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

On that same occasion, he expressed chagrin that all four of the Review's “readers,” including his friend Stephen Spender, had missed the point of “A Change of Air”; and, assuming responsibility for at least part of the poem's failure to communicate his intended meaning, Auden wondered whether his strategy for approximating prose (including the device of addressing the reader as “you”) might not have been at fault. “I must confess to feeling a little sad—am I to blame?—that none of them seems to have spotted the kind of poem it is.”²³ The poem was meant, he said, to be a parable.

The problem with parables is that readers may analyze their import dispassionately, assess their aesthetic value as narratives, and never identify themselves ethically with the parable's characters. Auden must have wondered whether any poetic technique existed that would ensure such an identification on the part of his readers. The evidence of his critical writings suggests that, while Auden had long believed that great art makes itself felt as parable, after 1964, he was most often preoccupied with a related and particularly puzzling dilemma. He sought a way of embodying an intimate tone of voice in parabolic poems at once “beautiful” and “drab,” at once “ostentatiously different from talk” and “conversational”—the desiderata espoused in Making, Knowing, and Judging.

Auden's solution—long in coming to him and such as it was—had two components. It required both a somewhat different—but decidedly unliberal—approach to versification and what John Reichert has called “a direct mode of expression,”²⁴ with all its attending epistemic responsibilities. It involved the use of multiple perspectives on the subjects of his poems and, even more decidedly, a shift away from the second-person and into the first-person-singular point of view. A reader responding