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

I suggest in chapter 3 (“Terminus the Mentor”) how thoroughly the idea of limits, of borders and frontiers, works its way into much of what is most provocative in Auden's reflections.

For most of his life, while he was paying his bills with the cash he earned by producing his prose pieces, Auden was steadily acquiring a reputation for making splendid poems, technically brilliant works with stunning rhyme schemes, mostly in accentual and accentual-syllabic meters, and in complicated traditional forms. His creative responsiveness to technical limits was at a high level of virtuosity, especially between the late 1930s and the early 1960s. But during these years, his technical interest in limits and his interest in limits as subject matter were running along paths that did not meet. Not until the mid-1960s did Auden make the poetically significant, explicit connection between the two important sources of his poetry—(a) the special spirituality (the “numinous” quality) for him of boundaries and (b) the stimulus of formal strictures and technical problems. When he made the conceptual connection, the character of his poetry changed completely.

Had Auden's concern with limits and borders remained as markedly dichotomous as it was in the 1920s and 1930s, there would have been no provocation for this particular study. What has compelled my attention is the insistent way Auden's heterogeneous thoughts regarding limits and borders worked themselves into his poetics and, especially towards the end of his life, influenced and altered his manner of writing verse.

It was not until the early 1960s that Auden began tentatively and informally to develop the poetics for what I call his “limitary poems.” I have chosen the adjective limitary to describe the poetry of his latest phase for several reasons. In the 1960s Auden wanted—more, even, than before—to produce genuine poems about boundaries, contact, and growth; but he now wanted those poems located near the frontier between poetry and prose—located there by the ear but still metrically exact and ceremonious. Moreover, he wanted his poems to respect the epistemological and linguistic limitations of language while exploiting the expressive possibilities of metered expression to the fullest extent. There is a wholeness about the concern that had not existed in the earlier poetry.