automatically having to deal with the future, to move forth. In fact, the last line of Auden’s poem resembles very much a prophecy: “; but I shall rise again to hear her judged.” ⁶ Thus, Auden offers the possibility that the impact of the idea of the ”City of God” transforms a given future.

2.1.2. The Epigraph by Juliana of Norwich

Juliana of Norwich, English mystic of the fourteenth century and Benedictine nun, is the author of The Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love, the source of Auden’s epigraph. According to her, she wrote her tract after having received a serious of visions in 1373. Her work resembles a meditation on

⁴ Bernardini,P. “Nostalgia for the Future. Time Past and the Construction of Europe“ www.tilgher.it/metaartberna.html.> Feb.25 ^th .

⁵ Bernardini, P. www.tilgher.it/metaartberna.html.> Feb.25 ^th .

⁶ Auden, Selected Poems (Mendelson ed. 1979: 195).

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these revelations, an attempt to reach for their core. The fundamental beliefe in the world existing only because of God’s infinite love, is the basis for her book. In so far, she has very much in common with other mystics of her times. The remarkable point in her studies is that she shows little of the dualism of body and soul that is frequent with her scholarly contemporaries. According to her, God is to be found in the bodily part as well as in the spiritual part of man. Since an important theme in Auden’s poem is the relation of the physical and the spiritual part of the human being, the epigraph seems to be rather telling: In the self-same point that our soul is Made sensual, in the self-same point is the City of God ordained to him from without Beginning. 7

St. Augustine’s “idea”, here referred to by Juliana, consists in a fundamental opposition between the “City of God”, i.e. the community of those committed to the Christian faith, and the “Earthly City”, i.e. the community of the pagans. The “City of God” is neither situated in heaven nor as a particular place on earth, but refers to the society of the “good” on earth. The unity of this community needs no outward signs, for it is felt in the heart of each of its members. Within the epigraph, a temporal aspect is added to St. Augustine’s concept. Though the point of view of Juliana is certainly different from Heidegger’s, her phrase “from without beginning” seems to resemble his “Once-for-all”. In Heidegger’s work, the context of his phrase is “that nature can take the place of the divine being-initself, which manifests itself in the once-for-all of historical time.” ⁸ For Auden, the sense of this phrase is completely different and derives from Rosenstock-Huessy: “ ‘In the cyclic, pagan view of History, there is nothing new under the sun; everything we do has happened before, will happen again; nothing of any permanent value is achieved; there is only change, without beginning or end. Christianity, on the contrary, has shown how man can be eternal in the moment, how he can act once for all.’ “ ⁹ For Auden, the temporal aspect in the epigraph means an everlasting, divine moment, which is created when kairos and logos are fused (cf. Auden’s Kairos and Logos, 1941). Most probably the artist first came across the lines by Juliana of Norwich when reading Charles William’s The Descent of the Dove. In the 1966 Collected Shorter Poems Auden added a dedication to his memory, for Williams had been one of the various influences on him.

2.2. Section I: Different Views on the World

In the first part of the poem Auden confronts the reader with two different views on the world: the Christian and the naturalistic point of view. The reader is faced with the present state of the city,

⁷ Auden (1979: 190).

⁸ Mendelson (1999: 317).

⁹ Mendelson (1999: 317).