W.H.Auden, were he alive, would be 100 this year. He said once: “In spite of all this einsam rubbish, poets are no lonelier than anyone else. Poetry itself is lonely, of course, in the sense that few people read it.” This is typical Auden, levelling mythical superstructures with a single quip; honest to the bitter end, even when that honesty meant admitting the uselessness of his own occupation (’poetry makes nothing happen’) or consigning a whole poem to the bin, as he did with ‘September 1, 1939′ because it was, as he put it, ‘infected with an incurable dishonesty’. But since his death in 1973 Auden’s reputation, which was dogged during his life by criticism of his flight to America after the beginning of the War, has enjoyed a popular revival. This renewed interest- an interest that is genuinely popular and not just scholarly-most probably rests on the appeal of just two poems from Auden’s entire output: “Stop all the clocks” and the previously mentioned “September 1, 1939″.
“September 1, 1939″ has, by unspoken popular consensus, been appointed to the rarefied and privileged office of Poem which Sums up All Thoughts and Concerns on the Subject of-in this case-Anticipation of Conflict. It is a poem shot through with aphoristic rhetoric: “Low dishonest decade”, “waves of anger and fear”, “unmentionable odour of death”, “psychopathic god”, “the strength of Collective Man”, “Lost in a haunted wood”, “an affirming flame”-these phrases alone are enough to create the premonitory effect that floats this poem. The offending line-”We must love one another or die”-that so appalled Auden when he came to revise the poem, has, ironically, become perhaps the most celebrated line he ever wrote. Auden insisted the line was ‘a damned lie’: we die anyway, love or no love. It is difficult to fathom his pedantry on this point. The line is quite comfortable in its context. When Auden suggests we may die, he is clearly not referring to death as a consequence of natural causes, but to the imminent conflict with which the poem is concerned. Auden seems at all times to be irritated by the “romantic lie in the brain”, the potential of all art to become brazen, careless and fraudulent. He said that the male poet “tends to become an aesthete, to become too detached, to say things not because he believes them but because they sound effective.” Auden fought against this tendency throughout his whole poetic career. In the case of “September 1, 1939″, his dogma may have got the better of his rationality. It is futile to pretend that “Stop all the clocks” (Twelve Songs, IX) does not owe its relatively widespread popularity to the recitation in Four Weddings and a Funeral. The poem’s final stanza demonstrates Auden’s characteristic manipulation of the diminished world:

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any
good.

Auden’s imaginative leap straddles the divide between the enormity of the most conspicuous natural phenomena and the possibility of reducing the universe to a toy set. Whatever might boldly and thoughtlessly be asserted about the inimitable power of love or allengulfing nature of grief, there is a grand resonance in the first three lines which would correlate with almost any sentiment the last line contained. A similar effect is visible in “Lady, weeping at the crossroads”: the poet encourages the “lady” to “Stare the hot sun out of heaven” and to “drink it [the ocean] dry”. Here the conceit is used differently- possibly as an ironic reproach to the lady’s self-structured romantic artifice (the last couplet runs: “Find the penknife there and plunge it / Into your false heart.”). The poem details the sort of stifling love-myth that Auden would probably have found insufferable. Another of Auden’s best-loved poems, “Musée des Beaux Arts”, celebrates the canny artistic device of focusing away from a subject and onto incidental details so that the main subject is, perversely, enhanced:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window
or just
walking dully along;

“At the Grave of Henry James”, when he comments in a very off-hand manner on blue puddles which “echo such clouds as occur / To the sky, and whatever bird or mourner the assing moment remarks they repeat”. Again, the effect engendered by these sideways glances is, loosely, pathos. Auden seems to be sold on the idea that a poem’s focus should occasionally drift from the object of contemplation in order to provide perspective and a sense of what is going on elsewhere. The absolute and uncompromising shift in the final stanza of “The Fall of Rome” is perhaps the best example of this focal drift; far from pathetic, the tone is decidedly ominous:

Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.

Auden began writing poetry during a time of unprecedented artistic upheaval. The Modernists were in full stride and traditional verse-forms were quickly becoming obsolete. Auden was quite unfazed. Stating happily that mastery of vers-libre was beyond him, he continued to write metric verse. From his first published work he made it clear by his language and chosen subjectmatter that he was willing to advance the cause of modern poetry in more thoughtful and enduring ways than the short-sighted tinkering of the Modernists. In retrospect, the figure of Auden stands arm-in-arm with Robert Lowell at the narrowest point of the twentieth century. Lowell was the great innovator, the democrat, who dissolved the last of the obstructive requirements of form and subject. His legacy is freeverse as we know it now. Auden was the rejuvenator of traditional verse-forms, making them palatable for a modern readership. Today, both legacies are respected in equal measure. Auden was the consummate versifier and, consequently, the obvious and suitable elegist of those whose deaths he recounted in his poems, including, most notably, Sigmund Freud, Henry James and W. B. Yeats.