Remember: he was a sonarsman on a destroyer!*
It’s hard not to get on my high horse about the “frivolous,” a pejorative some poets throw at others from the shelter of their glass gazebos. Conservative poets use it to shore up their position that poetry should be a high art, thus “serious;” political poets use it to shore up their position that poetry should denounce violence and imperialism, and be thus “serious.”**
So when Auden says –
There’s something a little irritating in the determination of the very greatest artists, like Dante, Joyce, Milton, to create masterpieces and to think themselves important. To be able to devote one’s life to art without forgetting that art is frivolous is a tremendous achievement of personal character. Shakespeare never takes himself too seriously.
– one really takes notice. The author of as grand and grave a work as In Memory of Sigmund Freud could admit that no matter how “serious” one’s poetry, it is in the scheme of things unimportant. “In Memory of Sigmund Freud” doesn’t claim for itself the achievements it ascribes to its hero — who is, by Auden’s account, a threat to the State, a rebuke to tyrants, and a debunker of mob violence. The best that his modest alcaics can do is sum up those achievements in the most uncompromising language possible, and inspire the reader with joy.
Interestingly enough, as the poem reaches its rhetorical climax, it is Freud’s own liberation of the frivolous or trivial that counts amongst his greatest gifts to humanity:
so many long-forgotten objects
revealed by his undiscouraged shining
are returned to us and made precious again;
games we had thought we must drop as we grew up,
little noises we dared not laugh at,
faces we made when no one was looking.
In fact, Auden’s Freud knew that “the frivolous” is never merely frivolous. And so did Auden, or he would have stopped writing poetry, especially after he returned to the Anglican Church, where he found a truth that put art to shame. Nevertheless, between Auden’s insight — that we are frivolous — and Freud’s insight — that the frivolous is also precious — there is a hint of grace: the “Grace to be born and live as variously as possible.”
It doesn’t have to be chiseled on a gravestone to be a serious position.
*O’Hara died 41 years ago today.
**I ought to provide some evidentiary links, but pointing fingers would be too distracting. My point is general.
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