Next comes "Letter to Lord Byron", which is a jollity, followed by poems from the period 1933-1938, the glory years of "Paysage Moralisé", "Night Mail" and "Musée des Beaux Arts". When reading these early poems what one is responding to is not just the intellectual showiness but the sheer sexiness of Auden's language, as in the post-coital conclusion to "Consider this and in our time": "To disintegrate on an instant in the explosion of mania / Or lapse for ever into a classic fatigue."
"Who stands the crux left of the watershed, / On the wet road between the chafing grass". No one could possibly deny the brilliance of Auden's early crack-of-doom phrase-making, which maps the mythic and the psychological on to a landscape. Thus, Part II of the Collected Poems gathers together all of those poems from the period 1927-1932 which Auden himself wished to preserve there are 38 of them. Rather than representing the poems as they appeared in the original collections (as Peter McDonald has done in his magnificent new edition of Louis MacNeice's Collected Poems) Mendelson has again chosen to honour Auden's own peculiar habit of radically editing and then rearranging his poetry in roughly chronological order, with each period representing what Auden believed was "a new chapter in my life". It all seems extremely portentous and strained, but then Auden was only 21 when he wrote it.
It's a shame then that the Collected Poems begins with "Paid on Both Sides", Auden's 1928 show-off play, which is a kind of revenge tragedy featuring dream sequences, soliloquies, a Chorus, Father Christmas, and characters called Bo, Po, and "The Man-Woman". In the year of the centenary of Auden's birth, and with the publication of the new Collected Poems, readers should perhaps try to overcome irrational prejudice or excitement, and take a long hard look at the evidence.Įdward Mendelson, Auden's literary executor, has added a new "note" to his earlier preface, which sets out to reposition Auden not as a heartless brainbox, but as the great 20th-century poet of love.
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