Top 6 - W. H. Auden

Just reading Alan Bennett's The Habit of Art and so it might be a good time to feature Wystan here.

Having elsewhere here nominated Musee des Beaux Arts as my favourite poem, that is obviously a given. However well-known and widely quoted it becomes, and despite Tom Paulin being most derogatory about its 'complacency', I still love it and choose it above even the highest points of my other most admired poets. It might not be complacency exactly but a stoic acceptance and a wonderfully controlled meditation that makes its way between mundane and transcendant thoughts with the utmost confidence and savoir faire.

In the Collected, there are numerous candidates surrounding Musee, suggesting that the late thirties was when the artist was at the height of his powers. These are poems beyond critical category that are simply all they need to be, accessible but profound, beautifully-made and balanced. Not showing off Auden's virtuoso facility for its own sake but neither drifting towards the sentimental or overtly political, which he might at other times have done. Brussels in Winter isn't well-known enough; The Novelist, as well as everything else it does, agrees with what I've long thought, that their job is much harder than the mere poet's.

I don't want to include The Fall of Rome because for reasons I can't quite say, it's either seemed too easy or too generalized or something, but the more one looks at it the better it gets and one's subconscious objections become reasons for liking it.

It might be a received wisdom to accept the idea that Auden became rambling and meandering in his later poems but it could just be that he developed a discursive style, and one perhaps always ought to move on to new ways of doing it, if only for one's own sake, to stay interested in what one's doing. So, although there is always the didactic 'mother hen' in Auden explaining to us quite categorically what he has decided, I'll have The Common Life from About the House which is a comfortable book to read in one's slippers.

Which only leaves one more place and there are at least a dozen candidates to fill it. Having said we don't want to get too sentimental (like those other sickly valentines do) and there are a few Auden poems that have become so well-known one almost tires of them, it'll be The More Loving One because that's what he always was.

It might not look like the real Top 6 to posterity or to many Auden readers but in doing these little summaries, it has been the most difficult to pick, the most overwhelming choice and it is inevitably betting without the Collected Longer Poems.

Footnote. I knew that the facial skin condition was a rare medical syndrome but what I didn't know was that Racine also had it. Thanks to Alan Bennett for that.