ABSTRACT
He is a wonderful poet, and I cannot see this falling off that people talk about. Wyndham Lewis has a phrase ‘the surge and roar that greets a reader approaching one of the great Shakespearean tragedies’ that is, I take it, a whole cycle of ideas and feelings has been connected to the main theme so that even the casual phrases of the play seem to hint at a great deal. Certainly if you compare Auden with almost all his contemporaries it is clear that they have hardly anything to say. You often find that he has taped firmly what you had been dumbly feeling; for instance, I have found myself saying weakly in the recent disasters, ‘I don’t know why, but I feel it’s somehow all my fault,’ and I had forgotten how Auden can always say this with a bang: Out of the mirror they stare, Imperialism’s face And the international wrong. [EA, 245]
