Giving Things Their Proper Names: Carl Linnaeus and W. H. Auden

Abstract

This year we celebrate the 300th anniversary of Carl (Carolus) Linnaeus (1707–1778) whose binomial system has made it unlikely that the names of living things will perish. We also celebrate the 100th anniversary of Wystan Hugh Auden (1907–1973) who gave his time the proper name: The Age of Anxiety (3). An avatar of the 18th century Enlightenment, Linnaeus set the stage for Darwin by recognizing similarities between man and ape: he named our species Homo sapiens. In an age when the word was unspoken, Linnaeus recognized that even plants had sex. He put Sweden on the map of natural science and changed forever the way we label living things. An avatar of the Enlightened Left in the 20th century, Auden brought English poetry into the modern world: he set planes and trains and automobiles to verse. At a time when “In the nightmare of the dark /All the dogs of Europe bark,” while Yeats was chasing the Celtic occult, and T. S. Eliot worried over “Murder in the Cathedral,” Auden addressed Murder in Madrid. And after Guernica and the Hitler war, he retained high hope for a new world of reason, paying our profession a compliment we barely deserve: