“At the beginning of the 21st century,” Edward Mendelson writes in his entry on W. H. Auden in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, “many readers thought it not implausible to judge his work the greatest body of poetry in English of the previous hundred years or more.” Even allowing for a literary executor’s special pleading, this is an extravagant claim: Auden’s poetry is full of good things, but it is also full of bad things. And the latter are usually the result of bad rhetoric. That Auden regarded “September 1, 1939,” for example, as “infected with an incurable dishonesty” says something for the probity of his criticism. If he was capable of writing nonsense, he was also capable of owning up to writing nonsense.
Some of the bad rhetoric that marred Auden’s work can be blamed on his left-wing politics.Valentine Cunningham’s British Writers of the Thirties (1988) brilliantly supplies the cultural and historical context for those politics. Yet Auden also acquired his rhetorical excesses from William Butler Yeats, whose public persona he initially tried to emulate. One of the virtues of this mammoth, six-volume edition of Auden’s prose, which covers his essays and reviews from 1926 until his death in 1973, is that it shows how the poet gradually renounced the public stage for a more self-effacing, meditative, private life, especially after settling in America in 1939 at the age of 32.
“When the ship catches fire,” he wrote in a piece on Rilke, “it seems only natural to rush importantly to the pumps, but perhaps one is only adding to the general confusion and panic: to sit still and pray seems selfish and unheroic, but it may be the wisest and most helpful course.” Later, speaking with the Paris Review in 1972, he insisted that “a poet, qua poet, has only one political duty, namely, in his own writing to set an example of the correct use of his mother tongue which is always being corrupted.”
How Auden regarded this duty can be seen in his moving eulogy for his friend Louis MacNeice, “The Cave of Making” (1964), in which he celebrated the demands of the art to which he devoted his life.
One can agree or disagree with the charge brought by Philip Larkin that Auden’s intellectual interests stultified his poetry, but one cannot maintain that the essays in which he pursued those interests are stultifying. They exude zest. There may be much about the writing of Auden’s generation that is meretricious. Evelyn Waugh was unsparing about Stephen Spender—”To see him fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a Sèvres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee”—yet Auden wrote a sprightly, elegant, witty prose. And if his reviewing paid the bills, it also helped to shape his protean poetry. The relationship between the state and the individual, history and human suffering, cultural vitality and cultural decay, talent and the snares that entrammel talent—these are the constant preoccupations of his poetry, and they are abundantly explored in these well-annotated volumes.
Since Auden only published two essay collections, The Dyer’s Hand (1962) and Forewords and Afterwords (1973), there is much uncollected and unpublished work gathered here, and together with the previously published pieces, they reveal a good deal about the poet’s inner life. In 1964, for instance, in a review of autobiographies by Waugh and Leonard Woolf, he wrote something of an autobiography of his own in which he gave expression not so much to family or personal history as to the exile’s inexorable loneliness. Writing about other artists beguiled his sense of aloneness.
The range of Auden’s subjects is staggering: Goethe, Gogol, Hardy, James, Stravinsky, Mozart, Tennyson, Sainte-Beuve, Dickens, Shakespeare, Dante, Kipling, Wagner, Cervantes, Johnson, Beerbohm, Waugh, Wilde, Scott—these and many others make lively appearances here. In a review of a book on Tennyson, Auden relates how the great poet was dining one night with Benjamin Jowett, the master of Balliol, and after reciting one of his new poems, Jowett said to him: “I shouldn’t publish that poem if I were you, Tennyson.” To which the poet replied: “Well, if it comes to that, Master, the sherry you served us before dinner was filthy.”
Journalists will be amused by a long piece that Auden submitted to Life in 1966 on the fall of Rome, in which he observed certain startling parallels between the third and 20th centuries:
Edward Mendelson points out that Life was willing to pay the poet $10,000 for the piece, if only he toned it down. Auden refused, and was paid nothing.
The pieces here on poetry reveal Auden’s poetic ambitions. “It is frequently the case,” he observes,
The very versatility of Auden’s poetic output—with its restless array of different forms—shows how keen he was to achieve major status, though his stylistically conservative poems tend to be his best. “For the Time Being” (1944) and “The Mirror and the Sea” (1944) may be full of technical virtuosity, but “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” (1939), “A Walk After Dark” (1949), and “On the Circuit” (1965) are more memorable. Nonetheless, Auden has amusing things to say on form: “Rhymes, meters, stanza forms, etc. are like servants,” he writes. “If the master is just enough to win their affection and firm enough to command their respect, the result is an orderly happy household. If he is too tyrannical, they give notice; if he lacks authority, they become slovenly, impertinent, drunk and dishonest.”
On his fellow poets, Auden is at once generous and insightful. Of Alexander Pope, he observes, “if Wordsworth had Pope in mind as the enemy when he advised poets to write ‘in the language really used by men,’ he was singularly in error.” Pope writes as men normally speak; it is Wordsworth and the Romantics who resort to “poetic” language. In the case of Byron, Auden points out that, while the author of Don Juan might have been a master of form, and particularly comic form, he never managed “deep emotions” or “profound thoughts.” Why? Auden quotes Lady Byron, who once said of the poet: “He is the absolute monarch of words, and uses them as Bonaparte did lives, for conquest, without regard to their intrinsic value.”
Considering the strictures leveled against Auden’s own glibness, there was a certain self-knowledge in this unanswerable reproof. Then again, regarding the poet about whose influence he was so ambivalent, Auden says that “Yeats is probably the only poet in [the 20th century] who has written great poetry on political subjects,” which was another way of admitting his own poor showing in that usually sterile vein. Of Marianne Moore, he writes, “Those who believe, as I do, that what any poem says should be true and that, in our own noisy, overcrowded age, a quiet and intimate poetic speech is the only genuine way of saying it, will find in O to Be a Dragon exactly what they are looking for.”
Regarding his publisher at Faber, Auden confesses, with a twinkle in his eye, that while T. S. Eliot was “one of the most idiosyncratic of poets, both in his subject matter and in his technique,” and therefore impossible to imitate, he still exerted a salutary influence on a younger poet prone to waywardness:
Now that Princeton has completed this superb edition, we can look forward to reacquainting ourselves with a wonderfully discerning, erudite, life-enhancing critic. W. H. Auden may not have been the greatest poet of the 20th century, but he was certainly one of our most enjoyable critics.
Edward Short is the author, most recently, of Adventures in the Book Pages: Essays and Reviews.
