Queering the City of God: W. H. Auden’s Later Poetry and the Ethics of Friendship.

Abstract

Scholars have for the most part kept quiet about the intersection of queerness and Christianity in the poetry of W. H. Auden, a gay British modernist poet who immigrated to America just before the outbreak of World War II and converted to Christianity shortly thereafter. Queering the City of God brings to light the queer commitments of Auden’s Christian poetry. His post-conversion oeuvre, which spans the early 1940s to the early 1970s, unfolded in the midst of two international crises: World War II and the Cold War. Fittingly, questions like, “What would a just society really look like?” and, “What role should art play in resisting a destructive political regime?” dominate his later work. He gives decidedly queer theo-ethical answers, interpreting his own participation in queer networks of friends through the lens of the Christian faith to construct gay subjectivity as an anti-imperialist prophetic vocation. These theo-ethical apologies for friendship give us purchase on several current issues in queer theory. Queering the City of God argues that (1) the pre-Stonewall perspective of Auden’s oeuvre provides a resource for thinking politically and ethically outside the strictures of gay pride. (2) Since Auden’s relationship with psychoanalysis cooled after he converted, his later poetry provides a resource for talking about gay subjectivity without using the pathologizing concepts of psychology. (3) And Auden’s later poetry, the labor of a gay Christian polymath, has much to offer current debates in academic theology about nature, grace, religious epistemology, and how to do ethics.