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Apophatic Auden, Abstract Stevens: From Kierkegaard to Cézanne in “The Sea and the Mirror” and “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet”

CURSORY SURVEY of the careers of W. H. Auden and Wallace Stevens might lead one to assume these two poets shared little in common—at least by the early 1940s, when the English Auden, transplanted to the States, had embraced Christianity and was occupying an ambitiously professional, if polemical, place in American letters, while the American Stevens was exploring an essentially secular scrutiny of “abstraction” with only the occasional public appearance on his native turf for the odd lecture or two (“The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet” also qualifying as an “odd lecture” both in its subject matter and performative qualities). 1 However, on closer inspection, especially considering “The Sea and the Mirror” and Stevens’ similarly “experimental” lecture, we witness two poets seeking novel voices, almost new modes of expression, in that period, influenced by the Second World War, in which modernism reconfigured itself. That is, if early modernism was colored by an avant-garde replete with manifestos and the attempt to “make it new” in just about any medium—an overall cultural phenomenon marked by the disturbing modernity of the Great War—the poets and artists who survived to experience a second global conflict were by the early forties preoccupied by crises of faith (“religious” and “secular”) in which the validity of anything, poetry included, was debatable. Auden inherited his sense of modernism, at least in English, primarily from T. S. Eliot; and, born in 1907, came to maturity early as the leading English poet of the 1930s. Auden quickly investigated poetry’s and the poet’s roles in the public domain in the hilarious “Letter to Lord Byron” (1936), among other socially and politically engaged works (ACP 79–113). 2 As Aidan Wasley has observed (2), it was significant, therefore, that the first poem Auden wrote on emigrating to the US in January 1939 was “In