A Classic Fatigue

IN "CONSIDER," one of the best of his early poems, W.H. Auden offered his generation two destinies: "To disintegrate on an instant in the explosion of mania/Or lapse for even in to a classic fatique." It may be unfair to judge Auden's recent poetry until we can read his as yet unpublished work, particularly his love poetry, but it seems as if our verdict in his case must be one of fatigue. There are seventeen poems in Thank You, Fog--few of them are bad and they are all characteristic, but they are enervated, written on a lower energy level. Perhaps the softening for Auden thanks numbed his perceptions and dulled his creative powers. Although Auden was only 66 when he died last September, he was clearly not a man who expected to live much longer. Many of his last poems construct a "neutral" position indifferent to life and death.

"We never step twice into the same Auden," his first really good critic, Randall Jarrell observed, and went on to identify "Four Stages of Auden's Ideology." On the other hand, Auden's development can be neatly split into only two periods. At first he felt uncomfortable in his world, and rejected its economic organization, social structure, and sexual practices; even nature, things like landscape and weather, seemed sick and threatening. Auden himself, in a poem in this book called "Thanksgivings," takes a stab at explaining why he abandoned this radical alienation:

Finally, hair-raising things

That Hitler and Stalin were doing

Forced me to think about God.

Auden returned to Christianity and a certain complacence about politics, even though he maintained to his death that "human time is a city/where each inhabitant has/a political duty/nobody else can perform." But in his later work Auden is no longer interested in defining that duty, or even in dramatically exhorting anyone to perform it. He is content to inhabit the realm of "common-sense" and its unrevolutionary complement, "tall stories."

Auden finds himself at home here. He feels himself in a world where "trees are proud of their posture,/stones are delighted to lie/just where they are." His disgust for man himself, and he is willing to settle for mediocrity so long as it is not troublesome. Beasts can be admired in preference to men:

If you cannot engender

A genius like Mozart

Neither can you

Plague the earth

With brilliant sillies like Hegel

Or Clever nasties like Hobbes.

Not only does Auden seem to be arguing for the kind of standardization he once accused totalitarianism of creating, but he seems to have forfeited--and it sounds at least partly intentional--one of his best poetic voices. Auden was the greatest writer of English light verse since Byron. He could make ideas sound "truer than true" without criminal oversimplification, and in long poems like New Year Letter and Letter to Lord Byron he had proved himself as effective at satirizing the condition of modern man as at prescribing for it. In the process, he came up with such sparkling intellectual characterizations as

Self-educated William Blake

Who threw his spectre in the lake

Broke off relations in a curse

With the Newtonian universe,

But even as a child would pet

The tigers Voltaire never met

It is sad to think that Auden was reduced to calling Hegel silly and could think of no better way to describe Mozart than "a genius." Sometimes, reading Thank You, Fog, you wonder if Auden isn't parodying himself and his early poetry, from which he grew to feel so remote that he revised many of the most successful passages and even excised some of his most famous poems from new editions. While he once kept light and serious verse considerably apart, in Thank You, Fog he mixes them with such a dead-pan expression that he is rarely very serious or very witty at all.

The poet has become an old-man at the fireside not a tortured and self-torturing ego but a satisfied, even smug, old man who can whisper the sentiments of others because he feels them himself:

No voice is raised in quarrel,

But quietly We converse,

By turns relate tall stories,

At times just sit in silence,

And on fit occasions I

Sing verses sottovoce

Made on behalf of us all.

Auden's personal voice seems to have vanished along with his sense of isolation and individuality. From out point, there is a false easiness to his happiness. What has Auden done that he has the right to be so reconciled? Why do the sixties and seventies seem so much less ominous to him than the twenties and thirties?

Auden's technique as well as his sensibility seems to have atrophied by the time he wrote these last poems. In his early work he'd brought a new terseness to English poetry based on occasionally leaving out articles and inverting the usual structure of the sentence:

Order to stewards and the study of time,

Correct in books, was earlier than this

But joined this by the wires I watched from train,

Slackening of wires and posts' sharp reprimand,

In month of August to a cottage coming.

Auden was always more interested in experimenting with syntax than with things like meter and stanza and he was content to pour his unusual grammar into the molds of sonnet, quatrain and blank verse. His chief experiments in Thank You, Fog are with verbs. Poets who write in English, he tells us in one of his "Shorts," "can very easily turn nouns, if we wish, into verbs." He proceeds to do so with gusto, not only to nouns but almost every unit of syntax he can get his hands on. Some examples from a single new poem, "Archeology:" "vacancied long ago," "man...has always graved his dead," "what disastered a city," "though gluttoned on sex/And blanded by flattery," "not that all rites should be equally fonded."

Far from trying to create new relationships between the parts of speech or "wringing the neck of rhetoric," Auden seems simply to be trying to restore some of the freshness of his old voice. Sometimes he succeeds, sometimes he is merely awkward. For example, one of the best things about Auden's early poetry was the way he integrated popular speech into his own poetic voice; but that kind of success is largely a question of touch, of getting the nuance just right, and Auden doesn't seem to have been able to assimilate the characteristic phrases of the sixties as well as those of the twenties:

Out there still the Innocence

That we somehow freaked out of

Where "can" and "ought" are the same.

ANYONE WHO HAS read Auden's earlier poetry must wonder why his genius petered out in this painful, disappointing way. Some have felt Auden's return to Christianity, capitalism and official morality to be the prime betrayal of his talent. But he continues to write great poetry after these ideological changes, during the Second World War and through the early fifties. Perhaps part of the answer lies in emotion instead of ideas--it seems that, after a certain point in his life, Auden became happy. As he explains in "Lullaby," he was "released at last/From lust for other bodies,/Rational and reconciled." Some poets can write under these circumstances; Auden apparently could not. Auden wrote Thank You, Fog after the long exiles of his life--in Weimar Germany, Iceland, and New York--had ended and he was invited back to Oxford. As a long-time expatriate and as a homosexual, Auden could never have been Poet Laureate. Yet, by the end of his life, he would have been as innocuous a choice as Sir John Betjeman.

Sometimes a poet seems to outlive his greatness. Christopher Isherwood once claimed that you could give Auden a subject and a verse form and he'd bring you back a "perfect" poem in twenty-four hours. In his later years, Auden was no longer able to pour out great poetry effortlessly like this, but he could still write some excellent things, like "Epistle To A Godson." A poet of Auden's quality can never be "washed out;" for what it's worth, Auden was the greatest living English poet even in his decline. But it's still unfortunate--for us--that he ever had to decline at all. When a great poet dies at the height of his powers, we must be grief-stricken to think of what the loss of even a single day may have robbed us. But when a great poet dies after lapsing into a "classic fatigue" we can be more temperate. We are only sorry this meant we had to lose a poet before his time.