THE POEM "The Sea and the Mirror" represents a diversity of Auden's intellectual and emotional interests, but as its subtitle indicates, it is first of all "A Commentary on Shakespeare's The Tempest." Auden was drawn to The Tempest for many reasons. As he told a lecture audience in his course on Shakespeare at the New School for Social Research in 1947, The Tempest is a mythopoeic work, an example of a genre that encourages adaptations, including his own, inspiring "people to go on for themselves . . . to make up episodes that [the author] as it were, forgot to tell us." Auden also, like many critics before and since, understood The Tempest as a skeptical work. When he wrote that "The Sea and the Mirror" was his Art of Poetry, "in the same way" he believed The Tempest to be Shakespeare's, he added, "i.e. I am attempting something which in a way is absurd, to show in a work of art, the limitations of art." In the concluding lecture of his course at the New School, Auden especially praised Shakespeare for his consciousness of these limitations: "There's something a little irritating in the determination of the very greatest artists, like Dante, Joyce, Milton, to create masterpieces and to think themselves important. To be able to devote one's life to art without forgetting that art is frivolous is a tremendous achievement of personal character. Shakespeare never takes himself too seriously." Neither did Auden, and "The Sea and the Mirror," which he wrote in the shadow of war, is a testament to his own artistic humility.
"The Sea and the Mirror" is one of the most breathtaking poems I know, and it is WH Auden at his brilliant best and at his sweeping brilliance.
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