The House of Auden

...For even more than Ransom or Tate, it was Auden whose verse became the basis of that academic orthodoxy in opposition to which the poetry of the '60s has declared its independence...

...It therefore excels in dealing with public occasions, but is remarkably arid in depicting private passion, the particularities of experience, and the sheer look of the quotidian world...

...It has reduced the sum total of unearned moral reflection with which our poetry had been overburdened for two decades...

...Reading Auden's poetry at the present moment, one cannot help being aware—quite apart from the success or failure of individual poems—of the extent to which the prevailing mode of imagist and confessional verse, of an utterance that is at once highly pictorial and nakedly personal, has been directed against his style above all...

...And it is characteristic of all these poems that whenever "unmythical mortals"—including, presumably, the speaker of the poems—make their appearance, they are promptly re-mythicized and sent soaring again into that empyrean of archetypal postures and universal truths that is the poet's sole concern...

...As it is these latter concerns which, under the joint influence of Robert Lowell and the late William Carlos Williams, are just now dominating our poetry, Auden's voice has inevitably lost some of its old authority...

...About the House (Random House, 84 pp., $3.00) is altogether too slight a production to alter anything but one's estimate of Auden's powers...

...And by far the most personal of the poems in this series is "The Cave of Making," a rumination on the poet's workroom which turns into a chatty elegy for the late Louis MacNeice...

...As it is precisely this distance which Auden's rigorous diction has been concerned to perpetuate, his verse shows itself, by contrast, to belong to the ancien regime, to a world in which the poet could still assume the existence of a spacious common ground— social, moral, and spiritual—inhabited by himself and his audience...

...The poem opens: Don Juan needs no bed, being jar too impatient to undress, nor do Tristan and Isolde, much too in love to care for so mundane a matter, but unmythical mortals require one, and prefer to take their clothes off, if only to sleep...

...Whatever its pretensions or omissions, this radical shift in poetic loyalty has restored poetry once again to the world of the senses...

...Votaries of the new style—actually, a congeries of styles—seem determined to speak of nothing in their poetry that has not been tested in their own experience, and this determination has brought with it a wholesale reform in poetic diction...

...In such a poem, the poet's essential impersonality, which elsewhere can be so dispiriting, acts to clarify and exalt the implicit moral indictment...

...While it boasts certain charms, even a certain wisdom, which no other poet could give us in quite this measure or with quite this assurance, the book as a whole is naggingly brittle and unfleshed...

...New vocabularies and new rhythms, felt to be more responsive to the immediate pressure of experience, have attempted to narrow the distance separating the poet and his style...

...Now quite apart from whether this assertion is strictly true—it obviously isn't—the special diction used by Auden ensures not only that "data" emanating from the bedroom, but from most other realms of common experience as well, will remain safely in the sphere of the ineffable...

...The pace here is jaunty, the tone ironical and worldly wise, but the poem never quite descends to earth...

...Here the skimping of immediacy is at least compensated by the warmth of feeling with which Auden addresses his dead and admired friend...

...Against the detachment, the complacency—even, alas, the intelligence— of this orthodoxy, the new poetry has given priority to feeling, to the deepest avowals of the eye and the heart...

...Auden's strength has always lain in the strictness and formality of his diction, and in About the House he builds his fence with the usual care, nailing it with verbal oddments ("banausics," "neotene," "galimatias") and decorating it with occasional artifacts from the mundane world (transistor radios and the like), but in the end keeping the gate tightly shut to everything but moral essences...

...Thus, in "The Cave of Nakedness," the poem devoted to that locus classicus of the modern self, the bedroom, Auden brandishes his entire repertory of abstractions and mythological allusions to endow with allegorical significance what is never really established in the mind's eye of the reader...

...Perhaps the best of the series is the poem now called (after Brecht) "Grub First, Then Ethics," but actually a reprinting of "On Installing an American Kitchen in Lower Austria" from Homage to Clio...

...About half the poems comprise a cycle called "Thanksgiving for a Habitat," and are devoted to the rooms in Auden's recently acquired house in Vienna...

...Every poet's diction is, of course, a kind of fence thrown up around the materials of experience, isolating what seems most essential— or what, at any rate, seems most negotiable —and rigorously shutting out all that is inessential or merely intractable...

...There is much that is clever in this "Thanksgiving" cycle—a poem celebrating the pleasures of defecation, for example—and much that is chillingly complacent: I think especially of those awful lines, from "The Common Life," about "the homes I warm t o / [which] always convey a feeling/ of bills being promptly settled...

...The "Habitat" so gratefully invoked in these poems remains a moral abstraction whose earthly counterpart the reader is never permitted to enter...

...In "The Cave of Nakedness,' to be sure, we are offered an alibi for all the generalizing: "where there's a bed," Auden writes, " there are no effable data...

...After the garrulities of the "Thanksgiving" cycle, the lean opening stanzas of this poem restore us to an authentic vision: Who, now, seeing Her so Happily married, Housewife, helpmate to Man, Can imagine the screeching Virago, the Amazon, Earth Mother was...

...When, nearly halfway through, Auden suddenly speaks of himself, referring to his "infantile entrance into Edwardian England," one is first surprised, then dismayed, for he quickly turns even himself into a categorical abstraction: the "Fifty-plus...

...The poet remains an eminence on the literary landscape, but his style is no longer what it once was: a source of direct inspiration for the most interesting younger poets...

...Its vision, though animated by quite disparate ideologies over the long course of the poet's career, has always been firmly fixed on the moral surface of modern civilization...

...For it is not only a literary manner that has been rejected, but the untenable moral certainties supporting it...

...His new book is not likely to alter this situation...

...One leaves these poems knowing a great deal about what Auden thinks, and rather too little about what, amidst so many brilliant moral reflections, he actually feels...

...It is certainly not going to restore his style to anything like its former hegemony on the literary scene...

...If, at its more trivial levels, their revision of style often results in little more than verse snap-shots and gossipy post cards, it nonetheless produces, in its higher elevations, an existential realism that contains much of the real history of our time—a history not of events but of emotions born in their wake...

...The new poets assume—correctly, I think—that this common ground no longer exists, and thus make of the self the sole basis of their vision...

...What is envisioned is a world stripped bare of all its primeval mystery and abundance ("Her jungle growths/ Are abated,/ Her exorbitant monsters abashed"), a world deprived of its vital prodigality and pressed into the service of a species whose ends are not only trivial ( " A church clock subdivides the day") but are a denial of life itself: I well might think myself A humanist, Could I manage not to see How the autobahn Thwarts the landscape In godless Roman arrogance, The farmer's children Tiptoe past the shed Where the gelding knife is kept...

...Their very themes hold out the promise of a discourse more personal, more existential, than anything the poet has attempted heretofore, but the promise is unfulfilled...

...But Auden has, clearly, the strengths that go with his weakness, and they are beautifully displayed in what seems to me the finest poem in the book and one of his finest ever: "Et in Arcadia Ego...

...Auden's abiding concern for the place of man in the natural order, and his sensitivity to the moral forfeitures which are writ large in man's imposition of his will upon that order, are given transcendent form...

...A poem like "Et in Arcadia Ego," so perfect in its equation of form and idea, may arrest for a moment one's enthusiasm for this change, but most of the poems in About the House only confirm it...

...The accidents of earthly life, though much alluded to, are never engaged...

...These, like others in the book, are the poems of a public figure, quick to convert the homely impedimenta of his domestic surroundings into general moral propositions and relying on a wellpracticed and all too familiar irony to keep the self at a discreet distance from the crux of the poetry...

...Still, what is missing in this cycle is a compelling "I"—and, it must be said, a compelling eye—to which the reader can give complete credence...