. Wystan Hugh Auden
. The permanent Auden

Poets.org - Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, England, in 1907. He moved to Birmingham during childhood and was educated at Christ Church, Oxford. As a young man he was influenced by the poetry of Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost, as well as William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Old English verse. At Oxford his precocity as a poet was immediately apparent, and he formed lifelong friendships with two fellow writers, Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood.

In 1928, his collection Poems was privately printed, but it wasn't until 1930, when another collection titled Poems (though its contents were different) was published, that Auden was established as the leading voice of a new generation.

Ever since, he has been admired for his unsurpassed technical virtuosity and an ability to write poems in nearly every imaginable verse form; the incorporation in his work of popular culture, current events, and vernacular speech; and also for the vast range of his intellect, which drew easily from an extraordinary variety of literatures, art forms, social and political theories, and scientific and technical information. He had a remarkable wit, and often mimicked the writing styles of other poets such as Dickinson, W. B. Yeats, and Henry James. His poetry frequently recounts, literally or metaphorically, a journey or quest, and his travels provided rich material for his verse.

He visited Germany, Iceland, and China, served in the Spanish Civil war, and in 1939 moved to the United States, where he met his lover, Chester Kallman, and became an American citizen. His own beliefs changed radically between his youthful career in England, when he was an ardent advocate of socialism and Freudian psychoanalysis, and his later phase in America, when his central preoccupation became Christianity and the theology of modern Protestant theologians. A prolific writer, Auden was also a noted playwright, librettist, editor, and essayist. Generally considered the greatest English poet of the twentieth century, his work has exerted a major influence on succeeding generations of poets on both sides of the Atlantic.

W. H. Auden was a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1954 to 1973, and divided most of the second half of his life between residences in New York City and Austria. He died in Vienna in 1973.

A Selected Bibliography

Poetry

Poems (privately printed, 1928)
Poems (1930)
The Orators prose and verse (1932)
Look, Stranger! in America: On This Island (1936)
Spain (1937)
Another Time (1940)
The Double Man (1941)
The Quest (1941)
For the Time Being (1944)
The Sea and the Mirror (1944)
Collected Poetry (1945)
The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (1947)
Collected Shorter Poems 1930-1944 (1950)
Nones (1952)
The Shield of Achilles (1955)
Selected Poetry (1956)
The Old Man's Road (1956)
Homage to Clio (1960)
About the House About the House (1965)
Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957 (1966)
Collected Longer Poems (1968)
City without Walls (1969)
Academic Graffiti (1971)
Epistle to a Godson (1972)
Thank You, Fog: Last Poems (1974)
Selected Poems (1979)
Collected Poems (1991)

Prose

Letters from Iceland (1937)
Journey to a War (1939)
Enchaféd Flood (1950)
The Dyer's Hand (1962)
Selected Essays (1964)
Forewords and Afterwords (1973)

Anthology

Selected Poems by Gunnar Ekelöf (1972)

Drama

Paid On Both Sides (1928)
The Dance of Death (1933)
The Dog Beneath the Skin: or, Where is Francis? (1935)
The Ascent of F.6 (1936)
On the Frontier (1938)

Wystan Hugh Auden - Answers

The English-born American poet W. H. Auden (1907-1973) was one of the preeminent poets of the twentieth century. His works center on moral issues and evidence strong political, social, and psychological orientations.

In the 1930s W. H. Auden became famous when he was described by literary journalists as the leader of the so-called "Oxford Group," a circle of young English poets influenced by literary Modernism, in particular by the aesthetic principles espoused by T. S. Eliot. Rejecting the traditional poetic forms favored by their Victorian predecessors, the Modernist poets favored concrete imagery and free verse. In his work, Auden applied conceptual and scientific knowledge to traditional verse forms and metrical patterns while assimilating the industrial countryside of his youth.

Wystan Hugh Auden was born on February 21, 1907, in York, England. His father was the medical officer of the city of Birmingham and a psychologist. His mother was a devout Anglican, and the combination of religious and scientific or analytic themes are implicit throughout Auden's work. He was educated at St. Edmund's preparatory school, where he met Christopher Isherwood, who later gained a wide reputation as a novelist. At Oxford University, fellow undergraduates were Cecil Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender, who, with Auden, formed the collective variously labeled the Oxford Group or the "Auden Generation."

At school Auden was interested in science, and at Oxford, where he studied English, his chief interest was Anglo-Saxon. He disliked the Romantic poets Shelley and Keats, whom he was inclined to refer to as "Kelly and Sheets." This break with the English post-Romantic tradition was important for his contemporaries. It is perhaps still more important that Auden was the first poet in English to use the imagery (and sometimes the terminology) of clinical psychoanalysis.

Early Travels and Publications

A small volume of his poems was privately printed by Stephen Spender in 1928, while Auden was still an undergraduate. Poems was published a year later by Faber and Faber (of which T. S. Eliot was a director). The Orators (1932), a volume consisting of odes, parodies of school speeches and sermons, and the strange, almost surreal "Journal of an Airman" provided a barrage of satire against England, "this country of ours where no one is well." It set the mood for a generation of public school boys who were in revolt against the empire of England and fox hunting.

When he had completed school, Auden traveled in Germany. In 1937 he went with MacNeice to Iceland and in 1938 with Isherwood to China. Literary results of these journeys were Letters from Iceland (1937) and Journey to aWar (1939), the first written with MacNeice and the second with Isherwood. Auden also wrote several plays in collaboration, notably 1935's The Dog beneath the Skin (another satire on England) and The Ascent of F 6 (1931). More than a decade later Auden again worked in collaboration - this time with Chester Kallmann on the librettos for several operas, of which the most important was Igor Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress (1951).

In 1939 Auden took up residence in the United States, supporting himself by teaching at various universities. In 1946 he became a U.S. citizen, by which time his literary career had become a series of well-recognized successes. He received the Pulitzer Prize and Bollingen Award and enjoyed his standing as one of the most distinguished poets of his generation. From 1956 to 1961 he was professor of poetry at Oxford University. In his inaugural address, "Making Knowing and Judging," he explored ideas about his vocation as a poet.

Poetic Themes and Techniques

Auden's early poetry, influenced by his interest in the Anglo-Saxon language as well as in psychoanalysis, was sometimes riddle-like, sometimes jargonish and clinical. It also contained private references inaccessible to most readers. At the same time it had a clouded mysteriousness that would disappear in his later poetry. In the 1930s his poetry ceased to be mystifying; still dealing with difficult ideas, however, it could at times remain abstruse. His underlying preoccupation was a search for interpretive systems of analytic thinking and faith. Clues to the earlier poetry are to be found in the writings of Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx. In the later poems (after "New Year Letter," in which he turns to Christianity), some clues can be traced in the works of SÓren Kierkegaard, Reinhold Niebuhr, and other theologians.

Among Auden's highly regarded attributes was the ability to think symbolically and rationally at the same time, so that intellectual ideas weretransformed into a uniquely personal, idiosyncratic, often witty imagistic idiom. He concretized ideas through creatures of his imagining for whom the reader could often feel affection while appreciating the austere outline of the ideas themselves. He nearly always used language that is interesting in texture as well as brilliant verbally. He employed a great variety of intricate and extremely difficult technical forms. Throughout his career he often wrote pure lyrics of grave beauty, such as "Lay Your Sleeping Head, My Love" and "Look Stranger."

Often Auden's poetry may seem a rather marginal criticism of life and society written from the sidelines. Yet sometimes it moves to the center of the time in history in which he and his contemporaries lived. In "The Shield of Achilles" he recreated the anguish of the modern world of totalitarian societies in a poem which holds one particular time in a mirror for all times. Auden was learned and intelligent, a virtuoso of form and technique. In his poetry he realized a lifelong search for a philosophical and religious position from which to analyze and comprehend the individual life in relation to society and to the human condition in general. He was able to express his scorn for authoritarian bureaucracy, his suspicion of depersonalized science, and his belief in a Christian God.

Later Works

In his final years, Auden wrote the volumes City without Walls, and Many Other Poems, (1969), Epistle to a Godson, and Other Poems (1972), and the posthumously published Thank You, Fog: Last Poems (1974). All three works are noted for their lexical range and humanitarian content. Auden's penchant for altering and discarding poems has prompted publication of several anthologies in the decades since his death, September 28, 1973, in Vienna, Austria. The multi-volume Complete Works of W. H. Auden was published in 1989.

Further Reading

Criticism and interpretation of Auden's works may be found in such studies as Stan Smith, W. H. Auden (1997), R. P. T. Davenport-Hines, Auden (1995), Anthony Hecht, The Hidden Law: the Poetry of W. H. Auden (1993), Allan Edwin Rodway, A Preface to Auden (1984), Edward Callan, Auden: A Carnival of Intellect (1983), Humphrey Carpenter, W. H. Auden: A Biography (1981), and Charles Osborne, W. H. Auden: The Life of a Poet (1979). In addition, Auden figures prominently in the autobiographies of some of his contemporaries. See, for example, Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise (1938; rev. ed. 1948), Christopher Isherwood, Lions and Shadows: An Education in the Twenties (1938), and Stephen Spender, World within a World (1951). The Oxford Group is examined in Michael O'Neill, Auden, MacNeice, Spender: The Thirties Poetry (1992).

The permanent Auden - Roger Kimball - The New Criterion

“It’s such a pity Wystan never grows up.”
—W. H. Auden, Letter to Lord Byron

“I shall only ask you to apply to the work of the deceased a very simple test. How many of his lines can you remember?”
—W. H. Auden, “The Public v. the Late Mr. W. B. Yeats”

In June 1994, shortly before Princeton University Press brought out its edition of W. H. Auden’s juvenilia, The New Criterion published a handful of those apprentice poems from the mid-to-late 1920s. While working on a brief introduction to accompany the selection, I happened to have a conversation with a visiting English critic whose work I admire. I told him I was writing something about Auden’s juvenilia. Without missing a beat he said, “It’s all juvenilia, isn’t it?”

I joined him in a laugh. But his comment did take me aback. W. H. Auden, perhaps the most accomplished poetic craftsman since Yeats—the man who once claimed to have written poems exemplifying every form discussed in George Saintsbury’s History of English Prosody (three volumes)—a lifelong purveyor of juvenilia? Surely not. Auden was one of the most urbane and insightful essayists of the twentieth century. That much is indisputable. But his poetic stature?

There seem to be two main schools of thought. No one denies the prodigious skill, the cleverness, the wide if quirky erudition on display in Auden’s poetry. And very few would deny the strength of many—well, anyway several—poems published between 1930, when his first volume appeared, and around 1940, the year after he emigrated (his enemies said “fled”) to the United States. These were the years of most of Auden’s anthology pieces: “The Secret Agent,” “Lullaby,” “As I Walked Out One Evening,” “Musée des Beaux Arts,” “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” “September 1, 1939,” “In Memory of Sigmund Freud,” and one or two others. Opinion has long been divided about Auden’s later work, especially his work after 1945. And since 1973, when Auden died at the age of sixty-six, opinion has also been increasingly divided about the larger question of what his poetic achievement really adds up to. Does it rival or even surpass that of Yeats or Eliot, say? Or has the discipline of posterity made it seem less capacious, less vital, less necessary?

Auden’s champions include many distinguished and articulate figures: poets like Joseph Brodsky, Richard Wilbur, and John Fuller, whose recent reference work, W. H. Auden: A Commentary,1 is a meticulous labor of love and scholarship. A much-expanded and revised version of his 1970 Reader’s Guide to Auden’s poems, the new Commentary attempts “to say something useful about every original poem, play, or libretto of his written in English that has so far reached print (with the exception of most of the juvenilia . . . ).” Among Auden’s other commentators, the palm must go to Edward Mendelson, the poet’s literary executor, chief editor, bibliographer, and most devoted critic. In Early Auden (1981), Professor Mendelson distinguished between the traditions of “civil poetry” and “vatic poetry,” locating Auden firmly in the former. “He had no wish to achieve an imaginative triumph over common reality,” Professor Mendelson wrote in his introduction. “His poems were not visionary autonomous objects, exempt from the practical and ethical standards appropriate to all other human works. They were made to be judged both for their art and their truth.” What Auden wanted, Professor Mendelson wrote later in the book, was “poetry that reflected the formal and linguistic lessons of modernism yet could still serve the public good. The art he wished to create was intent less on autonomy and stasis than on enlightenment and action.”

Early Auden followed its subject’s career through the eve of his emigration to the United States, in January 1939, with his friend, sometime lover, and occasional collaborator Christopher Isherwood. Later Auden2 picks up the story from there, providing a history and interpretation of Auden’s work from 1939 through his death in 1973.

Later Auden is a scrupulous and inviting piece of literary-critical scholarship, crisply written and full of the quiet authority that comes with intimate mastery of a subject. Indeed, I doubt whether anyone can claim greater mastery of the Auden corpus than Professor Mendelson. He began with a doctoral dissertation on Auden. In 1970, when Auden was thinking about putting together a collection of his book reviews and review essays, he found he was unable to remember exactly what he’d written or where. But Professor Mendelson, who had met Auden while working on his thesis, had amassed photocopies of virtually everything. Auden—who was spectacularly disorganized himself—was duly impressed by this display of order (and doubtless by the homage it implied) and entrusted the selection of the volume that became Forewords and Afterwords (1973) to him. In 1972, Professor Mendelson was appointed Auden’s literary executor (joining William Meredith and Monroe K. Spears), and he has devoted himself to Audeniana ever since. In addition to his critical studies, he is a founding member of the Auden Society. He has also edited almost all of Auden’s posthumous works:3 the last collection of poems, entitled Thank You, Fog (1974), Collected Poems (1976), The English Auden: Poems, Essays, and Dramatic Writings 1927–1939 (1977), and the ongoing Complete Works of W. H. Auden of which three volumes (plays, libretti, and prose to 1938) have thus far appeared from Princeton University Press. All of which is to say that there is precious little about Auden’s work that Professor Mendelson doesn’t know.

Although it is half again as long as its predecessor, Later Auden does not come with the same kind of interpretative scaffolding. In Early Auden, by arguing for the merits of what he called the “civil tradition” of poetry, Professor Mendelson challenged the prevailing critical climate that gave precedence to the Romantic-Modernist tradition with its emphasis on the isolated individual and the autonomy of the work of art. His detailed discussion of Auden’s early development was at the same time a brief for the view of poetry—and by implication, the view of society and man’s place in it—that Auden came to represent. At bottom, it is an eighteenth-century view, according to which the purpose of art is to delight and instruct.

In Later Auden, such larger arguments are more implicit than explicit. In his introduction, Professor Mendelson lays out various oppositions—between myth and parable, between “the Ariel-dominated poet and the Prospero-dominated poet,” between the poem as “verbal contraption” (Auden’s phrase) and moral artifact—with which Auden’s poetry contended. But the text proper is a tightly focused, sometimes almost abrupt, tour of Auden’s work from the elegy for Yeats, which was written a few weeks after he arrived in New York, to the “concluding carnival” of his last, chatty poems. As in his earlier volume, Professor Mendelson quietly punctuates his critical narrative with aptly chosen biographical details. While no substitute for a full-fledged biography, this procedure does provide readers with a kind of precis of Auden’s movements, activities, and infatuations. Those interested in a fuller account of Auden’s life may consult the excellent biography by Humphrey Carpenter (Houghton Mifflin, 1981) and the briefer, more thematic life by Richard Davenport-Hines (Pantheon, 1995).

Early Auden argued for Auden’s surpassing greatness (“the most inclusive poet of the twentieth century, its most technically skilled, and its most truthful”); Later Auden assumes it. It is revisionist in that it places Auden’s later work on a par with, or even ahead of, his early work. Professor Mendelson is far from uncritical; about some poems from the early Forties, for example, he writes that “the contemplative saints briefly but disastrously took over much of his work, and they ruined every poem they touched.” But such local criticisms occur in the context of presumed greatness. They tend to underscore the boldness of Professor Mendelson’s arresting claim that “much of [Auden’s] most profound and personal work was written in the last fifteen years of his life,” that is from 1958 on. “Personal” of course it may be; any doodle might be personal. And in fact Auden, who famously declared that he did not want a biography written about him, often noted that his poems were full of coded autobiographical references. “For a poet like myself,” he wrote, “an autobiography would be redundant since anything of importance that happens to one is immediately incorporated, however obscurely, in a poem.” The task of identifying such references has kept scholars busy for years and is one of the things that makes John Fuller’s Commentary so valuable. Among other things, he is almost always able to provide the relevant biographical correlative: “Auden wrote this poem while staying at the new Pennsylvania home of Caroline Newman, his patron,” “Auden spent the night of 19 January in Paris, en route with Isherwood for Marseilles,” “The circumstances of this early poem to [his lover, Chester] Kallman are,” etc.

But by “profound” Professor Mendelson means artistically significant: not only technically accomplished but also (given Auden’s understanding of art) morally wise and aesthetically compelling. Professor Mendelson argues this case passionately and intelligently; whether he argues it convincingly is another matter. There are many ways in which one can trace Auden’s poetic development. The road from existential bafflement to religious affirmation charts one course (in 1940, at the age of thirty-three, Auden began “in a tentative and experimental way” to return to the Anglo-Catholic faith of his youth). The movement from lyric isolation to deliberate didacticism marks another. A third path has to do with what we might call diminishing poetic tautness. I do not mean a loss of prosodic virtuosity. Auden’s astonishing technical mastery never left him; if anything, he became more facile with age. His stupendous example helped make us more aware of the ways in which technical facility can be the precondition of poetic achievement. It may also have encouraged us to neglect the fact that technique, uncatalyzed by sensibility and subject matter, can be the enemy of poetic achievement. In any event, for Auden technical fluency sometimes resulted in poetry that seemed to proceed on verbal autopilot.

Auden often remarked on his fondness for the Oxford English Dictionary. In later life, it provided some of his favorite reading matter and indeed was the source of many of the lexical curiosities that—increasingly—bedizened his poetry. Humphrey Carpenter notes that the most prominent object in the workroom of Auden’s house in Kirchstetten, Austria (where he summered from 1958 to the end of his life), was the OED. The set, Carpenter writes, would always be “missing one volume, which was downstairs, Auden invariably using it as a cushion to sit on when at table—as if (a friend observed) he were a child not quite big enough for the nursery furniture.” Auden’s raids on the lexicon resulted in some bewildering rarities. In a review of Epistle to a Godson (1972), one critic lists “blouts, pirries, stolchy, glunch, sloomy, snudge, snoachy, scaddle, cagmag, hoasting, drumbles,” among others. How many do you know? How many were chosen because the poet felt he had stumbled upon the one absolutely right word for the thought or feeling he was trying to express? How many did he adopt because he happened to pick them up from yesterday’s trip through the dictionary and they filled a metrical hole? Auden regularly described poetry as a verbal puzzle, akin to a crossword. Well, it is and it isn’t. Not all poems are verbal puzzles—not even all good ones—and it should go without saying that not all verbal puzzles are poems. These are distinctions that some of Auden’s later poetry elides.

In 1936, Auden said that “the first, second and third thing in . . . art is subject. Technique follows from and is governed by subject.” Possibly he later changed his mind; he certainly changed his practice. Auden’s love of complicated verse forms and unusual words was doubtless partly an expression of a poet’s delight in the resources of language and his ability to manipulate it skillfully. It may also have been an attempt to compensate for the diminishing tautness I mentioned: an effort to inject arbitrary verbal complexity to distract readers—and even, perhaps, himself—from the lack of genuine poetic density that characterizes so many of his later poems. In this regard, it seems significant that the word “cosy” came to loom large in Auden’s vocabulary in later years.

These features of Auden’s poetry have not gone unremarked. Already in 1940, reviewing Another Time, Randall Jarrell complained that, unlike Auden’s early “oracular” verse, the present poems seemed “moral, rational, manufactured, written by the top of the head for the top of the head.” Although he was full of generalized compliments about Auden’s talent, Jarrell also wrote that “the poems say often now, ‘Be good.’ They ascend through moral abstractions, gnomic chestnuts, to a vaguish humanitarian mysticism.” And this was only 1940. By 1955, when he reviewed The Shield of Achilles, Jarrell was resorting to sarcasm: “non-Euclidean needlepoint, a man sitting on a chaise longue juggling four cups, four saucers, four sugar lumps, and the round-square: this is what great and good poets do when they don’t bother even to try to write great and good poems.”

One of the most devastating reflections on Auden’s development—or decline—was Philip Larkin’s review of Homage to Clio in 1960. Entitled “What’s become of Wystan?” (a play on Anthony Powell’s novel What’s Become of Waring), Larkin begins by praising Auden’s pre-1940 poetry and proceeds to describe his later verse as “too verbose to be memorable and too intellectual to be moving.” Larkin readily acknowledges Auden’s large ambition and poetic virtues—“the wide-angled rhetoric, the seamless lyricism, the sudden gripping dramatisations”—but he insists that “almost all we value is still confined to the first ten years” of his career. Auden, he wrote, had “become a reader rather than a writer” with the result that his poetry suffered a “loss of vividness” and “a certain abstract windiness.” The “rambling intellectual stew of ‘New Year Letter,’ ” Larkin wrote, “was hardly more than a vamp-till-ready.” The poems in Homage to Clio were “agreeable and ingenious” but their “poetic pressure is not high.” Too often, he mused, readers find “a wilful jumble of Age-of-Plastic nursery rhyme, ballet folk-lore, and Hollywood Lemprière served up with a lisping archness that sets the teeth on edge.” As an example, Larkin quotes this bit from “Plains” (1953), part of Auden’s sequence Bucolics:

Romance? Not in this weather. Ovid’s charmer
Who leads in quadrilles in Arcady, boy-lord Of hearts who can call their Yes and No their own.
Would, madcap that he is, soon die of cold or sunstroke: Their lives are in firmer hands; that old grim She
Who makes the blind dates for the hatless genera Creates their country matters.

Tough as Larkin’s review was, it exhibited disappointment as much as hostility. It was with sadness, not malice, that Larkin concluded that Auden, “never a pompous poet, has now become an unserious one” who “no longer touches our imaginations.” It speaks extremely well of Auden that, a few months after this review appeared, he wrote about Larkin’s first book The Less Deceived and, as Professor Mendelson notes, “praised it without reservation.”

The tweeness that Larkin discerned in Auden’s verse was always a temptation for Auden; it was a temptation he gave into more and more as the years went by. Hence the increasing levity and campiness of Auden’s poetry. This was something that Christopher Ricks registered with deadly precision in his review of About the House (1965). Professor Ricks begins by describing the “disarming” quality that much of Auden’s poetry displays; he then goes on to note that it is “harder to pinpoint the moment at which such a word has to be said accusingly rather than thankfully.” Consider, for example, the prominence of the word “silly” in Auden’s poetic vocabulary (e.g., from the elegy on Yeats: “You were silly like us.”) As Professor Ricks points out, Auden doubtless expected his readers to recall the etymology of “silly” (“blessed,” “fortunate”), but the line depends mostly on the word’s deflationary effect: a confidential, homey effect that can easily be overplayed. Increasingly, Auden did overplay it. Consider the lines that Professor Ricks quotes from “Grub First, Then Ethics” (1958):

surely those in whose creed
God is edible may call a fine
omelette a Christian deed.

At best, this is silly in the modern sense: “showing a lack of good sense,” “frivolous.” The fact that Auden wrote not to ridicule but out of professed commitment to Christian doctrine makes the poem in even more questionable taste.

Taste is the lodestar of art, the inner principle that accounts for the decorum of the appropriately said. Increasingly, Auden’s faculty of taste functioned accurately only in a risible or mocking mode. Given the right subject and the right form, he could be very funny. He was, for example, a master of the clerihew: “No one could ever inveigle/ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel/ Into offering the slightest apology/ For his Phenomenology.” Or: “Mallarmé /Had too much to say: / He could never quite/ Leave the paper white.” But he had difficulty purging his poetry of that superciliousness. As Professor Ricks points out, this shows itself with lamentable consequences in his habit of irregular capitalization: “A Major Prophet taken Short,” “a Perfect social Number,” etc. The effect is unsettling, and ultimately unserious. Exactly how, Professor Ricks asks, does it differ from A. A. Milne’s procedure with Winnie the Pooh: “A Good Hum, such as is Hummed Hopefully to Others”?

This family of criticisms is broached even by some of Auden’s most stalwart admirers. In the 1940s and 1950s, Edmund Wilson became a staunch booster of Auden. He concluded his long tribute, “W. H. Auden in America” (1956), by describing him as “a great English poet who is also . . . one of the great English men of the world.” Nearly twenty years earlier, however, Wilson put his finger on another dimension of Auden’s sensibility: “W. H. Auden has presented the curious spectacle of a poet with an original language . . . whose development has seemed to be arrested at the mentality of an adolescent schoolboy.” There is no doubt that Auden’s poetry developed; the question is whether it can really be said to have matured. The quality that, in their different ways, Wilson, Jarrell, Larkin, and Ricks dilate on has to do with a precociousness that never outgrew itself. In later years, Auden took to referring to himself as “mother,” especially in relation to the monumentally irresponsible Chester Kallman. (Although they were lovers only briefly, Auden supported Kallman for the rest of his life and the two periodically lived together.) More telling and finally more appropriate was the nickname Auden acquired at Oxford: “The Child.” The coyness and prolixity that characterize Auden’s later poetry are emblematic of what happens when the desire for perpetual adolescence fails to outgrow itself: it becomes seedy. It is shocking, as one looks back over Auden’s poetic oeuvre, to note how early the seediness set in.

Auden memorably defined poetry as “memorable speech.” How well does his own poetry do by this criterion? Auden certainly said and wrote some memorable things. His comment that Rilke was “the greatest lesbian poet since Sappho” may be described as unforgettable. Likewise his comment that his face, which in later years was ravaged by the thick furrows of Touraine-Solents-Gole syndrome, was “like a wedding cake left out in the rain.” The widely memorable lines from his poetry are almost exclusively from poems written, as Larkin observed, from the first decade of his career. They also tend to be fragmentary: a line here, two or three lines there. “Lay your sleeping head my love/ Human on my faithless arm” from “Lullaby” (1937); “About suffering they were never wrong,/ The Old Masters” from “Musée des Beaux Arts” (1938); “In the prison of his days/ Teach the free man how to praise” from the Yeats elegy (1939), which also appears as the epitaph on Auden’s memorial stone in Westminster Abbey; “sad is Eros, builder of cities,/ And weeping anarchic Aphrodite” from the elegy for Freud (1939).

It is ironical that what is probably Auden’s single most famous poem, “September 1, 1939,” was one that he disavowed and even, as he put in 1957, came to “loathe.” Nevertheless, the poem contains some of Auden’s most memorable poetry, from the ominous opening lines,

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-Second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade

to the famous end of the eighth stanza: “We must love one another or die.” As Professor Mendelson points out, “this line was more widely quoted and admired than perhaps anything else” in Auden’s work. E. M. Forster said that because Auden had written it, “he can command me to follow him.” Which doubtless tells us a lot about Forster.

In any event, Auden soon had misgivings about the poem. In 1944, he abandoned the celebrated eighth stanza partly because he believed that in the context of the poem (“Hunger allows no choice/ To the citizen or the police”) the line about love reduced what should be a voluntary act to an instinctual drive like hunger. In 1964, Auden’s dislike of the poem hardened into revulsion when an advertising consultant for Lyndon Johnson misappropriated the line in an infamous campaign commercial. As Richard Davenport-Hines reports in his biography, the commercial featured a little girl counting the petals of a flower; suddenly, she is interrupted by a stern male voice counting down from ten to zero, at which point the girl is replaced by the flash of an explosion and a mushroom cloud. Then Johnson’s voice intoned: “These are the stakes: to make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or go into the dark. We must love each other or we must die.” Auden bitterly responded, “I pray to God that I shall never be memorable like that again.” When he prepared his Collected Shorter Poems for publication the following year, he omitted the poem and later gave instructions that it was not to be reprinted in his lifetime.

Most readers will be able to cite a few other lines or poems—“At the Grave of Henry James” (1941), for example, with the beginning of its stern last stanza: “All will be judged.” But after around 1940, most readers will find that the gems are fewer and farther between. It is sad that among Auden’s later poems, one of the most memorable is the last verse he ever wrote, an often-reproduced haiku:

He still loves life
but O O O O how he wishes
the Good Lord would take him.

(As Professor Mendelson points out, the “O”s need to be elided to keep the haiku to the requisite seventeen syllables; but should they be read as three syllables, as he says, or two, as I suspect?) In the end, Auden’s poetry has produced relatively faint echoes. He was a remarkable mimic; he did marvelous impersonations of seriousness; but his continual worries about the authenticity of his poems show that even in his own mind he did not transcend impersonation. In comparison, say, to the poetry of T. S. Eliot, Auden’s poetry lacks density. His example has meant a great deal to several poets who came after him; his techniques are preserved in the practice of some of the best. But Auden’s poetry has left indifferent traces on the sensibility of our epoch. It is accomplished, not ineluctable. Reverberations from “Prufrock,” The Wasteland, “Gerontion,” and The Four Quartets are everywhere: the meter and the matter of those poems are part of the poetic metabolism of the age. Auden wrote nothing that has entered our pulses so thoroughly.

The permanent Auden is found elsewhere, above all in the scintillating and companionable essays of The Dyer’s Hand (1962), Forewords and Afterwords, and some of his lectures, especially The Enchafèd Flood (1949) and parts of Secondary Worlds (1968). He was always penetrating on literary subjects. His essay on Trollope in Forewords and Afterwords is a masterpiece. So is his essay on Shakespeare’s sonnets. As in the scenario he described in “Musée des Beaux Arts,” his essays hail the triumph and consolation of the ordinary in the face of the extraordinary. In the poem, “the expensive delicate ship” saw “something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,” but it had somewhere to go and “sailed calmly on.” One of Auden’s most salutary services was to remind us of the importance of sailing calmly on.

Auden wrote often and well about the contradictory desire to find in art both an escape from and a revelation of reality. In an essay on Robert Frost, he observed that

we want a poem to be beautiful, that is to say, a verbal earthly paradise, a timeless world of pure play, which gives us delight precisely because of its contrast to our historical existence with all its insoluble problems and inescapable suffering; at the same time we want a poem to be true, that is to say, to provide us with some kind of revelation about our life which will show us what life is really like and free us from self-enchantment and deception, and a poet cannot bring us any truth without introducing into his poetry the problematic, the painful, the disorderly, the ugly.

Auden was especially effective in his admonitory mode, warning about the hubris of art absolutized. In a prose passage of “The Sea and the Mirror” (1944), a character observes that “if the intrusion of the real has disoncerted and incommoded the poetic, that is a mere bagatelle compared to the damage which the poetic would inflict if it ever succeeded in intruding upon the real.” This admonition is a leitmotif in Auden’s work. “Poetry,” he wrote in The Dyer’s Hand, “is not magic. In so far as poetry, or any other of the arts, can be said to have an ulterior purpose, it is, by telling the truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate.” Later on in that volume, he expands on this thought. The effect of formal beauty, he writes, is “evil to the degree that beauty is taken, not as analogous to, but identical with goodness, so that the artist regards himself or is regarded by others as God, the pleasure of beauty being taken for the joy of Paradise, and the conclusion drawn that, since all is well in the work of art, all is well in history.” And again: “Orpheus who moved stones is the archetype, not of the poet, but of Goebbels.” Poetry, Auden said in the elegy for Yeats, “makes nothing happen.” Many of his essays expatiate on the mischief of trying to have it otherwise.

Auden’s essays are rich and endlessly rewarding. Yet in them, too, there is a large element of impersonation. In “Reading,” the opening essay of The Dyer’s Hand, Auden remarks that “in literature, as in life, affectation, passionately adopted and loyally persevered in, is one of the chief forms of self-discipline by which mankind has raised itself by its own bootstraps.” This is undoubtedly true, though not necessarily reassuring. It is also true, as Auden remarks a few pages later, that “some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.” Authenticity and affectation are not opposites, exactly, but if they can co-exist, they must do so uneasily. Auden never really resolved such tensions; he exploited them. The beguiling urbanity of Auden’s essays depends partly on his native brilliance and erudition, partly on what we might call his air of easygoing religious seriousness. He never simply reviewed a book, he made it part of an existential project. He managed to do this whether he was writing about Kierkegaard, migraines, or M. F. K. Fisher’s The Art of Eating.

Auden was fond of quoting Yeats’s line about being forced to choose between perfection of the life and perfection of the work. He early on chose the latter. “Charade” is too strong a word. But there is a startling disjunction in Auden between the avuncular moralist who has such remarkable things to say about art, pride, sin, self-deception, etc., and the disheveled, lickerish narcissist who habitually besotted himself with horrifying quantities of alcohol, benzedrine, and some fifteen-thousand cigarettes yearly, who talked about being “married” to the disreputable Chester Kallman and then diverted himself with a steady procession of call-boys. George Orwell retracted his description of Auden as “a sort of gutless Kipling,” but not, I believe, his comment from 1940 (soon after Auden absented himself from the perils of war-threatened England) that “Mr. Auden’s brand of amoralism is only possible if you are the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled.” Auden later wrote to the British embassy offering to do “anything when and if the Government ask me,” but he oughtn’t have been surprised to find his offer rebuffed. Auden mounted a campaign against an overly aestheticized view of the world, but he did so while remaining within the orbit of aestheticism. His anguish was no doubt genuine, but his solution always had something of a performance about it. This is not to say that it lacked pathos. In a sermon he delivered in Westminster Abbey in 1966, Auden poignantly observed that .

those of us who have the nerve to call ourselves Christians will do well to be extremely reticent on the subject. Indeed, it is almost the definition of a Christian that he is somebody who knows he isn’t one, either in faith or morals. Where faith is concerned, very few of us have the right to say more than—to vary a saying of Simone Weil’s—“I believe in a God who is like the True God in everything except that he does not exist, for I have not yet reached the point where God exists.” As for loving and forgiving our enemies, the less we say about that the better. Our lack of faith and love are facts we have to acknowledge, but we shall not improve either by a morbid and essentially narcissistic moaning over our deficiencies. Let us rather ask, with caution and humour—given our time and place and talents, what, if our faith and love were perfect, would we be glad to find it obvious to do?

Referring to Christianity, G. K. Chesterton once said that anything worth doing is worth doing badly. It is a witty statement, partly true. But only partly. In both his art and his life, W. H. Auden leaned heavily on the resources of the subjunctive, even as he entertained his readers with dreams of indicative truth. When he was eight years old, his mother taught him the love duet from Tristan.. Auden played Isolde. It is not clear that he ever ceased giving that performance.

Notes

1. W. H. Auden: A Commentary, by John Fuller; Princeton University Press, 640 pages, $35. Go back to text.
2. Later Auden, by Edward Mendelson; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 570 pages, $30. Go back to text.
3. An exception is the aforementioned Juvenilia: Poems, 1922–1928, edited by Katherine Bucknell (Princeton University Press, 1994). Go back to text.