W. H. Auden as Seriocomic Critic

Abstract

W. H. Auden is a brave rhetorician when, The Dyer's Hand, he plays with self-refuting syllogisms to define and qualify his authority as a poet writing criticism: am always interested, he writes, in hearing what a poet has to say about the nature of poetry, though I do not take it too seriously. As objective statements his definitions are never accurate, never complete, and always one-sided. Not one would stand up under a rigorous analysis (52). Predictably, readers have used such sophisticated modesty as a pretext for treating him not seriously enough. His biographer Humphrey Carpenter sloughs off apparent inconsistency thus: often his life, Auden adopted a dogmatic attitude which did not reflect the full range of his opinions, and which he sometimes flatly contradicted (xv). Carpenter, like many critics, fails to recognize a strategy Auden's use of emphatic pronouncement. In his mature critical writings Auden developed a style, by turns assertive and self-qualifying, that acknowledged the process of trial, error, and correction by which his judgments were being shaped. Auden's acknowledgment of ineluctable limitation and error had benefits as well as risks. When he lived up to its discipline, correcting and clarifying his theoretical principles, they refreshed his art so that it changed and developed coherent ways throughout his life. Furthermore, conceding his critical principles were but partial truths, he set them into strenuous dialectic relation with the debates of other