Taming the Monster

Abstract

‘Auden is a monster’. With this neat formula Geoffrey Grigson sums up Auden’s position among English poets at the height of his fame in 1937. For Grigson, the dominant feature of Auden’s poems is their refusal (or inability) to integrate themselves into established literary patterns: Auden does not fit. Auden is no gentleman. Auden does not write, or exist, by any of the codes, by the Bloomsbury rules, by the Hampstead rules, by the Oxford, the Cambridge, or the Russell Square rules.1 Auden’s poetry denies reverence to contemporary standards, such as free verse, and refuses to accept the great models of its time, Yeats and Eliot. Instead it prefers decidedly unfashionable poetic ancestors, such as Housman and Kipling, and forms as dusty as Icelandic sagas and Anglo-Saxon verse. But just as much as it ignores current norms and fashions, it is eager to create a tradition of its own. Together with the writings of other young authors, such as Stephen Spender, Cecil Day Lewis, Christopher Isherwood, and Edward Upward, Auden’s poetry aims to set standards whose benchmark becomes the problematic adjective ‘new’. New Signatures and New Country are the anthologies of these writings, New Verse and New Writing their periodicals.r ‘New’ always means more than mere artistic innovation - as it does in the various modernist avant-garde movements. It always includes a political stand, usually a left-wing position that occasionally drifts towards doctrinaire Marxism.KeywordsContemporary StandardPolitical ConvictionYoung AuthorPolitical StandEnglish PoetThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.