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

All of these statements apply just as well to the sort of criticism Auden himself produced. Reading his prose, one is constantly aware that what matters most to him is the way what he is saying relates to his own poetry. If one does not take his pronouncements too seriously, tries to understand them in the context of his active preoccupations, and considers them as “manifestations of his debate with himself as to what he should do next and what he should avoid,” one not only grants Auden the special indulgence he hoped for as a critic, but also can mine the vast tracts of his prose for the vein of thought most precious to him as poet. Once having uncovered the lode, one should be in a position to appreciate what—as a poet—Auden was keen to accomplish. In any event, it is tempting to agree with Auden that such an objective for the study of a poet's prose is very often the only one worth the time and trouble.

Auden's prose writings and his limitary poetry, considered together, help to dispel two widely held critical opinions. One was that Auden's late devotion to Terminus was a retreat—or as one critic acerbically put it, that it had the effect of trivializing Auden's earlier notions of love, justice, and goodness and of “downgrading” these concepts “to much smaller virtues: decorum, ‘mannerly speech,’ [and] private happiness with a living companion.”¹⁷ The other opinion was that as a consequence of his latest shift in allegiance (this time to Terminus, as the numen of modest human communication) even his vaunted proficiency in versification suffered a precipitous decline, or that he had ceased to concern himself with poetic form as such. When Auden's poetic style changed in the 1960s, Auden's critics were baffled. Their only explanation was that the poetic wizard had become an ordinary man—and a boring one at that.

Looking back to the late 1930s, critics remarked that Auden's reputation as the principal poet of his generation had at that time seemed assured. He had produced most of his anthology pieces: “This Lunar Beauty,” “The Wanderer,” “Consider this and in our time,” “On This Island,” “Lullaby,” “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” and so on. But, as time passed, a great number of Auden's once-admiring critics apostatized—some as early as 1940, when Auden returned to the Christian fold after a period of spirited intellectual engagement with Freudian and Marxist ideas.¹⁸