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The Humanization of Auden's Early Style
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Abstract
The widespread feeling that Auden's poetic powers have declined steadily since the thirties, which is epitomized in an essay like Randall Jarrell's “Changes of Attitude and Rhetoric in Auden's Poetry,” is based on a misunderstanding of both his intellectual and stylistic evolution. By taking adequate account of the important stylistic shift which moved Auden away from his early Anglo-Saxon and Hopkinsesque addictions and made it possible for him to express a more straightforward and centrally human concern in the poetry of his middle period, we can appraise his achievement more accurately. This crucial and beneficial shift, which owes something to Yeats, begins in Look, Stranger! (1936) and is characterized by Auden's new willingness to face the dangers and failures of the period directly in lucid, reflective, fully syntactic speech. The full-throated, implicated, moving human voice which emerges here, concerned not with extravagance or exaggeration but with facing the truth and accounting for it, is largely responsible for Auden's preeminence among English poets born in this century.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1968
References
1 See, e.g., David Daiches, rev. of Another Time in Poetry, LVI (April 1940), 40–43; Randall Jarrell, “From Freud to Paul: The Stages of Auden's Ideology,” Partisan Review (Fall 1945), pp. 437–457; Joseph Warren Beach, The Making of the Auden Canon (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1957); R. G. Cox, “The Poetry of W. H. Auden,” The Modern Age, Vol. vu of The Pelican Guide to English Literature, ed. Boris Ford (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1961); and Philip Larkin, rev. of Homage to Clio in Spectator (15 July 1960), pp. 104–105. A number of recent reviews of Auden's About the House (1965)—see the one in Time (13 August 1965), for example—perpetuate this idea of a regrettable decline.
2 See especially Frederick P. W. McDowell, “ ‘The Situation of Our Time’ : Auden in His American Phase,” in Aspects of American Poetry: Essays Presented to Howard Mumford Jones (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1962), ed. Richard M. Ludwig, pp. 223–255; Justin Replogle, “Auden's Homage to Thalia,” Bucknell Review (March 1963), pp. 98–117; Monroe K. Spears, The Poetry of W. H. Auden (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963); G. S. Fraser, “Auden: The Composite Giant,” Shenandoah, xv (Summer 1964), 46–59, and rev. of About the House in The New York Times Book Review (18 July 1965), pp. 5, 20; John G. Blair, The Poetic Art of W. H. Auden (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1965); and George T. Wright, “A General View of Auden's Poetry,” Tennessee Studies in Lit., x (1965), 43–64.
3 Southern Review, vii (Autumn 1941), 326–349. Oddly enough, no critic of Auden's poetry has ever answered, or even systematically considered, the charges that Jarrell makes in this important essay.
4 Those poems that Auden has reprinted in The Collected Poetry of W. E. Auden (New York: Random House, 1945) will be so designated parenthetically in the text with the abbreviation CP, and with an indication of a title change, if one has occurred.
5 “Rilke in English,” The New Republic (6 Sept. 1939), pp. 135–136.
6 Frederick P. W. McDowell has argued trenchantly for the superiority of the poetry written after Look Stranger(1936) to that of Poems (1930) in “ ‘The Situation of Our Time’: Auden in His American Phase,” pp. 223–229. McDowell, however, is more concerned with such stylistic manifestations as the flexibility, lucidity, and terseness of Auden's language in the late thirties and forties, and with its utilization of the rhythms of speech; he is not particularly concerned, as I am in this essay, with the motive of humanization and the ways in which it helps to determine the new style
7 “Shut Your Eyes and Open Your Mouth,” and “1929” in CP.
8 John G. Blair discusses Auden's debt to Yeats in connection with the occasional poem, which affords an opportunity, Blair feels, for objective, impersonal, universally significant poetry (The Poetic Art of W. E. Auden, pp. 91–94). I am myself more concerned with the elevated personal component of the Yeats style which engenders a large human relevance not by suppressing subjectivity but by extending it to things that matter greatly. Monroe K. Spears comes closer to the essence of this Yeatsian influence when he says, “A part of the style is the ability to be unselfconsciously personal” (The Poetry o/W. E. Auden, p. ISO).
9 See my “W. H. Auden's Bestiary of the Human,” Virginia Quarterly Review, xiii (Spring 1966), 207–233, for an extended discussion of the animal-human motif in Auden's poems.