Alan Jacobs on Auden’s “Local Culture”

…[A]rt, while it cannot of its own power enforce any alteration of consciousness or morality, can help those who would be joined together to find their desired unity. Artists can never become the legislators of the world, acknowledged or unacknowledged, but they can become after a fashion public servants. Yet even this they can do successfully only if the public they serve is small enough for real commonality of purpose to be possible: art can promote “local understanding” in a miniature civitas but cannot change the world. And this is true not because art is weak, but because, in Auden’s view in 1940, all dreams of universal or even national unity, dreams which he himself had tried for a decade to share in, are fundamentally absurd. Art serves local understanding only because it is the only kind of understanding available.

– Alan Jacobs. What Became of Wystan. University of Arkansas Press, 1998. p. 53.

Auden’s replacement for these great dreams [a universal unity of mankind], his determination to cultivate his garden, may be chastised as a philosophy of cozy, merely domestic ethics. But Auden is quite explicit in his belief that on these grounds, and on these grounds only, can meaningful culture—and moreover, the kind of culture which both safeguards us from as being “driven mad” in the way the Germans were and minimizes the danger of becoming like the Nazis in fighting them—be achieved.

– p. 61