Whinily and very fast: A brief consumer guide to W.H. Auden
Giving Wystan a reason not to sit with statisticians
A nondescript express in from the South,
Crowds round the ticket barrier, a face
To welcome which the mayor has not contrived
Bugles or braid: something about the mouth
Distracts the stray look with alarm and pity.
Snow is falling. Clutching a little case,
He walks out briskly to infect a city
Whose terrible future may have just arrived.
“Gare du Midi”, 1938
Auden is the optimal poet for a consumer guide. Undoubtedly a major writer, his books vary widely in quality. What’s more, his Collected Poems are a mess because of deliberate omissions and because of his tendency to revise works long after initial publication, a strategy that made sense until he started getting worse. Anyway, completism is for chumps: I’ve read all the Auden books I want to read besides maybe the Isherwood collaborations. Some of them I want to read again.
Selected Poems (ed. Edward Mendelson, 2009)
The expanded 120-poem edition is the best Auden starting point, not least because it contains works as originally published, free from his later tinkering: in particular, here’s the hard-to-find full version of “Spain”, the great English-language propagandistic poem of the twentieth century (which he later disavowed.) The chronological order lets you see his development from a young hotshot with a remarkable ear to one of his country’s all-time great verse thinkers. And then the calendar ticks over to the 1940s and suddenly his vision shrivels because of either moving to America, the war, Chester Kallman, or Episcopalianism, depending on your political compass quadrant. Long stretches of the remainder of the book are comparatively trite, and worse, repetitive. Read the whole thing once anyway.
Grade: A (“Spain”, “In Time of War”)
Poems (1934)
His first U.S. release was four books in one. The opening salvo of thirty poems shows he had by his early twenties a mastery of varying meter comparable to his early model Eliot’s, as well as a growing seriousness of engagement with the issues of his time, though “To ask the hard question is simple”. The Orators I found surprising given his reputation: a hardcore avant-garde work mixing formal verse, speechifying, and even abstract diagrams; it’s mostly successful and points to an intriguing road not taken. The two closet dramas are not my thing and, as far as I can tell, not really his.
Grade: A MINUS (The Initiates, “It was Easter as I walked in the public gardens”, Journal of an Airman)
On This Island (UK title that Auden hated: Look, Stranger!, 1936)
A major achievement here is the merger of the personal and the political, such that it’s often not possible to say where one ends and the other begins, which is as it should be, as you know (but later Auden doesn’t.) “August for the people…”, dedicated to lifelong friend and sometime collaborator/fuckbuddy Christopher Isherwood is a strong example, discussing the progression of the author and “Your squat spruce body and enormous head” through formative and historic times. Yet Auden’s just as effective at his most explicitly leftist: when he rhymes “Cambridge ulcer” with, four lines later, “none falser”, the disdain is reminiscent of no one reminiscent of no one more than Dylan (the Nobel Prize winner, not Thomas.) Plus: the only good twentieth century sestina that’s not about Popeye.
Grade: A (“Brothers, who when the sirens roar”, “August for the people and their favourite islands”, “Hearing of harvests rotting in the valleys”)
Letters from Iceland (with Louis MacNeice, 1937)
This travel book has Auden’s easiest work to like for non-poetry nerds—pretty good amateur photography included—and arch-heterosexual MacNeice keeps up with him. The verse of greatest interest is in the Letters to Lord Byron, which goof off Don Juan to lay out Auden’s of-the-moment opinions on politics and culture: Wordsworth gets a particular battering. The prose includes highly specific sightseeing tips (“There is not much to be said for Reykjavik… The only other sights are Olli Maggadon at the harbour, Oddur Sigurgeirsson anywhere, Kjarva; the painter, and Arni Pállsson the professor of Icelandic history”) and a opinionated dining guide (hákarl is “half-dry, half-rotten shark” that “tastes more like boot-polish than anything else I can think of.”) The book finishes with pie, line, and bar charts, which is pretty funny given he’d soon become lit’s greatest detractor of statistics since Dickens. The Nazis lurk.
Grade: A (“Letter to Lord Byron, Part II”, “For Tourists”, “Letter to Lord Byron, Part III”)
Another Time (1940)
One of the best cases for not just reading a poet’s Selected and instead going back to the original books. There’s a slightly increased density of great poems relative to On This Island, but perhaps more importantly, the works are in genuine dialogue with each other. Thus Auden’s unease with Pascal’s resolution to his wager is immediately contrasted with Voltaire’s self-satisfied Enlightenment, in case you thought the latter offered a comprehensive solution. The so-called “lighter poems” encompass cadavers, chemical weapons, and elegies so over-the-top they might accurately describe grief. The Occasional Poems mark the death of a very human generation of heroes and the start of a war. Few works of literature have summarized interesting times so well.
Grade: A PLUS (“September 1, 1939”, “Pascal”, “Funeral Blues”)
For the Time Being (1944)
Auden was losing focus fast, but at least writing an extended gloss on The Tempest helped him to stick to themes. The second half of the book was intended to be a libretto for Britten but is utterly unadaptable; still, it shows both that Auden needed Christianity and that he had mixed, complex thoughts about the religion, even as he had a tendency to sweep them away.
Grade: B PLUS (“The Temptation of St. Joseph”, “Prospero to Ariel”)
Nones (1951)
He never lost the knack for good lines, just the ability to turn them into good poems, let alone good books. It takes some nerve to write something as elegant as the famous closing stanza of “The Fall of Rome” and use it to cap off a nothing poem. The crux is, having abandoned innovation and any attempt to speak for anybody other than himself, the work stands or falls on his persona, and boy did he become a narrow-minded cultural conservative quickly.
Grade: B MINUS (“In Praise of Limestone”)
The Shield of Achilles (1955)
At the peak of his mutually enfeebling relationship with American poetry, he was still too caught up in two-cultures bullshit, but this represents an incremental improvement, mostly because he regains the ability to land a joke every now and then. By far the most fun he has is when he writes in circles around his sexuality. The title of “The Truest Poetry is the most Feigning” is about the most honest thing he ever wrote, while the poem itself sneaks a “Re-sex the pronouns” in there.
Grade: B (“The Truest Poetry is the most Feigning”)
About the House (1965)
The sequence Thanksgiving for a Habitat, ostensibly a tour of his less-than-humble abode from cellar to attic (with special attention to the shitter: one might speculate that a good toilet was crucial to his recovery of poise and of control over tone), is infused with the pathos each room accumulates through the act of living in them—he’ll never have that recipe again, oh no. The remainder of the book is generally light, again with frisson derived from resonances with work from when he was great and when he was mediocre. His best since Blood on the Tracks.
Grade: A MINUS (“The Cave of Making”, “Thanksgiving for a Habitat”, “Hammerfest”)
City Without Walls (1969)
He wrote more books afterwards, but this one has a valedictory feel, as he bemusedly copes with his own living obsolescence and his generation’s amidst “lasers, electric brains, do-it-yourself sex manuals”. His archaisms and refusal to write like the kids almost make him avant-garde again. Almost.
Grade: B PLUS (“Eulogy (for Professor Nevill Coghill)”, “Insignificant Elephants”)
Another time is wonderful. Epitaph for a small tyrant is an all time favourite. This line is almost as good: "the only good twentieth century sestina that’s not about Popeye."