W. H. Auden's Public Art: From Poetic Reticence to Operatic Performance

W. H. Auden brought the matter of the homoerotic love lyric into a public form in his mid-century operas. This article examines Auden's aevre through the lens of performativity as various attempts to formalize a homoerotic identity. I argue that Auden's Augustan propensities in opera-his sense of opera as a repository of civic art and the high style-are more fully understood against the backdrop of the strategies of the performative love lyric. Reading the civic thematics of Auden's operas as part of an erotic project reveal libretti that implicate sexual with civic politics, thus queering the "high style."