And we are talking 'English language' poet here. Unless one is fluent in every language that poetry has been written in, I don't know how one can say. Translations are interesting, useful, possibly even essential, but they aren't the 'poetry'.
I was alerted recently to some lines by Auden, including,
Time that tires of everyone.
And they were followed up in short order by the review in Saturday's Times of September 1, 1939: A Biography of a Poem by Ian Sansom which would be very much the sort of title to order notwithstanding anything in any circumstances. So, rather than embark upon Doktor Faustus by Thomas Mann that has waited long enough and can wait a bit longer, I picked out Edward Mendelson's Later Auden that I bought many years ago but never read.
How many biographies of one's fourth (let's say) favourite poet does one need to read when there aren't any of one's favourite. Three seemed enough. Carpenter, Osborne, Davenport-Hines.
And yet Mendelson impressed so much in his first two chapters that Early Auden was ordered in a less salubrious edition straightaway. As James Marriott, the reviewer in The Times says,
I could read trivia about him all day.
Except Mendelson is no William Hickey and he's not trivial. If I was intending to be a leading authority on Auden, I might need the depth of detail he provides on New Year Letter but I'm not and so I don't. I rarely miss a word of any book I'm interested in and am surprised at those who skim or speed read any book but I have to admit I jumped a paragraph or two that I might never need there. I'll know where it is if I ever need it.
But reading Mendelson, with Collected Shorter Poems 1927-57 close by, I remembered how I thought Auden might be the Greatest Poet of the C20th many years ago. In the meantime one has failingly tried to avoid any such grandiose debates but if you decide there must be such a thing the next step is to identify them.
One thing that counts against him is his 'facility', just how much wisdom he manages to churn out, sometimes rhymed in C18th style, that makes it look too easy if not trite. On the other hand, his humanity, liberalism and anti-fascism is to be admired and he tried his best in the times he lived in, which, considering the circumstances in Europe circa 1939, are starting to look not dissimilar to those the failure of democracy and shift to the bone-headed right that are happening again now.
So much for learning from history. It only takes two generations for us to forget.
If we did need to appoint a Greatest Poet of the C20th, W. H. Auden is a candidate, if not the 'front-runner', that epithet that had seemed to have become pre-fixed to Boris Johnson's name in his virtually unopposed escorting to the job he always wanted. Most kids in the generation before him just wanted to be train drivers.
At least there are other choices available for those who don't like Auden enough.
Elizabeth Bishop might be too much the 'poet's poet', like an insider job who hasn't passed into the language via a Hugh Grant film and a poem like Stop all the clocks. The Greatest Poet might need to have broken through beyond poetry circles and written Night Mail even if many who know that poem don't know who wrote it.
Philip Larkin has passed into the language with a handful of memorable lines and been seriously suggested for the title in the twenty years since I heard Anthony Thwaite say, 'great, minor poet, like George Herbert'.
Eliot had been a 'good thing' a few decades ago when it looked as if he had changed everything, was the very touchstone of the 'modern' and there must be much we should still be grateful to him for. But I seem him friendless in the market after all he did, not only for racism but also for the unconsolably highbrow, which also rules out Geoffrey Hill, John Ashbery, Ezra Pound and, extending in other ways, those not highbrow enough and those who thought it was all about them. One might excuse Sylvia's 'confessionalism' because she was also a compellingly wonderful artist but none of the others can be considered because, of course,
Some might say dear old Thomas Hardy and Edward Thomas are in the running.
The form is all in the books. If it's a question worth finding an answer to.
There might not yet be a consensus about who was the Greatest Poet of the C19th so it might be a bit soon to start dishing out prizes for that which was still being written only twenty years ago.