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W. H. Auden‘s Criticism on Totalitarianism

W. H. Auden's poetry can be interpreted in terms of Hannah Arendt's political philosophy. Auden directly used Arendt's political action theory in his writings. It is not hard to find crucial political ideas shared by Auden and Arendt and, drawing these ideas, the pages that follow intend to analyze Auden's political poems. It is essential for Auden and Arendt to overcome a totalitarian individual completely conditioned in social needs and to be a free citizen to choose one's reality through spontaneous and communicative political actions. Arendt's politically acting subject is free from inner necessities, and can be applied to seek political solutions free from economic interests such as the green movement, the anti-war movement or the anti-globalization movement. To them, 'the public realm' was crucial to prevent an individual from being instrumental in the historical process and to participate in making one's own history. A free individual meant a citizen as a subject of a political action as seen in Auden's lines "a political duty/nobody else can perform," in "Aubade". In conclusion, citizens transcending private and intimate life have to be political subjects. Auden and Arendt struggled to illuminate the origins of various kinds of totalitarianism and to decentralize or disperse all the power among citizens. Citizens' independent critical thinking and responsible judgement was the door to get out of the consumption-oriented unidentifiable mass. Deconstructing production-oriented goals was their main strategy to reveal and resist instrumentalization of totalitarian collective subjects and undemocratic actions. Their political discussion was goal-constructive and related to freedom.