The Auden Syllabus
The uses and abuses of a great poet's reading list
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W. H. Auden was a visiting faculty member at the University of Michigan in autumn 1941. The course he taught is briefly mentioned in the poet’s biographies, and on rare occasion it has been remarked upon by students who took it. Otherwise, “English 135: Fate and the Individual in European Literature,” was forgotten until about twelve years ago when Baylor scholar Alan Jacobs posted its syllabus online:
The syllabus went viral, in a modest, academic way: a long Reddit thread, a 2019 article in The Hedgehog Review, a handful of links in such outlets as 3 Quarks Daily and The Paris Review, and passing mention in two New Yorker articles this year, which is what prompted me to read up on it.
Reddit debated whether or not a reading list amounting to 6,000 pages was too extensive for one semester, and if a theme such as “fate and the individual” was a better organizing principal for a survey course than representative texts of a national literature. The conversation was eventually overtaken and ruined by some Oxbridge types who claimed to have read 6,000 pages over lunch at their colleges while also dashing off 3,000-word essays.
The Hedgehog Review article, by Wilfred M. McClay, an historian at Hillsdale College, recounts how “teachers and students alike could not help but stare in disbelief at the audacity of [Auden’s] reading list … diabolically compressed into a single semester, a literary boot camp to end all boot camps.” McClay was excited by it: “It was like a guided tour of the essential furnishings of a great poet’s mind.” He and two teaching colleagues decided to replicate the course, minus seven of the libretti, over two semesters. Recruiting students was easy:
Each semester we raise the ceiling for course enrollment; each semester we run out of space and must turn away students. Those who are busy lamenting the death of the humanities might want to take note of this experience.
McClay’s course also works Auden the poet into the syllabus, for instance, pairing the Aeneid with Auden’s “Secondary Epic,” and Augustine’s Confessions with “As I Walked Out One Evening.” The purpose of “audenizing” the great books is to show students how “such texts could sustain the imaginative life of a great creative artist, a man who was more or less our contemporary. They can take the books as their own sustenance, and learn to see from him—and, if less impressively, from their teachers too—how this is done, what it looks like, and how a life of intense creativity and searching moral imagination rooted in the rich and various literary inheritance can also be theirs for the asking.”
In a more recent piece in the Wall Street Journal, The University of Colorado’s Joseph Bottum views the Auden course as an antidote to lazy, student-centered approaches to post-secondary education. He cites a spate of articles in such outlets as The Chronicle of Higher Education and the Atlantic on how professors have taken to assigning their increasingly fragile students short readings instead of whole books (we discussed these in SHuSH 257, “The End of Reading.”) Bottum insists that students will rise to whatever level of expectations universities have for them. To prove his point, he has launched his own version of Auden’s course, a survey of the modern novel, assigning a full book a week, starting with Cervantes and driving on through Austen and Joyce to Kerouac.
I, too, was impressed at Auden’s reading list, if uneasy at the uses to which it is being put. The replicated courses are political projects, protests against everything that’s happened in the humanities over the last eight decades. Professor McClay’s Hillsdale College has set as its mission the salvation of a narrow slice of Western Civilization, and McClay himself appears to have since moved on to teach a history survey of the sort recommended by the current White House: “The Great American Story: A Land of Hope.” Professor Bottum, a former editor of the conservative/Christian magazine First Things, operates out of the University of Colorado’s Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization, which has recently attracted notice as the intellectual home of John Eastman, a lawyer and academic who advised an earlier White House on how to overturn the 2020 election result.
While those motives and associations don’t necessarily detract from the merits of the replica courses (I admire how McClay constructed his), I’m not sure Auden would be pleased to have his work resurrected on these terms, in this company.
McClay says his students view the “Fate and the Individual” syllabus as an endurance contest, awarding themselves t-shirts that read “I survived the Auden course.” Good on the students for signing up, even if it sounds more like a stunt than a sincere exploration of literature’s treatment of moral agency in the human condition. It made me curious as to how the course would have landed in 1941.
Fortunately, I still haven’t got around to disposing of the books I took down from my shelves two months ago in a half-hearted attempt to reduce my hoard (see SHuSH 279, “The Excruciating Pain of Parting with Books”). If you missed it:
I faced a bookcase of eight shelves with about forty books per shelf. I challenged myself to get rid of one book for every book I kept. An hour later, I had half the books on the floor. Hurrah.
The next step was to put the unwanted books in boxes and haul them away.
They’re still sitting on the floor.
One of the articles on the Auden course mentioned that Kenneth Millar had enrolled in it. Millar is the Canadian who, under the pseudonym Ross Macdonald, wrote some of his century’s best crime fiction. I recalled that Tom Nolan’s biography, Ross Macdonald, was in that pile on my floor. I picked it up. Here’s how “Fate and the Individual in European Literature” struck a bright young graduate student in 1941:
W. H. Auden, internationally famous at thirty-four, cut a strikingly odd figure. Fair-skinned, long-faced, and with unkempt reddish hair, he moved sideways like a skittish colt; his laugh was a whinny. He made no eye contact with students in class, staring out the window while lecturing as if in contact with the dead writers of whom he spoke. Auden played opera records to make literary points, analyzed Shakespeare’s characters from a Jungian point of view, and spoke about people (Rimbaud, Freud, Valery) largely unknown to American grad students. Millar, [his friend Donald] Pearce, and others were electrified by [Auden’s] brilliance. Millar dubbed Auden “a young Socrates and an old Ariel rolled into one.” Auden was impressed with Millar too and graded his essays (and Pearce’s) A-plus.
One paper Millar wrote compared Dante’s The Divine Comedy to Kafka’s The Castle. In lieu of a final, Auden had students memorize any six Dante cantos. Millar’s close study of the Comedy for Auden’s class heightened his appreciation of Dante’s epic. Pearce recalled Millar analyzing the poet’s technique: “Ken would talk about how the imagery in the inferno was heavy and concrete and specific and dark: ‘so like the place that’s being described.’ Then he said, ‘If you look at the imagery in the Purgatorio, what a change that is: it’s clear, rational, careful, and calculated—exactly what ought to occur in a place where you get cleansed of all your mud and error and sin and guilt. Then see what he does with the Paradiso imagery: it’s all light and high-musical and lyric.’”
Nolan has much more on how Auden encouraged Millar’s writing, “how Auden thinking well of Millar allowed Millar to think well of himself,” how he eventually used Dante as a frame of reference in his southern Californian noir. Millar had noticed how people in hell are constantly engaged in conversation. Dante, writes Nolan, “seems to be saying hell consists largely of conversation, self-justification, accusation.” Ross Macdonald’s famous detective, Lew Archer, a reluctant conversationalist, is nevertheless an expert interrogator, “eliciting many testimonies, self-deceptions, lies, and alibis” from people who can’t help but expose themselves through talk.
The most important lesson to be drawn from all this: never throw out your books.
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Thank you. I never expected to see Auden & McDonald mentioned in the same piece. I had a professor who taught Auden & changed my life. Played opera/ Benjamin Britton in background , too. Keeping Auden and all the books from that class on my shelf.
"The most important lesson to be drawn from all this: never throw out your books." Amen.