From Error to Terror: The Romantic Inheritance in W. H. Auden's "In Time of War"

In 1937, Faber and Faber commissioned W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood to write a travel book about Asia as a sequel to Letters from Iceland (1937), which Auden had co-authored with Louis MacNeice. While the journey to the North had been driven by cultural and personal inclinations, the decision to visit the East was motivated by a public and political purpose. After his return from Iceland in late 1936, Auden had written to E. R. Dodds that he was “not one of those who believe that poetry need or even should be directly political.” At the same time, he recognized that “the poet must have direct knowledge of the major political events” (Mendelson 2017: 183). In his quest for such direct knowledge, Auden took part in the Spanish Civil War but failed to translate his experience into poetry.1 The second Sino-Japanese War offered a chance to atone for this failure: in China, he said, “we shall have a war of our own” (Isherwood 289). At first, this conflict proved elusive. Auden was continually delayed in his attempts to visit the front. Eventually he did come close enough to witness the destruction and danger that people on the ground were facing. The germ of his sentiments can be glimpsed in a recently discovered newspaper article for the Birmingham Gazette (Mendelson 2019), in which he discusses the plight of missionaries, with particular atten-