Great Poets of the Twentieth Century: No. 2 - W H Auden

I had an odd experience with Auden once. Recommended him by a friend with dependable taste, I took his Collected Shorter Poems with me on an eight-week holiday as the only poetry I packed. (You can imagine the airport security: 'Careful, this one's packin' some poetry'). Anyhow, after detailed rereading of the book I was impressed in parts, but puzzled at my friend's enthusiasm. I challenged him about it on my return. 'Me, recommend Auden? Unlikely: I don't like it', he replied. I was, to put it mildly, even more perplexed.

This, I'm sure, is a much more straight-forward way to meet Mr Auden. Particularly so thanks to the graceful introduction by Rowan Williams, which addresses complex and sensitive issues of politics, sexuality and religion with a light but clear touch. He's got a distinctive prose style, too: sentences with multiple clauses which often start with a parenthesis but which nonetheless are perfectly lucid. The light qualifications of his remarks seem a mark of modesty and scrupulousness, rather than obscurity.

From the outset, he makes the clearest case for Auden's distinctiveness:

'Two things often said about great poets are that they create the taste by which they are appreciated, and that they have the capacity to constantly reinvent themselves. Auden illustrates these features perhaps more dramatically than any other of the great names of the 2oth century'.

It's these, too, that make him so difficult to get a handle on.

His overwhelming importance to his contemporaries in the '30s is, to my mind, baffling. His distinctive, thoughtful, voice sounds more like that of an interesting outsider. Obviously, his form at producing startlingly resonant poems (for example Musee des Beaux Arts, included here) would push him to prominence. But arguably one of Larkin's greatest achievements was to find a way of incorporating that discursive, analytical voice of Auden's in a way that neutralised its tendency to bleach out rounded emotion when used by lesser talents.

Talent and technique are things for which Auden is regularly praised. But I'd take question with Williams' assertion that 'the technical skill is always exceptional'. His strong use of end-rhyme with lines whose meaning flows over one to another creates, to my mind, a dissonant effect: the technique is prominent, rather than deft. This can be compared to Byron, frequently Auden's model, who has true lightness of touch despite being more dazzlingly showy. Equally, the mis-placed stress in the second verse of As I Walked Out One Evening has always infuriated me:

'And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway
"Love has no ending...'

It's like a dance partner treading on your foot: 'ending'. Tsk!

There were many particular pleasures in reading this selection, however. Picking carefully back over Lullaby, I discovered that beyond it's first verse and beautiful and striking phrases ('Lay your sleeping head, my love, / human on my faithless arm', 'fashionable madmen raise / their pedantic boring cry', 'watched by every human love' etc) it does actually make a sort of sense as a whole. And Secrets and Whitsunday in Kirchsetten were both new to me (as far as I recall) and striking poems, too. The latter seems like what the American poet, Robert Lowell attempts, but done more successfully: a discursive and inclusive sensibility, taking in a wide range of subjects, voices and striking phrases and reflecting the fractured texture of post-war Europe. For that broadening of my appreciation of Auden's work, I'm grateful to this selection.