Auden: Many Returns

At fifty (February 21), Auden is an imposing sight. His bibliography, if compiled, would reveal a bulk, variety and permanence of verbal output with which no other living poet in English—not even Robert Graves— could compete: stage plays, radio scripts, opera librettos, adaptations; prefaces, anthologies, essays, reviews; lectures, recordings, travel diaries, translations; besides every imaginable sort of verse, from song lyrics to sonnet sequences, didactic couplets to dramatic oratorios, sestinas to DrottKvaetts, and literally hundreds of prosodic feats which no one else in six hundred years of English poetry has surpassed.

At fifty, too, Auden’s creative life continues to arrange itself as tidily as one of his poems. Just as his First Period ended with his arrival in America in 1939, so, now, his Second Period—the American one, of exile, inner life, religious quickening, and aloneness—ended last June 11, when he delivered his inaugural lecture as Oxford’s Professor of Poetry. The Wandervogel had come home. Undergraduates cheered. The Listener printed his picture in cap and gown, as undapper as ever, but at ease now, authoritative, admired, content. A Third Period, of calm, success, propriety, was under way.

RP

About the Author

Robert Phelps

Featured Tags

Manage following

Literature

Poetry

At fifty (February 21), Auden is an imposing sight. His bibliography, if compiled, would reveal a bulk, variety and permanence of verbal output with which no other living poet in English—not even Robert Graves— could compete: stage plays, radio scripts, opera librettos, adaptations; prefaces, anthologies, essays, reviews; lectures, recordings, travel diaries, translations; besides every imaginable sort of verse, from song lyrics to sonnet sequences, didactic couplets to dramatic oratorios, sestinas to DrottKvaetts, and literally hundreds of prosodic feats which no one else in six hundred years of English poetry has surpassed.

At fifty, too, Auden’s creative life continues to arrange itself as tidily as one of his poems. Just as his First Period ended with his arrival in America in 1939, so, now, his Second Period—the American one, of exile, inner life, religious quickening, and aloneness—ended last June 11, when he delivered his inaugural lecture as Oxford’s Professor of Poetry. The Wandervogel had come home. Undergraduates cheered. The Listener printed his picture in cap and gown, as undapper as ever, but at ease now, authoritative, admired, content. A Third Period, of calm, success, propriety, was under way.