ABSTRACT
When a poet has the will to write poetry and poetry does not come, he has two alternatives before him: he can relapse into silence, or he can find a substitute for poetry. If he cannot experience poetry, he can at least poeticise experience; and the result, though it does not contain a single line of poetry, may nevertheless be significant (a word for which reviewers can never be sufficiently grateful). But should it then be called poetry? That excellent critic Oliver Elton, in discussing this question in relation to a poet whose work has some parentage to this new poem of Mr. Auden’s, remarked that
While poetry has no upper limit (for it may soar as high as it can), its lower limit is harder to define. There is a no-man’s-land, without fixed frontiers, over which hangs ambiguity; and a new name is wanted for the verse of Samuel Butler or of Swift. If we call it poetry, we seem to be setting it in the same rank as the work, let us say, of Dryden. Yet so sure is the reaction of metre upon syntax and idiom, and so powerful the consequent ‘medication of the atmosphere,’ that the result is more than a prose which merely rhymes and rattles.
[‘The English Muse’, 1932; repr., 1937, 256–7].