“Tell me the Truth”

Abstract

Auden’s late-thirties light verse and serious poetry use humor to construct a community of readers and fellow-poets. His humor and his poetics are programmatically anti-Fascist, rejecting the notion of the poet as “exceptional person” and treating literary tradition as potentially malleable and inclusive. For Auden, humor is both individuating and a way to identify like-minded people; more unusually, when it is based on potentially accessible literary knowledge, it also invites outsiders to join the poet’s community. Humor and laughter turn out to provide ways to extend the profound, life-changing intersubjectivity of love—the empathy we feel for our beloved—to a community beyond the dyad of lovers.