ogy to recruit new subjects and to shape the way those subjects order the world:
Auden quotes with approval Erikson's extended definition of ideology as, not just consciously held beliefs and convictions, or the propaganda which sustains them, but as an "unconscious tendency underlying religious and scientific as well as political thought: the tendency at a given time to make facts amenable to ideas, and ideas to facts, in order to create a world image convincing enough to support the collective and the individual sense of identity."
The Marxist perspective is strong in Auden's early work, and his disillusionment with Marxism mirrored that of many intellectuals of his age and would also be expressed in his poetry. The Marxist view indeed was only one of several that infused Auden's work, and Auden was never wholeheartedly devoted to it. His seeming dedication to it indeed often seemed forced and false to readers, though there have been some who insisted on seeing his Marxism as central and who try to read the early Auden either as a religious propagandist or as a kind of Grand Duke of Political Poetry in exile, as George T. Wright calls it. For a time, though, Auden did accept the
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