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PARTISAN REVIEW
tions. His chief motive is now didactic. He has become a teacher, father,
and prophet; he began as a subversive satirist, dissident son, and
enfant
terrible.
He is now trying to write in the didactic mode while at the
same time retaining the idiom of his early work, which was most suc–
cessful when it was a fusion of the ominous, the flip, the colloquial, and
the intuitive. In this new work, Auden attempts to use phrases such as
"You're not my dish really" in the same kind of context as "His .Good
ingressant on our gross occasions." The effect on one reader . at least
can only be compared to hearing that there's going to be a hot time in the
old town tonight chortled in an extremely English accent. Perhaps it is
possible to write in a style which is at once full of colloquial diction
and philosophical terminology (and this work might very well be a
stage in Auden's development of such a style) ; and perhaps it is also
possible to be didactic, dialectic, lyrical, dramatic, narrative, philosoph–
ical, concrete, and abstract in the same poem. But Auden has not suc–
ceeded in doing so. There is nothing wrong with being a didactic poet,
if one has a coherent set of ideas which one has lived with for a long
time. But Auden is not really a didactic poet, he is something better
and more important.
One also senses much that is uncertain and unclear in the ideas of
which Auden now writes so fondly. It is as if he were not really sure
that they were true, despite the schematism and the capitalized abstrac–
tions by means of which he presents them. Whether this be an accurate
impression or not, we have from years back a good example of how easy
it is to be lucid, eloquent, and utterly wrong. When Auden came to
America, his coming was compared to James's and Eliot's departure for
England as if it were the same kind of migration and not absolutely dif–
ferent: to go to Europe from America is obviously to go in the op–
posite direction from going to America from England. There is much
to suggest that an insensitivity to this overwhelming difference may ex–
plain the quality of Auden's recent work. His genius depends upon Eng–
land, upon the English scene, upon perceptions and emotions inspired
by being English. It is in America that he must become a poetic teacher
who versifies doctrines picked up carelessly and uncritically from a
dozen heterogeneous and unexamined sources. In America too Auden
/
has taken some of his most beautiful and serious poems and in his col–
lected volume attached to these poems titles which are facetious and
silly: "Shut Your Eyes and Open Your Mouth," "Heavy Date," "Such
Nice People," "Please Make Yourself At Home," "Do Be Careful," "It's
So Dull Here," "Nobody Understands Me." These are representative
instances of the kind of tourist slanginess which has infected Auden's
style as a whole and which is far from being the same thing as the
colloquial actuality which gave his work of ten and fifteen years ago so
much emotional force. There is nothing in this new book which comes
