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

Knowing, and Judging, Auden sketched his own development as a poet, conceived of it as a voyage, and noted his need of principles (“a guesswork map”) to guide him in his uncertain future efforts (“which may fail”). He admitted to having wandered rather aimlessly for twenty years, content in his continuous discovery of the extent and variety of his poetic gifts, and confessed his newly recognized desire for change and a definite program. But at that moment in 1956, he had not yet worked out exactly what his future program would be—beyond reaffirming his commitment to beauty and extraordinariness in poetry, for he still held that the form of a poem “must be beautiful, exhibiting, for example, balance, closure and aptness to that which it is the form of.”¹⁷ His observations indicate, however, that he did have some idea of the difficulties ahead of him. While he insisted that in a poem “the use of language is deliberately and ostentatiously different from talk,” he suggested that certain poems—to be apt—must employ “the diction and rhythms of conversation… as a deliberate informality” and that “it is over this last quality of aptness that most of our aesthetic quarrels arise.”¹⁸

Making, Knowing, and Judging introduces into Auden's prose works the first note of admitted insecurity about his opinions. Describing his feelings upon writing something genuinely new (not “a self-imitation”), he admits to thinking, “‘Either this is quite good or it is quite bad, I can't tell.’ And, of course, it may very well be quite bad.”¹⁹ Gone is the self-assured tone that enabled him earlier to write, no doubt sincerely, such characteristically dogmatic phrases as “The only way to counter this lie …,” “There is always a danger of…,” and the like (emphasis added).²⁰ Edward Mendelson notes that Auden wrote just one poem in 1960 (his self-estranged “You”), marking “a year of almost complete poetic silence before he could look back” on the fallow period and write poetry again.²¹ He composed his remarkable “A Change of Air” in 1961.

By 1964, in the Kenyon Review's symposium on Auden's “A Change of Air,” Auden could succinctly express what had latterly become the object of his quest: