The Humanization of Auden's Early Style

Abstract

The widespread feeling that Auden's poetic powers have declined steadily since the thirties, which is epitomized in an essay like Randall Jarrell's “Changes of Attitude and Rhetoric in Auden's Poetry,” is based on a misunderstanding of both his intellectual and stylistic evolution. By taking adequate account of the important stylistic shift which moved Auden away from his early Anglo-Saxon and Hopkinsesque addictions and made it possible for him to express a more straightforward and centrally human concern in the poetry of his middle period, we can appraise his achievement more accurately. This crucial and beneficial shift, which owes something to Yeats, begins in Look, Stranger! (1936) and is characterized by Auden's new willingness to face the dangers and failures of the period directly in lucid, reflective, fully syntactic speech. The full-throated, implicated, moving human voice which emerges here, concerned not with extravagance or exaggeration but with facing the truth and accounting for it, is largely responsible for Auden's preeminence among English poets born in this century.