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

Like the others, Grant objected to Auden's increased reliance on “urbane” statement (a “muffled” sort of proclamation). Writing in 1972, Calvin Bedient expressed more or less the same thought:

Bedient concluded his review of Epistle to a Godson with what was almost a surly accusation: Auden “has become so much a monument that he has begun to sound like one” (20).

The kinds of things Auden had been doing with experimental accentual-syllabic metres and classical forms went at first almost totally unremarked.²⁴ Only one critic, F. W. Bateson, noted—and only sketchily—that Auden was versifying by a different set of rules, as strict and demanding of ingenuity as ever, but in our day, so uncommon as to be unapparent to readers accustomed to more thunder or to more audible and familiar artifice in what they appreciate.”²⁵ But Bateson did not explain what he meant.

Most of the earliest critical response to Auden's limitary poetry indicates that Auden—according to his plan—had managed to avoid razzle-dazzle. But some critics, mistaking the changes in tone and style for a decline in powers, not only recommended that the last poems be forgotten but revised their old opinions of his earlier works as well, just as Bateson himself had done, finding them less admirable than they had originally seemed.²⁶

Auden's quest for appropriate poetic subjects and for a plainer and more modest poetic style was, indeed, a quest perilous. Much of the limitary poetry he produced was neither appreciated nor even understood. Whether what Auden found near the end of his search will be considered, in the end, rare and redeeming or “comparatively unexciting” and unremarkable (as many critics still think), will not be decided by me. But if an intelligent opinion is to be formed as to the relative virtues and vices of Auden's last poems, that opinion should, I think, be based on a genuine effort to understand their various forms and their