W. H. Auden's Poetry: Mythos, Theory, and Practice By R. Victoria ...

as can “a true passion” for language since “a poet's vision is probably given him in the beginning once and for all, and his life task is to explore it further and express it more completely.”³

Auden conceived of his life's task as an exploration of possibility and a celebration of freedom and agape. Many of his poems describe the difficulties of allegorical voyages of search and discovery. Even so, it was not the carrying out of a quest that interested Auden so much as the questor's lively awareness of the process itself. Significantly, Auden's quests hardly ever impelled him or his heroes into real deserts. Human landmarks could always be located. Availing himself of these, he hoped to become increasingly alert to the demands of particular situations along the way and not to lose his sense of direction or the right spirit for the adventure.⁴ His life-long, wide-ranging reading was part of it.

While he recognized that an awareness of limits is crucial to emotional and intellectual growth, Auden had a genuine fear of rigidity and inflexibility. Growth, he frequently reminds readers, always involves the expansion or displacement of old boundaries. In Auden's private mythology, no matter how rugged the terrain or how arduous the quest, the traveler passes boundary marks as he proceeds, and they are emblematic of that flexible sort of containment that accompanies healthy development and orderly progress. He recognized, too, that often just the presence of boundary marks satisfies the human need for contact and closure.⁵ He was fond of lists and categories and of scrapping them.

The very idea of borders stirred Auden into producing poetry. As early as 1937, Geoffrey Grigson noted that “one of the most frequent images used by Auden is the image of the frontier”⁶; Grigson's apt observation became a critical commonplace, but sometimes with snide undertones. “The way to imitate an early Auden poem,” wrote Paul Fussell, “is to get as many frontiers into it as possible.”⁷ For Grigson as for Fussell, the word frontier implied the border between two countries—not, as it does to Americans, an untamed region beyond a settled area. In Auden's first two volumes of verse, nearly all of the poems are “frontier” poems in either a literal or a figurative sense. There, borders are sacred, sometimes frightening, often dangerous, but invariably “numinous” and vitalizing