First‐class Fellow‐travelling: The Poetry of W.H. Auden

Extract

W.H. Auden died in Oxford a few years ago, leaving his reputation as untidy as his personal habits. There were those who believed him to be the greatest English-speaking poet of the century, after Yeats and Eliot; there were others who lambasted his work as slick, brittle, cerebral, excessively voulu. Hailed as a poetic revolutionary, Auden was also pilloried as an intellectual flirt, a brainy exhibitionist whose scintillating technical virtuosity conceals a merely adolescent smartness. If Eliot and Yeats are the revered masters of 20th century English poetry (neither of them, significantly, Englishmen), Auden has been seen as the upstart, too clever by half, thumbing his nose at received pieties, pathologically incapable of resisting the private joke or smart crack even if it ruins a poem. Placed beside the rhetorical resonances of a Yeats or the cryptic metaphysics of an Eliot, Auden can seem light-weight, flippant and garrulous; put beside the fertile resources of feeling of a Hardy, Edward Thomas or Lawrence, Auden seems clinical, anaesthetised, intellectually top-heavy, damagingly retarded in certain crucial areas of sensuousness and sensibility. Yet the judgement can be as easily inverted: compared with the hollow posturing and hairbrained mythologising of a Yeats, or the Olympian distaste of an Eliot, Auden emerges as our kind of man: materialist, democratic and subversively shrewd, with an uncanny eye for the telling contingent detail and a hardnosed sardonic realism which no soft-bellied Romanticism can seduce.