| Chapter 2: | The Quest Perilous |
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common reader. The following passage is a good example of the substance and rhetoric of Auden's later statements:
We want a poem to be beautiful, that is to say, a verbal earthly paradise, a timeless world of pure play, which gives us delight precisely because of its contrast to our historical existence with all its insoluble problems and inescapable suffering; at the same time we want a poem to be true, that is to say, to provide us with some kind of revelation about our life which will show us what life is really like and free us from self-enchantment and deception, and a poet cannot bring us any truth without introducing into his poetry the problematic, the painful, the disorderly, the ugly.10
Beautiful poems, Auden called “Ariel-dominated”; truthful poems, “Prospero-dominated.” Getting a poem to embody both truth and beauty is a difficult undertaking. Auden was not sure it was possible.11 It was, nevertheless, the objective of his own Quest Perilous as a poet. Auden evidently thought his reputation as a major poet depended on his willingness to risk failure in the hopes of producing poems at once elegant and truthful, at once artful and plain-spoken; for, as he wrote,
It is one of the distinguishing marks of a major poet that he continues to develop, that the moment he has learnt how to write one kind of poem, he goes on to attempt something else, new subjects, new ways of treatment or both, an attempt in which he may quite possibly fail. He invariably feels, as Yeats puts it, “the fascination of what's difficult”; or, in another poem,
I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world's eyes
As though they'd wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
For there's more enterprise
In walking naked.12
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world's eyes
As though they'd wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
For there's more enterprise
In walking naked.12