ABSTRACT
The second edition of ‘Poems’ gave F.R. Leavis the opportunity to scout Auden by way of a reply to Empson’s essay on ‘Paid on Both Sides’ (see No. 1). Leavis further explained in Retrospect 1950 why he had included no criticism of Auden in the first edition of ‘New Bearings in English Poetry’ (1932; revised edn. 1950): he believed that the ‘curious and youthful’ ‘Paid on Both Sides’
might have represented the very green immaturity of a notable creative talent…. The childlike vividness of imagination was accompanied by … an obscurity of the wrong kind … a surprising radical adolescence that should have been already well outgrown. It seems to me that Auden has hardly come nearer to essential maturity since, though he made a rapid advance in sophistication.
