Prince's first book of poetry, Poems, in relation to issues of decision-making in late 1930s British culture, and, in particular, to the Munich Crisis of September 1938, during which the volume was published. Reading Auden's 1950’s sequence 'Horae Canonicae', I establish the pervasiveness and the interpretative importance of the City and seek to adumbrate the Christian philosophy and history – and philosophy of history – that informs Auden’s specifically Christian civic discourse. If, as Charles Williams suggested, the development of a poet’s mind consists in the ‘adequate growth and analysed growth of the particular images he tends to use’, then Auden’s ‘new discourse’ can usefully be approached through a consideration of the continuity and the ‘growth’ in his image of the City. rather, a translation into a new discourse of those impulses which lay behind his thirties writing. But this essay argues that Auden’s later work constitutes what Stan Smith has called neither a quietist cult of waiting for the millennium, nor a recantation of his radical past. abandoned his audience together with their common dialect and concerns’, and suffered ‘irreparable’ damage to his poetry (1983: 125).
Philip Larkin famously pronounced that Auden, in leaving ‘Europe and the fear of war. The voice that in the thirties called for ‘The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder’ required to ‘build the just city’ (‘Spain’) was, despite Auden’s repudiation of this phrase (Hecht 1993: 131), the same voice that in the post-war years acknowledged that the ‘courtesies of the city’ (‘Sext’) could only be bought in blood. Auden was, throughout his career, very much a civic poet.
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