THE POETRY OF AUDEN AND SPENDER
PoEMS,
by W. H. Auden. Random House.
$2.50.
PoEMs,
by Stephen Spender. Random House.
$1.50.
Much has already been written about the work of the group of new
English poets, who, graduates from Oxford and Cambridge, sons of the
upperclass, deeply steeped in a literary tradition, have been drawn to the
revolutionary movement and have expressed in their poetry a philosophy
which draws much of its reasoning from the Communist analysis of
capitalist society.
The publication in America of most of their collected poems to date
indicates the wide sphere of interest both Auden and Spender have begun
to command. And one can say, that the interest, despite their technical
innovations, lies primarily in the fact that they are radical poets, that they
present in poetry the same attraction for the middle and petty bourgeoisie,
undergoing psychic as well as economic changes through the crisis, as the
political analysis and the economic treatises of other middle class intel–
lectuals. It is the role of the prophet crying in the bourgeois wilderness,
the St. John of the middleclass, prophesying inevitable doom a1 .d the day
of reckoning.
Auden writes:
and again:
"The falling leaves know it, the children
At a play on the fuming alkali top
Or on the floodinq football field, know it–
This is the dragon's day, the devourer's
..•"
"Financier, leaving your little room
Where the money is made but not spent,
You'll need your typist and your boy no more,·
The game is up for you and for the others
..."
This is the leitmotif that runs in a continual undertone of threat
throughout the poems of Auden. And like the prophet in the wilderness,
crying doom to his class, he speaks continually in parables, in riddles, in
veiled and double-meaning phrases. The Epiloque to
The Orators
is
such a parable in which Auden hints at the journey onward that he is
taking away from those who arc crying "deceiver" or warning him that
yonder is that treacherous valley. The metaphors of war arc used as
frequently as the mask of the parable. In
The Orators,
which is prob–
ably\ the most brilliant piece of satirical writing in postwar poetry,
the whole middle section, called the
Journal of an Airman,
exploits a
vastly extended war metaphor. The pages abound with the terminology
of the aviation field, the trenches and the war manuals. The Enemy is not
a foreign foe, but the Enemy of life. And in brilliant paradoxes, satirical
tour de forces, dadaist epigrams and descriptions of the battles in verse and
prose, Auden characterizes the Enemy, how he lives, what his habits are
lik:e, how he can be conquered. The sum total of these characteristics,
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