| Chapter 1: | Signposts: the Limitary in W. H. Auden's Imaginary |
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Up to about 1965, most critics who denounced Auden's poetry did so for ideological reasons. After 1965, when Auden published About the House, the critical apostasy shifted its grounds. Critics and reviewers generally deplored the loss of tension in Auden's last poems. They found the poems of his final decade inferior to his earlier work because, as Reed Whittemore put it, Auden's latest works seemed prosy, had come “reiteratively to proclaim man's incapacities, his inability to take charge, direct his fate.”19 There is no poetry in a proclamation, Whittemore reprovingly suggested, and others agreed.
Gerald Nelson described Auden's last poems as reflecting “the stance of a man who has tried to understand himself and the world and has given up.”20 Nelson attributed the decline in Auden's versification to a slackening in the “tension between the poet and his experience” (138) and added that
Nothing could be farther from Auden's intended message.
Like Nelson, George T. Wright identified loss of tension as the single, most serious fault of Auden's last volumes, calling the poetry in them “comparatively unexciting” because “it has passed through, has survived, and no longer therefore fully expresses this terrifying anxiety as to whether the world, or anything, is really there.”21 Puzzled by Auden's new and purposely “drab” manner, Wright does not recognize in Auden's last few volumes another sort of anxiety—a vitalizing anxiety, as exciting in its own way as the “terrifying” one of Auden's earlier work.
While asserting that “it is certainly true that the relaxed tone involves some loss,” Damian Grant characterized Auden's poetic “failure” this way: