SOURCE: "The Voice of Exile: Auden in 1940," in Sewanee Review, Vol. 90, No. 1, Winter, 1982, pp. 31-52.

In the following essay, Hynes discusses Auden's emigration to the United States, his preoccupation with history and art, and "New Year Letter" as a reflection of Auden's historical sensibility.

What I am going to say here concerns the relations between poetry and history. I intend to deal with Auden as an historical poet—in the sense not of a poet reconstructing the past in the manner of Browning and Pound, but of one who saw human actions as conditioned by history, and history as the necessity that men must recognize if they are to be free; and who wrote his historical understanding into his poems. The focus of my attention will be on the years 1939 and 1940—a point in Auden's career at which his ideas (and his style) changed radically—and on what...