| Chapter 2: | The Quest Perilous |
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Responding to Auden's obvious commitment to order, necessity, rules, concinnity, and elegance, many critics have labelled him a neo-Augustan.6 If he was a classicist of the neo-Augustan stamp, he was a very modern one, in no way a throwback to an earlier epoch. It would be unfair not to recognize that his lifelong preoccupation with self-limits and personal growth amounted to an extended criticism of the particular deficiencies of an Augustan world view.
The Augustan virtues were, Auden saw, public virtues, difficult of cultivation in a post-Romantic, near-anarchic “Age of the Individual.” In matters concerning art, he believed, common sense and a generally accepted standard of good taste practically no longer exist. While he expected that common sense and good taste might yet be able to govern certain sorts of public bahavior, Auden recognized that
In the life of a poet, that “decisive once-for-all instant of vision” is transformed into a personal, poetic passion. The poets of the English Enlightenment were no exceptions, for as Auden explained,
The Augustan passion for civilization and intelligence was Auden's too. From it sprang his serio-comic reverence for Terminus, the symbolic figure who emerged at the center of his inner mythological life. But Auden saw how very difficult it was in his own day to live a civilized, intelligent life. He believed truly in Terminus (in order, self-discipline,