| Chapter 1: | Signposts: the Limitary in W. H. Auden's Imaginary |
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places.8 Auden's preoccupation was less with the ostensible geogra-phical, historical, and social boundaries he denotes than with the psychological ones they imply or symbolize.
Auden's early preoccupation with frontiers has so far been of greater interest to biographers and psychological critics than to fans of Auden's poetic craft. The frequent frontier imagery in his earliest work was mostly a topic; and as he put it to young Stephen Spender at Oxford, a topic is “only a peg on which to hang the poetry.”9 There is little in Auden's earliest poems or critical prose to suggest that his fascination with psycho-social frontiers or limits extended problematically to matters of poetic craftsmanship, to versification itself.
By that, I do not mean to suggest that Auden's early poems were little concerned with form. On the contrary, they were carefully fashioned. Auden's precocious ability to produce technically accomplished verses was, in fact, so obvious that a friend and fellow writer, Christopher Isherwood, was provoked to comment somewhat enviously that
The young Auden enormously enjoyed overcoming the difficulties posed by metrical, stanzaic, and other sorts of constraints. The more complicated the stanza form, the more exacting the technical limits imposed by a metre, the better he thought the fun.
The fact of his skill notwithstanding, it is the idea of limits that surfaces increasingly in Auden's work with the passage of time. His critical writings, in particular, demonstrate that his lifelong near-obsession with borders was something more than mere fanaticism about a topic he found undiminishingly useful as a poetic “peg.” Year after year, in a broad range of contexts and with remarkable sensitivity, Auden explored conditions of limitation as he found them to affect culture and the arts.