Additional Poems i–ix

Commentary on “The Hero” by W.H. Auden

“…"Not to push" is a singularly unheroic response to an audience acculturated to a Western literary tradition in which the role of the hero is, in the words of Tennyson's Ulysses, "to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. " 2 The Hero's description of "the greatest wonder of the world" as "the bare man Nothing in the Beggar's Bush" is equally opaque, described by the literary critic John Whitehead as "deliberate nonsense, " although possibly an obscure reference to a small village in Wales called Beggar's Bush that Auden spent time in as a young man. 3 Alternatively, Beggar's Bush may be an allusion to an English Renaissance comedic play attributed to the seventeenth-century playwright, John Fletcher (although both authorship and dating of this play are uncertain) in which a usurped king joins a band of beggars and is elected their king.…”

“…The poem, which Auden scholar John Fuller describes as “one of the more interestingly obscure sonnets,” 1 begins with a series of cryptic responses to apparently straightforward questions addressed by a curious public to the titular Hero: “‘What did the Emperor tell you?’ ‘Not to push.’/‘What is the greatest wonder of the world?’ ‘The bare man Nothing in the Beggar’s Bush.’” These responses baffle the reader of the poem and the Hero’s listeners alike. “Not to push” is a singularly unheroic response to an audience acculturated to a Western literary tradition in which the role of the hero is, in the words of Tennyson’s Ulysses , “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” 2 The Hero’s description of “the greatest wonder of the world” as “the bare man Nothing in the Beggar’s Bush” is equally opaque, described by the literary critic John Whitehead as “deliberate nonsense,” although possibly an obscure reference to a small village in Wales called Beggar’s Bush that Auden spent time in as a young man. 3 Alternatively, Beggar’s Bush may be an allusion to an English Renaissance comedic play attributed to the seventeenth-century playwright, John Fletcher (although both authorship and dating of this play are uncertain) in which a usurped king joins a band of beggars and is elected their king.…”