Auden, Hopkins, and the Poetry of Reticence

Abstract

These comments by W. H. Auden, in The Dyer's Hand, are complementary and consistent, just as they are consistent with Auden's remark that Americans are generally far more reticent than Englishmen about showing their deepest feelings.1 They are consistent, as well, with Auden's telling friends how much he valued reticence. To him it meant, in part, refusal to speak in public or write specifically about those matters he considered most private, that is, emotions involving sex and religion. The poet whose apparent lack of reticence on at least second point most bothered him-the poet to whom he felt closer than to Frost or Donne, who of course influenced his verse more-was Gerard Manley Hopkins. A number of critics have noticed in passing how early Auden in particular both imitates and parodies style of Hopkins-his ellipses, inverted syntax, and oddities of diction. As John Fuller comments, poems of late twenties show the impact of Hopkins and Eliot at its most extreme.2 But, like Monroe K. Spears and Richard Hoggart, he recognizes manner if not always matter of Hopkins in later verse as well.