Germany invaded Poland, Auden was ‘in one of the dives / On Fifty-Second Street
/ Uncertain and afraid / As the clever hopes expire / Of a low dishonest decade’
(‘September 1, 1939’). A lonely individual, he was to sit in 1961 in a Cadena Café in
Oxford, a Professor of Poetry doing the Daily Telegraph crossword. He died alone in
a hotel room in Vienna in 1973.
Yeats had died in January 1939, and for Auden, as he wrote in his ‘In Memory of
W. B. Yeats’, ‘The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.’ As the mercury sinks
in the oral thermometer, the poet is no longer a noble figure. The brooks are
described as frozen in sympathy, a convention of the pastoral elegy in which a poet
mourns another poet. Equally characteristic of an elegy is to open with a discord, as
the great man ‘disappears’ among those who die in January. His words live on, no
longer his, and his death is ‘kept from his poems’; as the death of a parent is kept
from children. Unlike Yeats, Auden depersonalizes and understates. Part 2 of ‘In
Memory of W. B. Yeats’ charges him with silliness and tells us, famously that poetry
has no effect on the world; which, at the level of wars between countries, is true. But
Part 3, a hymn-like address to the poet, shows that poetry can irrigate the parched
heart of an individual reader. This redeploys the imagery ofThe Waste Landwithin
the classical conventions of the pastoral elegies of Milton, Shelley and Matthew
Arnold; yet all seems contemporary.
Earnest critics thought Auden frivolous, preferring to ‘ruin a fine tenor voice /
For effects that bring down the house’ (‘In Praise of Limestone’). This is to confuse
tone with intent, and ignores the ethical nature of Auden’s fundamental assump-
tions: ‘Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return’, like the urchin in ‘The Shield
of Achilles’, who does not know of a world in which promises are kept, ‘Or one could
weep because another wept.’ This seems grave enough; but Auden did not try to be
gr eat all the time.If poetry is ‘memorable speech’, his unconstraining voice will
survi ve. He wrote a modern poetry for a wider audience, the civilized and the ordi-
nary as well as the avant-garde. Auden was also a stimulating and wide-ranging
critic.His prose is likely to be of lasting interest; this cannot be said of his early plays
or his later libretti for opera.
In 1936, from the heights of T. S. Eliot’s firm, Michael Roberts launched The Faber
Book of Modern Verse (1936),canonizing the ‘modern’ for some decades. It began
with Hopkins, who had died in 1889 (!), Yeats, Pound and Eliot, but omitted
‘Georgians’, even Edward Thomas, and the unsmart Edwin Muir. In the Thirties, a
progressive criterion was applied, selectively. Spender’s ‘I think continually of those
who were truly great’ continues: ‘whose lovely ambition / Was that their lips, still
touched with fire, / Should tell of the Spirit’. This ‘lovely’ aspiration is as literary
and unmodern as the poetry Wilfred Owen wrote before 1917. Without politics,
Spender might have been a neo-Romantic like Dylan Thomas, autobiographical,
emotional, rhetorical: yet Spender is in Roberts’s anthology. Ever since Pound’s
Imagist anthology, ‘little magazine’ poets have tried to overthrow ruling poetic
regimes by the tendentious use of anthologies. Even the literary historian, distrust-
ing the classifications and listening to the poem rather than the hyperbole of public-
ity, cannot quite do without the groups and movements seeking to patent themselves
in an anthology. The only tendency that counts is a tendency to write good poems.
A poet of an unclassifiable kind, who first published in 1936, is Stevie Smith
(1902–1971), with Nove l Written on Yellow Paper. Her always unpredictable thought,
darting at every turn from an apparently naïve candour to gravity to schoolgirl
whimsy, works better in her verse, which became increasingly popular in her later368 13 · FROM POST-WAR TO POST-WAR: 1920–55