AUDEN IN AMERICA

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 504, 18 February 1949, Page 12

AUDEN IN AMERICA

THE AGE OF ANXIETY: A Baroque Eclogue. By W. H. Auden. Faber, London. English price, 8/6.

(Reviewed by

James

Bertram

HEN W. H. Auden, the acknowledged leader of poetry in England during the "thirties, voluntarily abdicated by migrating to the U.S.A. in 1939, he left the field of poetry clear for a surprising reconquest of the Eliot of the Quartets and another older poet, Dr. Edith Sitwell. The lost leader in his trans-atlantic wilderness flung himself strenuously, if not very profoundly, into philosophical studies: the clutter of footnotes that accompanied his New Year Letter suggested disorganisation rather than consolidation of his poetic resources. Some ground was regained in For the Time Being, a volume that announced (rather perfunctorily) the author’s assent and conversion to formal Christianity; but which contained, in The Sea and the Mirror, one of the most beautiful and sustained of all his poetic commentaries. Yet in general] it must be said that all Auden’s later work has reached British audiences slowly, end through a perhaps inevitable cloud of detraction. His literary isolation, in particular, has been painfully clear. Where has he got to now? By his decision to live and work in America, Auden abruptly reversed the pattern set by Mr. Eliot himself and by Henry James before him. The American expatriate in Europe is a familiar literary Phenomenon: the European artist in America seems less happily placed. But though Aldous Huxley and Isherwood can hardly be said to have increased their reputations from California, Auden’s American output has included much that is solid and characteristicnotably, some lyrics as musical and memorable as anything he has yet done. Above all, it has been marked by persistent attempts to construct the long serious poem of our time that Auden, of all modern poets using the English language, once seemed best qualified to write. The Age of Anxiety is the latest of these attempts (though it was written more than two years ago, and already dates rather uncomfortably in some of its detail). Published in England last September, it seems to have. been received there without much . enthusiasm: apparently the mood of post-war Europe, though lacking the social idealism of the ’thirties, has rejected both the bleak philosophy of Mr. Auden’s eclogue and the rather cold-blooded flippancy with which it is presented. This is under‘standable enough. In plan, The Age of Anxiety is a discussion between four ‘mouthpieces of the poet (they wear shadowy disguises as an elderly Irish shipping-clerk, a mature Canadian Medical ‘Intelligence officer, a not-so-young Englishwoman who has become a buyer for a New York department store, and a young American naval officer): the set-

ting is Manhattan in wartime: and the piece resolves itself into a laboured and rather fruitless debate on the decay of the West and the ills of modern urban society. The content of this discussion, which the publishers suppose "will arouse endless discussion and argument," is not very novel-it has all been in Mr. Auden before, with the exception of a faint tinge of orthodox Christian doctrine in the time-setting of All Souls’ Night, some hints in the dialogue, and a few religious quotations. The dissection of the bourgeoisie, the debunking and mortification of private worlds of fantasy and fear, is done again faithfully with the practised skill of the laboratory demonstrator: but without pity, and without hope. This wounded surgeon plies the steel, but he plies it without any sharp compassion, and with rather

too many medical-stu-dent jokes and asides. The total effect of the poem, as compared with the total effect of Mr. Eliot’s Quartets, is curiously negative and frustrated. Technically, on the other hand, as might be gathered from the poet’s classification of it, this poem is a dazzling tour de force. It should prove a gift to extension lecturers, and the range of metrical influences-from Old English to American. folksong and behop-will always astonish, if it may not always delight. The basic line of the dialogue is a modification of medieval English accentual metre; where this grows wearying (and Auden is always sensitive to musical effects, however his heart may have hardened towards his fellow men) it is lightened by lyrical variations that show all the old bravura. Where there is no room for illustration, a reviewer can only refer the expectant reader to Mr. Auden’s poem, a good history of prosody, and the New English Diction-ary-he will need them all. We have here a poetic virtuoso without living rival; it is only a pity that the burden of the music has gone sour, Auden, in a comment on his own poetry, has acknowledged a particular debt to three poets: Langland, Pope, and Dante. In the form of The Age of Anxiety the debt to Piers Plowman is obvious; and Pope, one remembers, also drew rather too heavily on fashionable philosophies that too soon went out-of-date. But of Dante-either of the Divine Love he shared, or of his own passionate and fanatic heart-there is little here; and of the rarer skill that makes a long poem more than the sum of the parts, nothing at all.