Darkness visible: Auden collected

by William Logan

On the evolution of W. H. Auden’s poetry.

Great poets hardly appear out of nowhere, but the map of Somewhere is rarely geographical: a cultural spasm, a conniving gang of influences, some peculiar strands of dna, or just a stagger of Freudian mishaps might be more at fault than a postal address or a clutch of bank statements. Born in York in 1907, W. H. Auden was the youngest son of a vicar’s daughter and a doctor who became Professor of Public Health at the University of Birmingham. The boy did public school (as the British call private school) at Gresham’s, followed by Oxford. There, his friend Stephen Spender published the poet’s first book on a hand press for printing pharmacists’ labels. Auden was twenty-one.

These two handsome volumes of Auden’s collected poems bring nearly to an end the sumptuous edition of the poet’s Complete Works, begun thirty-five years ago and edited entirely by one of Auden’s literary executors, Edward Mendelson.1 The poems alone, with their accompanying notes, amount to almost two thousand closely printed pages. Only a volume of selected letters, journals, and poems for friends remains unpublished.

Auden was a monster before he became a monument, because early talent is by nature monstrous—as the Latin desires, portentous, unnatural, something from which we cannot avert our eyes. His juvenilia is infused with a premonitory sense of the collapse of civil and economic society, dramatized through a Boy’s Own version of war and rebellion rooted in the turmoil after the Easter Rising and the General Strike, with the rise of fascism and Nazism underway. Later, the Great Depression stands in the background, and then the Spanish Civil War. The poems never predict—they merely observe the tottering wreck of the old order.

Auden caught early, even preemptively, the rot and wretchedness that after the Great War devoured the foundations of Europe. The world of his early poems is populated by hard-bitten revolutionaries warring against unnamed enemies in a land drawn from Icelandic saga and the Never Never Land of boys’ schools—with their ritual hazing, private betrayals, petty feuds, and deranged headmasters. The schoolboy version of war, or the aversions and antipathies that led to war, never descends into bullying allegory. The poems already exist in the realm of adulthood, between fantasies of the past and the nightmares to come. Consider how many young instructors had fought in the last war, and how many had lost students as well.

Auden kept most of his university poems in Poems (1930), published by Faber, and in the revised edition three years later, though some he saved he never printed again. When a poet moves so quickly into maturity, the tailings scattered behind sometimes leave a little salvage. Auden had the thrilling gift, almost at the start, of galvanizing language, here in service of bucolic heroics. The electroshock of his beginnings was not forgotten when the lines remaining were simply mechanical. Among opening lines in Poems (1928), only the dead would not be awakened by “No trenchant parting this/ Of future from the past,” “Who stands, the crux left of the watershed,” “Nor was that final, for about that time,” “Control of the passes was, he saw, the key,” and, from Poems (1930), “It was Easter as I walked in the public gardens,” “From scars where kestrels hover,” and “Sir, no man’s enemy, forgiving all.” He knew how to tease, in short—tease meaning from plain words, and tease the reader into meaning. The poems are driven toward something unsaid.

Throughout his career, Auden overestimated the long poems he sweated over; and it was a sign of overachievement unachieved that some parts were written, even published, before he conceived of the whole. The wish that tortured the dream is present even in the earliest example, the “charade” Paid on Both Sides from Poems (1930), among the many long sequences afterward that a reader could skip without regret—but at the cost of missing, despite sillier passages, the urgent telegraphese of speech:

In Kettledale above Colefangs road passes where high banks overhang dangerous from ambush. To Colefangs had to go, would speak with Layard, Jerry and Hunter with him only. They must have stolen news, for Red Shaw waited with ten, so Jerry said, till for last time unconscious. . . . They fought, exhausted ammunition, a brave defence but fight no more.

The sharpness of the dialogue that follows, dialogue no one ever spoke, too often tightens into boyish giddiness: “Not from this life, not from this life is any/ To keep; sleep, day and play would not help there/ Dangerous to new ghost,” or, in the words of the chorus, “Though heart fears all heart cries for, rebuffs with mortal beat/ Skyfall, the legs sucked under, adder’s bite.”

The Auden who wrote those lines understood nothing of the Auden who composed

This lunar beauty

Has no history

Is complete and early;

If beauty later

Bear any feature

It had a lover

And is another.

The lines are already intimate with meaning. However clumsy and cast-iron Auden’s lesser work, his light verse and lyrics were from the start instantly, insistently memorable. The irritating confidence was extraordinary in a man so young. (Hart Crane, only a little older than Auden, had similar confidence; but too much of his work was sheer muddle and mumble.) If many of Auden’s lyrics were not wholly formed, others seemed tossed off for the hell of it. With such a poet, the comic distractions were often more pointed than the serious drudgeries of this Sisyphus.

Auden succumbed to inflated phrase-making.

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In that early work, both in poems discarded and poems retained, Auden succumbed to inflated phrase-making, where the lines that remain in memory are darker, less aggrandized, often sadder and less wordy. He tried unsuccessfully to do what he later made his own, a demotic mingled with something Tennyson might have been proud of, poetry possessing stateliness without embarrassment. (Poets can be paralyzed by too much control over their gifts.)

In an odd act of irresolution or rebellion, perhaps, Auden left Oxford with only a third-class degree. (Nerves or laziness were more likely possibilities.) Friends had marked him down for an easy and triumphant first. He was hardly the only writer to have botched his studies by the Isis: Shelley was sent down for suspected atheism; John Betjeman and Stephen Spender left without degrees; John Henry Newman received a lower second; Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh, and more recently James Fenton, thirds. A. E. Housman failed outright. Auden bashed around awhile after Oxford, teaching hither-thither in boys’ schools.

When so many poets go from weakness to weakness, or strength to weakness (consider Delmore Schwartz), Auden for the most part went from strength to strength. Still, readers found the early poems heavy work, larkish but labored, as easy to see into as a smeared landscape through a muddy windshield. Auden was surprised—he wrote a friend, “Am I really so obscure?”

His second attempt at a long poem was even worse. The Orators: An English Study (1932) must always have found a few readers who struggled through it, but those who finished in raptures were probably far outnumbered by those who never finished at all. It’s hard to tell whether the intention of this mechanical modernism was “pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical” or “tragical-comical-historical-pastoral,” to borrow from that earlier master of fudgery, Polonius.

Auden could rarely sustain the reader’s engagement longer than the lines of a lyric. His design in long poems was usually to lay down one poem after another, like paving stones. The prose section that opens The Orators has a few moments not tedious or vain (the speaker sounds like a dotty vicar but is apparently an elderly alumnus of a boys’ school), though the rest reads like an MI5 exam for budding cryptographers. Those who adore Auden may meet their Waterloo here. In Early Auden (1981), Mendelson admits that the poem “is Auden’s only published work that is virtually impenetrable without certain keys.” You had to ask the poet for them.

It can be important for a young poet (Auden was twenty-five when The Orators was published) to learn what he cannot do—perhaps the success of Keats’s odes may be found in the small delights and large vacancies of Endymion. Auden could still write badly, as the rejected poems included among the appendices in these ravenous collected volumes reveal; but On This Island (1936) almost wiped them from memory. (The editor has sensibly used the American title, as Faber chose Look, Stranger! for the book while Auden was out of the country.) Where the early work, gorgeous line after gorgeous line, was too susceptible to the poet’s ambition, his overenthusiasm, his tendency to natter, poem after poem now revealed a gift compelling and compelled. Even the notes on politics had a force not seen again until Robert Lowell.

Auden’s diction in early maturity was at times impeccable—diction sorts the strong poets from the beasts. The opening lines rivet the attention in “Out on the lawn I lie in bed,” “Our hunting fathers told the story,” “Look, stranger, at this island now,” “O what is that sound which so thrills the ear” (the best of the mock ballads), “Hearing of harvests rotting in the valleys,” “A shilling life will give you all the facts,” and “Fish in the unruffled lakes.” Sometimes the poems pay off their debts to the reader; but, despite beginnings so stirring, the rest was merely Auden on automatic pilot. Readers may tire of his obsessive stereotypes of stereotypes: the “cramped clerk” and “noble robber,” the “smiling grimy boy,” the “tall professor,” and the “journalist writing his falsifications.” These are not characters but straw men to light on fire.

Auden at length can seem grunt work compared to his grand openings.

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Auden at length can seem grunt work compared to his grand openings. The cool, unexpected elevation of language and the unity of image and mystery can suddenly free fall into Auden-speak, half-lecture and half-utilitarian tract. He exhausts the poor reader with argument that busies and buries technique. Such poems tend to be long-winded—virtuous in a horse, tiresome in a politician, fatal in a poet. Auden’s light verse may lack the depth of poems with more gravitas; but the verse with higher aspirations, when written so mechanically, rarely has the cunning or supernatural dark humor of poems knocked off in sheer sport. The serious poems, then and later, are often unlovely to see and unlovelier to read.

Auden was always looking for ways to put his talent to the test, and it didn’t take much to provoke him to verse. His miscellaneous poems of the late Thirties include some hilarious occasional poems, including at least two that would be better known had he included them in a book, “Song of the Legions,” written for a bbc broadcast, and “Nonsense Song,” for an anthology of children’s verse that never reached print:

My love is like a red red rose

Or concerts for the blind,

She’s like a mutton-chop before

And a rifle-range behind.

Her hair is like a looking-glass,

Her brow is like a bog,

Her eyes are like a flock of sheep

Seen through a London fog.

There are three more stanzas in this wrestling match with Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130. It’s hard to know what children would have made of it.

Auden’s travels in the late Thirties produced Letters from Iceland (1937) with Louis MacNeice, and Journey to a War (1939) with Christopher Isherwood. (Auden provided almost all the poetry.) “Letter to Lord Byron,” the opening act of Letters from Iceland, sprawls across twelve hundred lines in rhyme royal, chock-full of sparkling remarks, tossed-off whimsies and wheezes, and slaps at this or that (“A church confession is too high for most./ But still confession is a human want,/ So Englishmen must make theirs now by post/ And authors hear them over breakfast toast). Even at bewildering length, Auden could do such squibs with eyes closed and hands in iron manacles—or zip ties, now. Though it goes on much too long, burying gorgeous passages along the way, “Letter” is a serious attempt to confront a Romantic poet equally gifted and hugely influential, one who also did not quite live to live up to his talent. There are worse things than a skittish Don Juan–ish pastiche, forever wandering from the point; yet even with the weak passages and frequent longueurs it’s the most remarkable long work Auden wrote in strict form. When he says to Byron, “You are the master of the airy manner,” it’s confession as much as accusation. If some of Auden’s poems suffer from too much planning and too little imagination, most of his best scarcely seem imagined at all—they arrive full blown, like holidays.

Journey to a War benefits from the concentration demanded by writing sonnets almost exclusively. Auden’s imagination was often jerked into focus when he had to write in repetitive forms—still, it was not always an advantage to have been touched with a facility for formal verse. He was capable of making light verse serious (and letting serious verse fall into flightiness); but it would be fruitless to seek in him the seriousness of Milton—Auden was always undercutting the visible darkness, making war and death a game (and love a war). He adored abstractions, an endless march of them, not infrequently personified. What exertion and industry he felt, if he felt any at all, stayed concealed behind the mask of wit, at one or two removes from life. The pair of sonnet sequences in Journey have the integration many of his roped-together poems lack, but some sonnets just shore up the whole or piece out a gap. If Auden seems more than usually drenched in cynicism there, cynicism in the late Thirties was a language common to those who wished to survive the falling night.

The following book, Another Time (1940), is perhaps Auden’s finest, composed of the miscellanea at which the poet so often excelled. Gone are the sluggish, overbearing sequences, like lead weights in a handicap race. The poems longer than fifty lines mostly, for once, compensate for the space required and attention demanded. The lyrics include, among his most beautiful,

Wrapped in a yielding air, beside

The flower’s soundless hunger,

Close to the tree’s clandestine tide,

Close to the bird’s high fever.

The poem almost collapses when Auden begins to lecture; but the ending, “To fresh defeats he still must move,/ To further griefs and greater,/ And the defeat of grief,” is a convincing character analysis. In a poet who loves ending on a down note, that counts as affirmation.

There are the portraits, stirring ones, of Housman (“Deliberately he chose the dry-as-dust”), Edward Lear (“he wept to himself in the night,/ A dirty landscape-painter who hated his nose”), Melville (“Towards the end he sailed into an extraordinary mildness”), Matthew Arnold (“His gift knew what he was—a dark disordered city”), an overlong and unnecessarily abstract one for Pascal, and a rich meander around Voltaire. There are extraordinary ballads, especially “As I walked out one evening” and “Miss Gee”; songs that read like poems (“O Tell Me the Truth About Love” and “Funeral Blues”); and poems that read like songs (“Roman Wall Blues”). Then there are the brilliant political poems,“Spain 1937,” which ends, “History to the defeated/ May say Alas but cannot help or pardon,” and “September 1, 1939,” which perhaps should have ended with its contentious line, “We must love one another or die.” (Auden soon thought the line a lie and dropped the stanza, later allowing it to be restored with “or die” altered to the unhappy “and die,” finally scrapping the whole thing.) To these must be added his hilarious goodbye to an England soon no longer England, “It’s farewell to the drawing-room’s civilised cry”; the elegies for Ernst Toller and W. B. Yeats (with the notorious aperçu “poetry makes nothing happen”); as well as droll one-offs like “Refugee Blues,” “Epitaph on a Tyrant,” and “The Unknown Citizen.” There are weaker poems, as always in Auden’s collections; but I cannot think of another book of the last century that contains so many poems, in so many modes, that touch brilliance.

In the following volume, The Double Man (1941), the first after Auden’s move to America in 1939, all his bad habits rear up again. “New Year Letter” begins, “Under the familiar weight/ Of winter, conscience and the State,” and has little chance of getting better in the course of over seventeen hundred lines followed by fifty pages of notes. Some of the short poems commandeered by those notes display all Auden’s good qualities except precision, conciseness, and disquieting imagery. The poet has gone on a spending spree in a secondhand philosophy shop. In a single decade, the stripling demon has became an old fogey, unable to curb his tongue before everyone else slips out of the room. The tetrameter couplets of this nearly endless poem are deftly constructed and as tedious as a mile of taffy:

We hoped; we waited for the day

The State would wither clean away,

Expecting the Millennium

That theory promised us would come,

It didn’t. Specialists must try

To detail all the reasons why.

The rational Auden was far less interesting and far less striking than the irrational Auden who began his career in a language boldly encrypted. The loving and beloved muddler still surfaces on occasion, when the poet takes off the top hat and spats and descends to light verse. The Age of Older Auden began not long after he turned thirty, and he was fortunate it did not kill off his career—but it’s hard to kill off the career of a poet like Auden.

Still, that older poet became a demented rambler as soporific as the elderly Wordsworth, and at a far younger age. Where Auden had once used rhetoric as a weapon, as a terrible old bore he used it as a shield. If The Double Man is bad, The Age of Anxiety (1947), published six years later, is even worse—yet between the two books lies For the Time Being (1944), with the most extraordinary of Auden’s long poems, “The Sea and the Mirror.” As he uses (and abuses) Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the force of his poetry returns, partly due to the staging required, partly to the staging allowed. Many critics have loved the long prose monologue that composes about half the sequence, “Caliban to the Audience.” Despite brilliant passages and some of the best of Auden’s thinking about art through art, it’s absurdly overlong and disturbingly dull, the work of Professor Dryasdust once more. Far more attractive are the monologues of the middle section (“The Supporting Cast, Sotto Voce”), including Antonio’s “As all the pigs have turned back into men/ And the sky is auspicious and the sea/ Calm as a clock, we can all go home again,” or the song of the Master and Boatswain, which begins,

At Dirty Dick’s and Sloppy Joe’s

We drank our liquor straight,

Some went upstairs with Margery,

And some, alas, with Kate;

And two by two like cat and mouse

The homeless played at keeping house.

The Christmas oratorio that finishes the book, however, is earnest, cracked at the seams, and labored as old laundry. There’s the occasional whisper of humanity—for example, the wise men who, describing their journey, mention “Tundras intense and irresponsive seas,” “vacant crowds and humming silences,” “ruined arches,” and “modern shops.” That’s not enough to refurbish the old tale.

This interim volume showed that, given the right material and the old lightness of heart, Auden could make use of all that ingenuity the more high-minded poems ignored. The dreary socially conscious verse and the even drearier socially conscious philosophizing block the barrel-chested humor in which many of the early poems thrived. More wryness might have been purchased at little price. His humor always had a spark of compassion in it, like the fire Prometheus carried in a reed. We know the punishment for that.

All Auden’s worst instincts went into The Age of Anxiety, in which, fueled with drink, three men and a woman in wartime, lounging in a Manhattan bar, discuss the Temper of the Times, the Ages of Man, or something or other. One man is a shipping clerk obsessed with mythology; the second a member of the Canadian air force; the third a naval recruit; and the woman, a Jew, a well-off buyer for a department store. Long internal monologues follow long, torturous speeches, speeches that play tag-team with yet more speeches. Some of this nonsense is hilarious because it’s hilarious (who wouldn’t long to hear, had he only written lyrics for it, the otherwise unknown song “Bugs in the Bed,” by Bog Myrtle and Her Two-Timers), yet much is hilarious because something so lame is the work of one of the major poets of the century:

The Laurentian Landshield was ruthlessly gerrymandered,

And there was a terrible tussle over the Tethys Ocean;

Commentators broadcast by the courtesy of a shaving-cream

Blow by blow the whole debate on the Peninsulas.

To love such lines you have to love Auden for the sake of the wonders he once conjured out of nowhere. There were eight books afterward (not counting collected volumes) with sunlit peaks and nightmare valleys, but the peaks are rarer than whooping cranes and the valleys common as rats.

The virtues of those later books lie largely in their miscellaneous character. In Nones (1951), there are beauties between brambles and bon-bons, craft amid the candy floss. If you don’t care for the airlessness of “Prime,”

Simultaneously, as soundlessly,

Spontaneously, suddenly

As, at the vaunt of the dawn, the kind

Gates of the body fly open

To its world beyond, the gates of the mind,

perhaps the pince-nez lecture of the forensic geologist of “In Praise of Limestone” will be to your taste: “If it form the one landscape that we the inconstant ones/ Are consistently homesick for, this is chiefly/ Because it dissolves in water.” Lectures stand atop lectures, freely descending into more hectoring than the poems can bear. (How mighty Hector has fallen.) Auden became a plodder, his poems like Frankenstein’s monster wandering the Arctic.

All the forward drive of the early poems was lost, except in the lighter verse—yet even the pitch and tone there could be hard to bear:

A robin with no Christian name ran through

The Robin-Anthem which was all it knew,

And rustling flowers for some third party waited

To say which pairs, if any, should get mated.

Such drollery sounds like Lewis Carroll dipped in printer’s ink and dripped through a worn-out coffee-filter. How much stranger, meanwhile, is a poem like “Song”:

Deftly, admiral, cast your fly

Into the slow deep hover,

Till the wise old trout mistake and die;

Salt are the deeps that cover

The glittering fleets you led,

White is your head.

A poet who can turn out an acre of sludge and then produce a piece so facetious yet unflinching remains a mystery. “The Fall of Rome” and one or two other poems are almost as good, but many seem to have drifted in from the most obscure pages of the oed or Kitchen Surgery in Five Easy Lessons. In later work, Auden descended into enervated list-making; though the light verse is often sweetly vigorous, it’s just as often trivial. He takes on large subjects even when they crush the life out of things. What great poet has written so many poems asphyxiated at birth? Still, I find myself rooting for them, trying to ignore their exasperating blather amid Kierkegaard’s shopping bags.

Memento mori became the poet’s favorite theme. He was only in his forties, though his face had already the look of a rumpled paper-bag. If the late sequences lack the spontaneity that characterized Auden’s most engaging work, it’s in part because they are sequences, called into existence so he’d have something to write about. If you write a series of bucolics from “Winds” to “Streams,” for a time you can stop the naggings of wasted imagination. Two stray poems in Nones became part of Horae Canonicae in The Shield of Achilles (1955)—thank goodness Auden didn’t write a poem titled “Midnight” in one book and follow in the next with the rest of the clock.

Such poems, written in the study and for the study, grow into verse essays without the panache Auden brought to reviewing. (The Complete Works includes six volumes of his prose.) His private delight in making the oed daytime and bedtime reading shows in poems that make insufferable use of the byways of English—“That Pliocene Friday when,/ At His holy insufflation/ (Had He picked a teleost/ Or an arthropod to inspire . . .).” They use the poet’s familiar twists and tics, drawn from the grab bag of gestures Auden made his own. Though a tour de force, the lines are so flattened and self-flattering it’s hard to recall when exactly they took over most of his poetry.

The world may be everything that is the case; but in late Auden the cases pile up, Gladstones atop satchels atop steamer trunks, until we have a Tower of Babel stitched of leather and sailcloth. Such a remarkable mind could produce so much wearisome poetry only by forgetting what it once was capable of. For the most part, in the larger of these heavyweight volumes, the late poems are interesting because they’re Auden’s and dull because they’re not very good Auden. Still, shafts of light penetrate the gloom:

I know a retired dentist who only paints mountains,

But the Masters seldom care

That much, who sketch them in beyond a holy face

Or a highly dangerous chair.

What rescues The Shield of Achilles are the miscellaneous poems between the two leaden sequences, beauties like the title poem, for the serious—or, for the less so, “Fleet Visit,” “Hunting Season,” and perhaps “The Willow-Wren and the Stare” and “‘The Truest Poetry Is the Most Feigning.’”

In the poems of Homage to Clio (1960) dullness is followed by greater dullness. You might call Auden’s sunset poems poems of morality and experience, because they lack much hint of the deliciously amoral or the pleasures of ruined innocence. The early Auden leapt on his prey, cunning as a jaguar, murderous and sure of his own genius; the later became a gentleman snoring after a heavy dinner. The desiccated old gent the poems eventually created was snipped from construction paper.

Auden died at sixty-six, but old age in his poems arrived far earlier. Of the books published in his final decade, the title sequence in About the House (1965) was apparently written by a real-estate agent in danger of losing his license. The young Auden had been replaced by a rhetorical machine, a Turkish automaton that played chess like a mage but wrote poems like a sledgehammer. For short stretches Auden could still work his magic:

Nobody I know would like to be buried

with a silver cocktail-shaker,

a transistor radio and a strangled

daily help, or keep his word because

of a great-great-grandmother who got laid

by a sacred beast.

The volumes from there to the end, City Without Walls (1969), Academic Graffiti (1971), Epistle to a Godson (1972), and the posthumous Thank You, Fog (1974), were stuffed with miscellanea: occasional poems without much occasion, picked-up pieces, songs (some commissioned), marginalia, more clerihews than were healthy for the environment, and half-hearted attempts to grasp newsworthy subjects like the moon landing—leavings of a literary life, detritus of the desk.

There were late triumphs in minor modes (“On the Circuit,” that is, the poetry-reading circuit); but the work of age consisted mostly of pronouncements from on high as painful as they were unnecessary, op-ed rages crossed with party pieces, arguments with the void. Late Auden became irrelevant to poetry and ever more intractable—the poems had the force of his thinking, but his style had hardened like a plaster cake in a bakery shop-window. If Auden at the end is a cruel disappointment, we don’t rank poets by their least work. (Otherwise most would be in trouble—think of early Keats and late Wordsworth.) There are reminders of what Auden could still do when the imagination itched enough—at the beginning of “To Goethe: A Complaint,” for instance: “How wonderfully your songs begin/ With praise of Nature and her beauty,/ But then, as if it were a duty,/ You drag some god-damned sweetheart in.”

Handsomely produced by Princeton University Press, though in irritatingly small print, these beautiful volumes are enhanced by the inclusion of poems Auden failed to summon into print or dropped along the way. This edition is an uncompromising advance on the Random House edition of Collected Poems (1978), which Edward Mendelson also edited. The poems there appeared in even mousier mouse-print and brutal sans-serif. The book was perfect bound before the method had been perfected, causing copies to fall apart before they were a few years old. Mendelson has edited these new volumes with religious ferocity, and his meticulous notes are now a necessity for any further work on the poet. While I don’t agree with all his editorial choices, he has done the old gentleman proud.

Auden was a distinguished poet but also a peculiar one. Though he rarely wrote badly, he could be as boring as the village priest whose annual Christmas sermon has come round again. Try to find a better or deeper poet of the last century, leaving out Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and perhaps Moore and Stevens. Though the recital of “Funeral Blues” in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) triggered a stunning, if brief, revival of his poetry, which scriptwriter of the current generation is likely to quote him? How many English majors have even read him?

Auden’s cleverness, his knack for savage opening lines, his sorcerer’s touch with form—all these can be appreciated, yet he now rarely enters what is called, rather stupidly, the “conversation.” Was he too formal (in manner as well as form), too high churchy and high arty, simply too measured for later ears? Or is he out of date, his poems not tuned to contemporary taste? Auden was the same generation as Elizabeth Bishop, born just four years after him; yet she speaks to a century a century later as he does not. Shadows fall upon even great poets after death, but he has already receded into the past, more Victrola than cell phone. Still, as Auden wrote in his elegy for Yeats, “The death of the poet was kept from his poems.”

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1.   The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Poems, Volume I: 1927–1939, by W. H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson; Princeton University Press, 808 pages, $60.The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Poems, Volume II: 1940–1973, by W. H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson; Princeton University Press, 1,105 pages, $60.