SOURCE: "Auden in Time of War," in Raritan, Vol. 17, No. 2, Fall, 1997, pp. 79-89.

In the following essay, Berger examines the content, structure, and central themes of "In Time of War."

Auden's poetry of the thirties is suffused by a sense of diffuse crisis, or crises—economic, social, military—so there is no clear line of demarcation separating peace and war in his poetry. In fact, there is very little represented peace in the early poems; moments of refuge are always shadowed by the sense of what they defend against. Early on, Auden tries to imagine the role of poetry during revolution, or in a postrevolutionary society. This is the plot of "A Summer Night," written in 1933. By the end of the decade, however, revolution has given way to war and the concept of a social avant-garde seems already to belong to an unrecognizable past. Auden's journeys to the...