ABSTRACT
The essential advantage for a poet is not, to have a beautiful world with which to deal: it is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory. Albeit that there may be a somewhat suspect grandiloquence in his doxological echo, Eliot's concern is to deny 'Beauty' status as an absolute value. W. H. Auden later noted that 'Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty!' is what Keats says the Grecian Urn says, rather than any utterance in propria persona. The association of machinery with beauty can be observed in early, middle and later Auden. The sequence later titled '1929' includes the lines: Yet sometimes man look and say good. Whatever the religious nature of the analogy between a beautiful poem and God's creating Man in his own image, Auden was equally clear that poetry, with its emphasis on language as aesthetic performance, rather than language as vehicle for truth.
