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| Francis Bacon Study from the Human Body 1949 oil on canvas National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne |
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| Nadia Benois Piazza Navona, Rome 1949 oil on canvas Government Art Collection, London |
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| Håkon Bleken Self Portrait 1949 oil on canvas Trondheim Kunstmuseum, Norway |
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| Byron Browne Apocalyptic Image 1949 oil on canvas Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami |
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| Joseph Cornell Cygne Crépusculaire 1949 wood, glass, printed paper, mirror Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Richard Diebenkorn Untitled 1949 oil on canvas North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh |
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| Clarence van Duzer Apartment #10 Looking West 1949 encaustic on canvas Akron Art Museum, Ohio |
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| Philippe Halsman Collette Marchand 1949 gelatin silver print Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami |
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| Carl Robert Holty Bathers 1949 oil on canvas McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas |
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| Edward Hopper High Noon 1949 oil on canvas Dayton Art Institute, Ohio |
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| Alex Katz Lakewood 1949 oil on panel Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine |
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| Fernand Léger Study for The Country Outing 1949 drawing Menil Collection, Houston |
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| George Platt Lynes Oskar Kokoschka 1949 gelatin silver print Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Sidney Nolan Untitled (Landscape) 1949 oil on panel Portland Museum of Art, Maine |
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| Gordon Parks Ingrid Bergman - Stromboli 1949 gelatin silver print Dallas Museum of Art |
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| Harry Sefarbi Interior: Jim 1949 oil on canvas Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia |
from Dichtung und Wahrheit (An Unwritten Poem)
– W.H. Auden (1959)
XVIII
It is easy for a poet to hymn the benevolent deeds of Aphrodite (filling his song with charming pictures like the courtship ritual of the Great Crested Grebe or the curious behavior of the male stickleback, and then all those jolly nymphs and shepherds loving away like mad while empires rise and fall) provided that he thinks of her as directing the lives of creatures (even human beings) in general. But what is her role when it is a matter of love between two people with proper names who speak in the first and second person? When I say I love You, I admit, naturally, that I owe to Aphrodite the general possibility of loving, but that I should love You is, I claim, my decision (or Your command) not hers. Or so, at least, I shall claim when I am happily in love: should I find myself unhappily in love (reason, conscience, my friends warn me that my love threatens my health, pocket and spiritual salvation, nevertheless I remain attached), then I may very well hold Aphrodite responsible and regard myself as her helpless victim. So, when a poet wishes to speak of the role of Aphrodite in a personal relation, he usually sees her as a malevolent Goddess: it is not of happy marriage that she tells, but of tragic and mutually destructive affairs.
XIX
The unhappy lover who commits suicide does not kill himself for love but in spite of it – to prove to Aphrodite that he is still a freeman, capable of a human deed, not her slave, reduced to mere behavior.
XX
Without personal love the act of kind cannot be a deed, but it can be a social event. A poet, commissioned to write an epithalamium, must know the names and social status of the bride and bridegroom before he can decide upon the style of diction and imagery appropriate to the occasion. (Is it for a royal or a rustic wedding?) But he will never ask: – "Are the bride and the bridegroom in love?": for that is irrelevant to a social event. Rumors may reach him that the Prince and Princess cannot bear each other but must marry for dynastic reasons, or that the union of Jack and Jill is really the mating of two herds of cattle, but such gossip will have no influence upon what he writes. That is why it is possible for an epithalamium to be commissioned.