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

Also, in the early 1960s Auden produced a series of critical and poetic works directly invoking the Roman god Terminus. By that time, Terminus was no longer for Auden the rather simple, antique god of boundary marks whom we find described in most reference books on classical mythology, but the numen of all limits and boundaries, of rules, grammars, and games, of translation, and, thus, of all forms of communication. By logical extrapolation, Terminus even developed into the symbolic embodiment of reticence and modesty. Auden's open invocation to Terminus occurred at the same time that he was articulating and adopting a new group of poetic objectives.

When Auden's sense of the sacredness of frontiers and his reverence for complex patterns of versification converged in the mid-1960s to produce a major change in his style, he desired no longer to write dazzling poems. From then on, he wanted his poems' nuanced diction to express his thoughts and feelings with keen but unaffected precision. He wanted his rhythmic patterns to seem casually conversational but to be respectful of rules. He wanted the immediate and overall effect of his poetry to be that of a clear and sinuous prose, but he also wanted his poems to prove upon closer inspection to be as elaborately artful in their own way as Pope's couplets or Byron's stanzas in ottava rima were in theirs. In short, he wanted his poems to be modest and to speak plainly but to retain surreptitiously that extraordinariness which characterizes all the best, most carefully crafted verse. Not until the last decade of his life, when he was forthrightly invoking “Terminus the Mentor,” did Auden actually discover to his delight the prosodic means by which to accomplish all of this. After 1965, nearly all of his major poems are formally limitary. At about this time, too, he began to be hopeful of “dream readers” who might recognize what was really going on in his most recent versification.

So far, critics have not fully appreciated the links between Auden's perennial preoccupation with limits, borders, and frontiers and his later poetics, or aesthetics—except vaguely and in relation principally to Auden's Christian beliefs. A number of studies of Auden's critical writings