Lost Causes: Auden’s “New Year Letter” and the Politics of Tone

Abstract This essay argues that W. H. Auden uses elegiac tropes to reflect on his ambivalent relationship to leftist politics at the start of World War II. The essay makes the case that the long epistolary poem “New Year Letter” is an elegy of sorts—in conversation both with Auden’s shorter (and more famous) elegies from this time and with the German elegiac tradition from Friedrich Schiller to Rainer Maria Rilke. Central to this tradition (and to the essay’s argument) is an understanding of poetic tone. In a broader frame, then, this essay—echoing the contemporary theorist of affect Sianne Ngai—suggests that tone is an especially apt tool for thinking (and feeling) about social and political dilemmas.