The Challenge of History

Abstract

Even though Auden’s early poems try hard to expose the forces of tradition, politics, and history as language games, one must not be misled into thinking that the texts thereby counter the challenge of external events and time, of history, once and for all. Indeed, as pointed out above, games are serious issues, and they also always subject the players to their rules. History as a force composed of undeniable and threatening external events that cannot be deflected by ‘magic countersigns’ enters Auden’s poetry gradually, at first almost unnoticeably, until it becomes a dominant topic which eventually determines the title of the largest of the pre-Orators poems, ‘It was Easter as I walked in the public gardens’, which becomes ‘1929’ in later collections (CP 50-3).