Edward Mendelson (ed.). Poems. Vols I 1927–1939 and II 1940–1973. By W. H. Auden

Abstract

Few readers and critics of Auden’s earliest publications would have believed what the blurb of the present volumes states confidently, that the writer would become ‘one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century’. Composed by a clever schoolboy and university student with the fashionable left-wing leanings of his time, working through Anglicanism and upper-middle-class predilections while also struggling with his sexuality, his early works appeared destined to become period pieces of the turbulent late 1920s and 1930s. In the end, it was not only Auden’s technical mastery of English verse but also his willingness to revise positions, change focus, and incorporate global events such as the Second World War and different cultural influences—US-American and those of post-war Europe—into his writings, that have kept them alive and relevant through the late twentieth- and into the twenty-first century. The poetry’s openness to adaptation has become clear through several recent ‘rediscoveries’, of which the first may seem misguided and shallow, when the international blockbuster Four Weddings and a Funeral (dir. Mike Newell, 1994) used ‘Funeral Blues’ (I, p. 366), originally an ironic dirge in Auden and Isherwood’s play The Ascent of F6, later an equally cynical cabaret song (I, pp. 762–3), in a sentimental scene. The second rediscovery, however, the global resurfacing of Auden’s poem on the start of the Second World War, ‘1 September 1939’ (I, pp. 375–7), after the terrorist attack on New York’s Twin Towers on 11 September 2001, demonstrated the deeper resonance of Auden’s ambivalent depiction of the conflict between private feelings and public poetic mission in relation to global events.