| Chapter 2: | The Quest Perilous |
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necessity, rules, concinnity, and elegance); but, aware of the perils of imagining boundaries (of creative possibility, propriety, and self-definition) where there are none, he wondered whether he really should give the Roman god of limitations the importance he did. Auden acknowledged that “a modern poet who celebrates his inner mythological life cannot escape asking himself, “Do I really believe in my mythology and, if I do, ought I to believe it?”9 The hundreds of prefaces, articles, and reviews in which he considered the concept of limits were, in one way or another (as we see in chapter 3), intellectual explorations of that important question. The insistence with which Auden wrote about limits seems to betray not so much a certainty about their value as a desire to explore further the implications of a limitary world view.
If he cared at all about popularity or worried about the problem of communicating his sense of the importance of Terminus, it was because he wanted to prove to himself that his vision was genuine and his mythology recognized by others as a true representation of reality. He was willing to sacrifice popularity for the sake of his personal growth as a poet, but he would not forfeit intelligibility. That his sensibility was complex he recognized. He did not want to compromise it by writing the sort of poetry that panders to the taste of the public—and he had an appreciative one in the young, all through his career. For a number of reasons, which I shall present and develop in chapter 3, he considered it wrong to condescend to the generally low level of lexical and prosodic competence that so many self-styled lovers of poetry possess. In The Dyer's Hand, he explained that
Still, he was not, in the end, a snob. When he considered what a poem ought to be, it was most often from the generalized point of view of the