424
PARTISAN REVIEW
has become smooth, the voice
is
no longer the sergeant major's, the
de.finite article is back in use. Few poems in
Look, Stranger
contain
difficulties of syntax or diction: most of them express the knowledge
that "What by nature and by training, We loved has little strength
remaining", the attempt
"To think no thought but ours,
To hunger, work illegally, and be anonymous"
at war with the idea and fact of
love,
which is seen as something
fascinating, dangerous, and (almost) wrong. ("The voice I hear and
wish I did not"). One cannot be less than sympathetic to the effort
in
these poems to link the two worlds, the outer world of political effort
and the inner one of private virtue and affection. This was the time of
the Spanish Civil War, the Popular Front, of manifestos and protesta·
tions: the time when petty-bourgeois writers were able most nearly to
approach a progressive, not purely detached, social position. But "love",
which represents always the private life, stands in the way; and the
opposition between love and necessary action is, for Auden and his
friends, not at all an absurd one.
The increase of directness in
Look, Stranger
is made at a cost-: there
is a lessening of power and incisiveness, a disturbing vagueness in some
poems; and the prevailing tone is still, after all, that of one intellectual
to another:
"The creepered wall stands up to hide
The gathering multitude outside
Whose darkness hunger worsens,
Concealing from their wretchedness
Our metaphysical distress,
Our kindness to ten persons."
The distress
is
metaphysical, not fully realized: if
it
were fully realized
it could not be expressed in such terms.
Look, Stranger
is
Auden's turning point. In the years following,
up to the present time, there are some fine poems, particularly the thirty
sonnets at the end of
I ourney to a War;
but generally there is an increas–
ing looseness and foggy idealism of thought, expressed by frequent use of
capital letters ("An Elk's Congress of the capital letters": Mr. Jarrell)
to convey things which are intangible, or Too Big To Be Said. A failure
of technique keeps pace nicely with the collapse of thought; similes
become mechanical or abstract, the necessary avoidance of the "poetic"
ends in bad prose (see the poem on Freud). Everywhere an inability
to come to terms with the real world going on outside is expressed by a
disintegration and slackness in the form of the verse. Mr. Jarrell has
described the process in detail in his
Southern Review
article: it has been
a process distressing to watch.
A ttFascism of the Intellectuals"
This equivocal English air has still a faint smell of nineteenth·
century Liberalism; the ghost of parliamentary power hangs about us,
