ABSTRACT
‘Nones’ is the first new volume consisting entirely of shorter poems that Mr. Auden has given to us since ‘Another Time,’ 12 years ago. It is described on the wrapper as a sequence ‘with an underlying unity,’ but there is certainly no obvious unity on the surface: many of the poems have previously appeared in a wide variety of periodicals and they celebrate diverse occasions, moods and themes. The first general impression may well be of a certain diffuseness and lack of vitality, qualities which appeared in some extent in ‘The Age of Anxiety.’ In form and style there are examples of several earlier manners – the six-lined stanza, recalling Burns, for light satire; Yeatsian rhyming trimeters, portentous lines in terza rima, slick trochaic quatrains, gnomic songs and sophisticated adaptations of classical elegiacs and ode forms. There are also various freer and looser patterns, while Mr. Auden’s customary technical ingenuity appears with assonance and internal rhyme, in particular the rhyming of the last word of a line with the penultimate syllable of the one before (see ‘Pleasure Island,’ ‘The Managers’). While for the most part comparatively unobtrusive, these devices do not seem to have any very positive function, and they hardly impose themselves as the inevitable expression of new ways of feeling.
