Out of the Audenary, into the Fire
- Bea Wood
- Feb 21
- 5 min read
Auden: the inscrutable, the difficult, the witty, the barbed, the sentimental, the beautiful. Critics have tussled with Auden for years - he doesn’t really quite fit in anywhere - he is distinctly Modern, part Eliot, Yeats, Lawrence, and Larkin, but is also not without the aesthetic pleasure and mystical, intoxicated joy of the Romantics. He doesn’t make things easy for the reader: he challenges, teases and mocks, famously described by Harold Bloom as ‘the enfant terrible of English poetry’.
Auden’s poetry, to his editor and critic John Fuller, is ‘always [in] danger of becoming too introspective and high-minded’; his aim, to transcribe the ‘thoughts of a wise man in the language of the common people’ is a self-conscious attempt to simplify complex feeling. But there is something much more light hearted going on too; as Stan Smith wrote, with Auden, ‘silliness [is] part of the whole show’. He plays with language, stretching it to its extremes, quibbling the reliability of any communication - as in ‘A Bad Night’, a poem riddled with poetic polyphony and linguistic unorthodoxy: ‘pirries of rain,/On stolchy paths/Over glunch clouds’. Given the poem’s powerful onomatopoeic vividity, Peter Porter is right to describe such linguistic ‘dismantling [a]s a mode of construction’.
John Bayley likens Auden to Eliot on the grounds of their shared ‘enormous self-consciousness’, describing Eliot’s ‘deprecation’ and Auden’s ‘irony’ as ‘symptoms of the same condition’. Indeed, Eliot’s ‘East Coker’ from The Four Quartets reels off unwavering epigrams: ‘the poetry does not matter’ (just like Auden’s famous ‘poetry makes nothing happen’), ‘humility is endless’, ‘to be restored, our sickness must grow worse’. Just like Eliot’s dually crystal-clear simple yet intricately complex aphorisms, Auden’s poems combine authorial confidence and deep-seated doubt and hesitancy. We can see such tentativeness here, in Auden’s preface to his 1945 Collected Poetry:
‘IN the eyes of every author, I fancy, his own past work falls into four classes. First, the pure rubbish which he regrets ever having conceived; second — for him the most painful — the good ideas which his incompetence or impatience prevented from coming to much (The Orators seems to me such a case of the fair notion fatally injured); third, the pieces he has nothing against except their lack of importance; these must inevitably form the bulk of any collection since, were he to limit it to the fourth class alone, to those poems for which he is honestly grateful, his volume would be too depressingly slim. W.H.A’.
Today, February 21st, marks Auden’s 119th birthday. So I have created a compilation of some of his great poems, including some newly discovered by me, which tend to slip under the radar. I haven’t included some of his most famous as they are widely available, and I’m prioritising shortness.
The list kicks off with a fairly famous poem by Auden, but it simply couldn't not appear here. I find this heart-rending, an ode to unreciprocal love - love, perhaps for a natural world which can never return it and to which it's impossible to ever demonstrate one's gratitude. Love, perhaps, for a person who cannot return your love. But the poem is an acceptance and commitment to merely bask in the unreturned and unreturnable feeling - because it is better to be able to feel it, even if incomplete and tragic, than not to feel it at all.
An under-acknowledged beauty - Auden's reflection on the difference - even superiority - of music vs other art forms.
Probably one of the most beautifully effervescent, stunning-to-read poems I have ever encountered; and a challenge. The river, and life, charges on with riotous and headstrong force until its abrupt disintegration into absolute oblivion.
About the disillusionment of being at a social gathering where you feel unheard, misunderstood, unacknowledged, unrecognised. We've all been there... and actually, if you're reading a blog post in celebration of W H Auden's birthday, you probably really have been there...
This is a classic, an Audenesque banger. It has appealed to me from the age of 4, when I first heard it. It demands pacy reading, and its rhythm, if nothing else, is a rollicking, awesome ride, mirroring its chugging train and flurrying letters. It was commissioned for a post office documentary, which included a score by Britten too. Alack. How adverts have fallen off over the years...
What perhaps could be seen as a brutal dismantling of sentimentality is actually left open-ended. Auden presents the inevitability of time and finality, but doesn't situate that as entirely at odds with any possibility for enduring love. I think Auden sometimes wants, or even intends, to be more cynical and ruthless than he actually is.
The deepest depths of the world, metonymised here by 'the waters', know more than humans can ever articulate, regardless of our attempts to answer the universe's burning questions. Auden's lack of grammatical propriety precludes any conclusion at all: 'but.' - redolent of Eliot's 'East Coker':
'That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory:
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings'.
Another classic; a chirpy, humorously infantile voice asks the trickiest question around, and - if we reverse the 'will it''s to 'it will''s as the poem goes on - actually does a decent job of answering.
This poem is simultaneously incredibly sad and quietly fulfilled. Auden pictures a celebrated man who, seemingly inexplicably, loves a woman who is humble, definitionally ordinary, even limited, to the extent that she can't appreciate or return his love at the same level that he does her. The poem is about a huge mismatch in people's capacity for love, but it is not necessarily an unhappy mismatch or a disillusioning wider quandary - just a matter of fact.
A clever, biting little poem. Although not the warmest eulogy across the first four lines, if the clerihew (an AABB quatrain) had stayed a quatrain, fulfilling its formal bidding, its mood would have been almost wholly benign. It is only where Auden extends the clerihew’s quatrain, adding two final lines, that a darker reality takes shape. The fifth line's re-animation of the opening’s ‘after’ in the cold ‘laughter’ of ‘respectable senators’ demands a re-read, retrospectively darkening line 1’s ‘perfection, of a kind’. The final line’s rhyme of ‘streets’ with the 3rd line’s ‘fleets’ is a final subversion, as the poem’s roster of social platitudes (‘what he was after’, ‘he was greatly interested’) are invalidated, exposed as complicit in the euphemistic, misleading (at first) eulogy for a tyrant.
A 'Wiedersehen'-like reunion between lovers, and an affirmation of eternal unity and togetherness, almost marriage-vow-like.
There is no easy way to summarise such a wide-ranging and multi-faceted group of poems, or indeed, poet. Sadly our society seems to be suffering the same deficits which Auden criticised: nearly one hundred years on, it does still seem that 'Defenceless under the night/ Our world in stupor lies', but if we can do anything about this, it is perhaps to abide by Auden's most famous, most lasting, and perhaps most naive (but honest) teaching - that 'We must love one another or die'.
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