W. H. AUDEN

Selected Poems. By W. H. Auden. (Faber and Faber. 3s. 6d.) IT is a good thing to have poetry popular and modish once more, and to have a poet whose new poems, even when they appear In the lesser weeklies, are read avidly and expectantly. Cer- tainly, in the whole history of English poetry, not more than tine or two poets have achieved anything like Mr. Auden's prestige at his age, to leave quality aside for the moment. He has won the King's Medal ; New Verse has devoted a whole double number to him ; and in Poems of Today, the English Associa- tion's dusty yet wide-eyed survey of the last twenty years' poetry, he is -given precedence in space over any other poet. (He gets nine pages, Yeats six, Hopkins four. Of his seven poems, however, only one is included in his present selection, significantly enough.)

Not that this really considerable recognition is misplaced or premature, or that his name, now orthodox and domesticated (more than Mr. Eliot's ever was), need be accordingly suspect in more austere circles. But this recognition, which finds concrete expression in the publication of his Selected Poems, does reasonably set the occasion for a more sedate and sceptical deliberation on his quality—on his curious merits, his mean- ingful limitations, his immense effect on his young contem- poraries, the nature of his development.

Of any such selection of poems, drawn presumably from a period of rather less than ten years, three questions forthwith present themselves : (I) How do they look, collected and re- read—better or worse than when we first read them ? (2) What sort of impression does their chronological sequence produce, with reference to the poet's development ? (3) How good is the- selection ?

The selection is occasionally surprising, but chaste and reasonable enough. Paid on Both Sides is, to my mind, un- questionably his most satisfactory play, and full of good verse, but it is a pity perhaps that the whole play, occupying about a third of the book, should have been included ; and that so little of the 193o Poems and of The Orators (his most inter- esting book) should have been.included.. He omits from those at least three excellent poems—" It was Easter as I walked in the public gardens," " Taller today, we remember similar evenings," and " Consider this and in our time." From Look, Stranger ! he omits two fine poems which bear re- reading extraordinarily well—" Casino " and the charming " Fish in the unruffled lake " ; while the slick and sentimental " A shilling life will give you all the facts " is, unhappily, included. But in general one can see dearly enough why many of the poems have been omitted ; and the indisputably best— the opening chorus from The Dog Beneath the Skin, the Prologue from Look, Stranger ! : " The earth turns over, out side feels the cold "—are included.

First of all, the disappointments. How explain the vague but undeniable sense of sketchiness, almost of flatness, even a sort of emotional emptiness, which a re-reading, plain-voiced and enured to novelty, produces ? Well, it is certainly too early to make predictions or pass far-flung judgements. But apparently; just as many of these poems excited by a greater suggestiveness on a third reading than on a first, just so they seem less complete, less valid it may be, on a fifth. The explanation perhaps is . that the use of epithet,, brilliantly observed, intelligent, original, is effective only so long as the mind of the reader is observantly exploring the meaning of the poems : but when their evocative power has been exhausted (a point at which Yeats's best poems begin to reveal their magnitude, their splendour and vitality of form), their frequent inadequacy as units, as simple and independent works of art, becomes apparent—they fall apart, they lapse curiously in the middle, they go off on a tangent, they resolve themselves at the end into simply a clever and felicitous gesture. Some of the stanzas in " Here on the cropped grass " and " Easily, my dear, you move " could be arranged in a different order (is it unfair to suggest that they once were ?) without irreparable loss : whereas in another poem of approximately equal length, a really tremendous poem like Yeats's " Among School-Children," or Holderlin's " Diotima," stanza follows stanza inevitably, on the twofold plane of intellect and formal harmony—the thought never swerves or falters or turns back on itself, nor does the music ; nothing is complete tilt the end of the poem ; the first line looks forward to the last ; each phrase and line gains immeasurably in -its context, suffers by excision. _

And this suggests another thing:_ Do Auden's. poems suffer a bit now for the very reasons which first made them so refresh- ing, so magnetic ? At'any rate, in this selection those phases— the guerilla, the Homer Lane, the masked-monitory, " the word is love "—lacking their proper context to give them relevance and stability, look less convincing. Their obscurity is shown to be less significant, we have in the meantime learned more about them. The manner of Paid on Both Sides, for' example, dates. For one thing, he has depended rather too much it would seem on the attentions of his friends, on catch- phrases, cults, pseudo-psychological theories, private game, , and gossips, all of which at one point served doubtless to add a certain spice for the reader (and they did reassure by their im- " plicit reference to biographical actualities), but which now look more like what, of course, they were all the time ; i.e., simply catch-phrases, cults, games, &c., &c. But a good deal has already been said by others on this particular matter.

His gift of phrase still thrills by its unerring novelty and truthfulness- " Small birds above me have the grace of those who founded

The civilisation of the delicate olive, Learning the laws of love and sailing On the calm Aegean " ; his eye for the dramatic touch is unfailing-

" And all who have compounded envy and hopelessness into desire , Perform here nightly their magical acts of identification

Among the Chinese lanterns and the Champagne served in shoes " his knack of interweaving a traditional image with a contem- porary, throwing a light in both directions, is individual and

happy- " But when the waters make retreat

And through the black mud first the wheat In shy green stalks appears ; When stranded monsters gasping lie,

And sounds of riveting terrify

Their whorled unsubtle ears."

What is disturbing, in this connexion, is his occasions preference for the intriguing irrelevance- " The cravings of lions in dens, the loves of dons."

The original and valid point in his simile of the night becomes lost here, for a moment, as he puts in a clever touch. And this suggests that hi is frequently admired for -the wrong reasons, which have nurtured in him a tendency to move away from what is really good in himself towards something more stylish, a sort of super-buffoonery, and even in his love poems there is a suggestion of the actor's sidelong glance. His recent poems on Spain, Oxford, and Dover betray his lack of discipline, this growing subservience to manner.

What is best in him, aside from his superb technical skill and variety, is his exuberance. He is constantly ferreting out new and unexpected juxtapositions in life (and reveals what surrealism at its best might have hoped for). He is thrilled by the dramatic variety of contemporary life, and it is the great virtue of, say, the choruses in The Dog Beneath the-Skin, that they communicate this thrill, that the objects of our daily life seem in them to become intense and poetic. He is, though wonderfully gifted, not a great poet—that seems clear ; for it is not something half-hidden within him that moves (vide Donne, Hopkins, Blake, Yeats) so much as it is his eye and his talent that excite. All of his powers come into play, they are all available. With a deeper sense of human character he might become a great dramatist.

One final point. Mr. Auden's own vitality and authenticity are unquestioned. But whether his effect in general on other poets has been as salutary as is sometimes supposed seems doubtful. No young poet has wholly escaped his influence : he would have to be stolid indeed who could do so. But some who might have written minor but genuine poems (such as those of Isaac Rosenberg or Edward Thomas) now find that they can produce a specious modernity—the same thing has long been true in painting and architecture—by adopting a new phrase- ology and ideology, which being highly personal are proper to Mr. Auden's talent and no other. Poetry is surely and eternally the attempt by the individual to explore, to fortify constantly and to deepen certain virtues and powers—a vision in short which is meaningless without character behind it, without action in some sphere or another. And this exploration must proceed by intuition, in the course of actual production, rather than by • analysis. The result must be an unique work of art, otherwise the intuition is revealed as shallow and fallible, not deeply true to the poet himself, therefore not true at all to the rest of