I've been having my own little Auden Festival in anticipation of Ian Sansom's new book which is due imminently.
After last week's casual chat about the Greatest Poet of the C20th, Wystan is installed as a slightly uneasy 9/4 fav in an open heat except I've no idea how the result would be decided. As we have recently seen, you can't trust people to vote sensibly on matters of importance.
Edward Mendelson's Later Auden can be heavy going at times, analysing in great detail the longer poems, their references to Jung or Kierkegaard and Wystan's unremitting search for liberal imperatives, Christian doctrine and literary properness. One has to admire his doggedness. Auden's as well as Mendelson's.
Alongside that, The English Auden is inappropriately the collected works of the Early Auden period, before the watershed moment of the emigration to America. I didn't necessarily need it, being in possession of other Selected and Collecteds, but it has long been one of those things one ought to have anyway and there's plenty in it I didn't have, not least the whole story of the poems he wrote in 1938/9, which represent a golden age. Who could be without both versions of Brussels in Winter so that one can see the revision from,
To warm the heartless city in his arms.
to,
To take the shuddering city in his arms.
I've lived with the 'shuddering' for so long it looks obviously right but the longer I look, the less sure I am. Being such a reviser leaves more than one version out there, which might be cheating, but when they are both that good, one can try to live with both and the poem benefits exponentially. The same is of course true of September 1, 1939, in which he changed his mind completely, from 'or' to 'and', but once you've read both versions you can't have one without the other.
Two facing pages in Later Auden quote lines that bring to mind later poets who owe Auden some debt, if not for these specific references. One Circumlocution is a poem I had not seen before but there it is,
Poems which make us cry direct us to
Ourselves least apt, least kind, least true
which looks like Wystan smuggling in more of his generalized wisdom under the beguiling magic of rhyme and vague truism but the 'kind' and 'true' set off alarms in a Larkin scholar for their echo found in Talking in Bed and,
It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.
On the opposite page, Mendelson quotes 'the end of a lecture on Don Quixote',
Art is not enough.
which brings to mind Sean O'Brien's Completists from the recent Europa.
As personalities, one might think Auden, Larkin and O'Brien as dissimilar but as poets I wouldn't put them too far apart. There is any amount of essay questions to be invented around that. Have them on me, they are yours.
But the case for Auden becomes more compelling with the disarmingly straightforward, Their Lonely Betters,
http://www.thebeckoning.com/poetry/auden/auden4.html
Goodness Gracious. He had retrieved English poetry from the excesses of high modernism to make it like Hardy only better to that extent, in 1950, by which time some commentators thought he had lost it in a deterioration into prolix inconsequentiality. The 9/4 is suddenly looking like value.
I was indebted to a schoolfriend's enthusiasm for Auden in the first place whose reading of Stephen Spender's memoirs and other anecdotes did as much as my own reading to put him where he is in my charts. The relationship to Eliot doesn't bear much comparison with my own maxim that one might admire David Bowie more but one loves Marc Bolan but some might see the point.
Somewhere upstairs there must still be the letter from Stephen Spender to my friend who had, ambitiously on my behalf, sent him some of my juvenilia. I was about 18, what else was there to send. He tried his best, Mr. Spender, who was by then all that was left of the Auden Group and so the closest we could get, and he really need not have been so gentle. I've done better since but still regret the few times I've bothered senior poets with my efforts on my own account.
As Larkin would have stamped it, why should he care.