mythology, wrote: ‘But all is changed, that high horse riderless’ (‘Coole Park and
Ballylee, 1931’). It is worth listening to recordings of Yeats, Eliot and Auden reading
their own verse: Yeats intones, Eliot’s echoing voice enunciates precisely, Auden’s
reading is faster, flatter, metrical, ‘unpoetic’.
Auden described a poem as ‘a verbal contraption’, and the poet’s duty as to tell the
truth. He was a virtuoso, writing in any style or form except free verse, and on any
subject. He was as intellectually omnivorous as John Donne, and read geology,
history, psychology, Old and Middle English, Icelandic, Kierkegaard, Niebuhr, musi-
cology. All information and ideas were grist to his mill. In his longest works, the
verse-plays and oratorios in which he worked out his ideas, his sophistication palls.
Like John Dryden, Auden found verse so easy that he used its resistance to help him
to think. He was happier in shorter forms.
Auden put new wine in old bottles. Unlike Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Lawrence, Jones
and early Joyce, he did not believe in a Fall from a previous golden age; he was still
a boy in 1918. Auden was used to the idea that mankind had fallen, himself included.
He masked his anxiety with humour, but his first poems betray it in their ellipses,
private language and electricity. Yet if the phrasing is perverse, the forms are tradi-
tional: ‘Sir, no man’s enemy’ is a prayer, ‘Look, stranger’ an epitaph. An engaging way
into early Auden is his light verse ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, written on a trip with
MacNeice to Iceland, a northern non-Byronic destination. Later, ‘A Thanksgiving’
(1973) listed his poetic mentors: Hardy, Edward Thomas, Frost, Yeats, Graves,
Brecht, Horace, Goethe. As a modern European he eventually found it natural, as the
modernists did not, to write discursively in a connected and completed syntax, and
to use forms which allow the poem to breathe as a social animal. This was true of his
work only after 1939, when he found some emotional and religious security, took his
hand away from his mouth, and spoke more easily to his reader.
His wor k falls into three phases. First there is the pre-war personal lyricist alive to
the ills of the time (‘Look, stranger’, ‘Out on the lawn I lie in bed’, ‘Lullaby’), looking
to psychological or political solutions (‘Spain’). Then, the Christian existentialist and
New York moralist of the middle style (‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, ‘The Shield of
Achilles’). Lastly, the chatty Horatian joker back in Europe (‘Thanksgiving for a
Habitat’).He left England to escape his role as spokesman for the Left. When
NON-MODERNISM:THE TWENTIES AND THIRTIES 367W(ystan) H(ugh) Auden (1907–1973), by Erich
Auerbach, 1961. An older Auden said that his face
looked like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.
Erich Auerbach/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.