“Upon Our Sense of Style”: W. H. Auden’s “New Year Letter” and Catastrophe

Abstract

ABSTRACTW.H. Auden’s “New Year Letter” (or The Double Man as it was titled in the U.S.) was published in 1941 to generally negative reviews. Reviewers judged the poem’s neoclassical form to be too abstract and even a “renunciation of modernism”. But the poem’s conceptual ambition, its subtleties of poetic voice, constant shifting of styles and tonal registers, and the texture of the world mapped by the poem all seem to belie its neoclassical formal surface. “New Year Letter” is most striking in its dialectical flow of ideas and the relationship this flow forges with its potential readers. With the dialectical complexity, tonal variation, and stylistic discontinuities in “New Year Letter”, Auden imposes on his readers a new reading regime. The demanding new reading regime and the challenging stylistic features of his poem represent Auden’s bequest to contemporary poets in the face of modern catastrophe.