ABSTRACT
‘We salute in Auden’, Geoffrey Grigson wrote in his editorial to this special issue of ‘New Verse’, ‘the first English poet for many years who is a poet all the way round…. He is traditional, revolutionary, energetic, inquisitive, critical, and intelligent.’ While acknowledging that there was much both to praise and to criticize in Auden, he explained further, ‘there are plenty of writers who do recognise Auden’s broad power of raising ordinary speech into strong and strange incantation….’
