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PARTISAN REVIEW
for (without necessarily finding) in philosophy or history-he will be
disappointed. Auden's lucidity is not that of thought, but of ceaseless
thoughtfulness; not that of stable knowledge, but of the apt phrase; in
short, it is a striking quality of his poetic
medium.
Eliot says that the
poet has not a personality to express, but a medium. I don't think
Eliot meant that the poet's medium was the poet's language, but the
distinction is hard to make, especially in Auden's case. In him, percep–
tion and epithet, attitude and meaning, tone and content are one.
Mr. Hoggart devotes his first three chapters to a description of
Auden's writing in general, with the purpose of making things easier for
the new reader. There are many details which one would like to argue
about in these chapters; but a pretty just impression of Auden's poetic
medium somehow emerges from them. We are reminded of the con–
ceptual basis of his language; its resources of caricature and parody; its
sometimes rather hysterical snobbishness, which Mr. Hoggart deplores;
its extraordinary flexibility. Auden's voice is always very recognizably his
own, yet at the same time he can catch the tones of more other writers
than anyone else except Joyce. Mr. Hoggart points out passages which
sound like the Sagas, Browning, Blake, Skelton, Yeats, Eliot and others
-besides popular verse of various times and places. There is a mimetic
element at the root of his poetic gift, but it is verbal and musical, and
neither visual nor dramatic, as Mr. Hoggart rightly observes. My own
impression is that Auden's musical talent is even more fundamental to
his art than his witty conceptualizing. His best poems are carried by
the song, and by his wonderful dexterity with the arabesques of many
different verse-forms.
Auden is perhaps the most obviously gifted poet we have, with an
inborn fluency in verse comparable to Shaw's in theatrical conversation,
or Aldous Huxley's in sardonic narrative. These authors are conscious
of being able to say a great deal very well; the voluble demon presses
them day and night. The question which bothers them is
what
to say–
not whether. The last four chapters of Mr. Hoggart's book are on
Auden's themes. He shows that Auden has been talking about love (like
so many poets before him) throughout his career. But his early themes,
before he came to America, are largely Freudian and Marxian, while
since then they have been Christian by way of Kierkegaard, Niebuhr,
Charles Williams, and Eliot. Mr. Hoggart approaches Auden's themes
with his usual modesty, and he is again helpful in his elucidations and
quotations. But because of his interest in Auden's prophetic role, he
takes the themes,
if
not too seriously, at least seriously in a misleading
way. There is no doubt, for instance, that Auden, like everyone else, has
