ABSTRACT
Dilys Powell wrote separate reviews of ‘Look, Stranger!’ and of ‘The Ascent of F6’, but they are grouped together in this section because they elicited from Auden this uncharacteristic response:
Dear Miss Powell,
I want to thank you for your generous and acute reviews of F6 and my poems.
You are quite right in saying that some of the difficulties in the first book were due to punctuation. I never have understood that art. Now I make someone else do it for me.
The non-dramatic quality of the poems is of course intentional. I want lyric verse to be really lyrical, because at least in my own work when I get into the dramatic lyric I hear far too often the shrill tones of the hockey-mistress.
In theatrical drama, as you said, I want to objectify the images, in symbols of action. I do want the drama I write to become more and not less like a boy’s adventure story. The significance on the external plane must be as childishly simple as possible. Till I have really learnt to do that properly (because at present my trouble is not that the behaviour of my characters is too schoolboyish, but that their schoolboyishness is sometimes only that, i.e. the real significance has failed to get itself projected into terms of their behaviour), I feel that I must soft pedal the poetry a bit.… (n.d. (November 1936), The Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin; a shorter extract figures in Mendelson, ‘Early Auden’, p. 264)
