Hannah Arendt on W.H. Auden in The New Yorker, a piece that's begun to recirculate on the interwebs:

In the forties, there were many who turned against their old beliefs, but there were very few who understood what had been wrong with those beliefs. Far from giving up their belief in history and success, they simply changed trains, as it were; the train of Socialism and Communism had been wrong, and they changed to the train of Capitalism or Freudianism or some refined Marxism, or a sophisticated mixture of all three. Auden, instead, became a Christian; that is, he left the train of History altogether. I don’t know whether Stephen Spender is right in asserting that “prayer corresponded to his deepest need”—I suspect that his deepest need was simply to write verses—but I am reasonably sure that his sanity, the great good sense that illuminated all his prose writings (his essays and book reviews), was due in no small measure to the protective shield of orthodoxy. Its time-honored coherent meaningfulness that could be neither proved nor disproved by reason provided him, as it had provided Chesterton, with an intellectually satisfying and emotionally rather comfortable refuge against the onslaught of what he called “rubbish;” that is, the countless follies of the age.

Praise is the key word of these lines, not praise of “the best of all possible worlds”—as though it were up to the poet (or the philosopher) to justify God’s creation—but praise that pitches itself against all that is most unsatisfactory in man’s condition on this earth and sucks its own strength from the wound: somehow convinced, as the bards of ancient Greece were, that the gods spin unhappiness and evil things toward mortals so that they may be able to tell the tales and sing the songs.

I often wonder what a writer like Arendt--who is not a poet, nor especially known for her appreciation of literature--brings to an appreciation of Auden.  I think it's her inescapable subjectivity, combined with the intensity of their relationship to one another. The two of them had somewhat parallel experiences of the twentieth century, for sure, and that created a capacity for understanding and resonance that unequals could not possess; but more deeply, what we see is her irreducibly subjective encounter with his unavoidable idiosyncratic self.  The presence of two such interesting and idiosyncratic creatures makes for a far richer account.  So Arendt's reflections on Auden are, in a way, surprising, not part of the general conversation on him, just because she was oblique to that conversation.  She was a unique mind; and she was his friend.  Encounters like this are like one writer reviewing another: the intensity of the there-ness in each case makes for an assessment that takes longer to metabolize, and is perhaps more difficult to incorporate alongside other, more readily digested, bits of criticism; but it seems to me the effort is worth it.

Happy Saturday, everyone.  It's cold and rainy outside, and I have to spend all afternoon outdoors, so this evening I'm looking forward to a delicious fire in our house.