Beyond the Age of Anxiety

HOMAGE TO CLIO (91 pp.)--W. H. Auden--Random House ($3.50).

Wystan Hugh Auden is a chameleon among modern poets. He has moved from Marxism to Anglo-Catholicism, changed with startling ease from the gay garb of a tart poetaster to the grave robes of the searcher for ultimate truth. He often goes back over his poems and revises them to conform with his new sentiments. From some of his work, as his thinking turned increasingly conservative, he dropped scathing references to dons, capitalists and churchmen--for instance these lines written in 1933:

Like corrupt clergymen filthy from their holes

Deformed and imbecile.

Although these second and third thoughts annoy pigeonholing critics, Auden's revisions are one sign that he takes his poetry seriously--and knows that it is influential. Even more than T. S. Eliot, he is responsible for the unfettered, almost conversational tone that makes modern poetry sound modern. His manner has always been topical, chatty, a bit brash, unfailingly poised, only rarely lyrical. Above all, Auden's work suggests that there is nothing a poet cannot write poetry about, and most young poets since the early '30s have borrowed his air of verbal freedom. With wit to spare, cleverness sometimes beyond bearing, and effortless technique, he dazzled his contemporaries well before he had anything of lasting value to say.

At 53, Auden may well have said everything of value he ever will say, but on the whole he restates it effectively. Homage to Clio--poems written during the past five years--is the work of the self-revised, settled Auden, but it still offers a reasonably varied mixture. The earlier, brash Auden still reappears occasionally with bits of wise-guy fluff:

T. S. Eliot is quite at a loss

When clubwomen bustle across

At literary teas,

Crying: "What, if you please

Did you mean by The Mill on the Floss?"

But in the same vein, he can get in some telling jabs:

Oxbridge philosophers, to be cursory,

Are products of a middle-class nursery:

Their arguments are anent

What Nanny really meant.

His homage to Clio, muse of history and time, takes forms and settled attitudes that only mellowness can explain. No great-man theories of history will satisfy him, no view of the past that dwells on great events and revolves around the doers and shakers of the moment. Clio, he is convinced, cares for the little man, the steady chap who tends the store and provides the hardly discernible backbone that supports the homely burdens. And Auden can make his peace with an entire universe seem like wry resignation:

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well

That, for all they care, I can go to hell.

Were all stars to disappear or die,

I should learn to look at an empty sky

And feel its total dark sublime,

Though this might take me a little time.

Clio is more poetically ruminative than ambitious, makes no attempt to spell out the problems of the human condition that led to the warnings and preachments of The Age of Anxiety. Auden has no palliatives now, no longer looks for comfort or understanding in Marx, Freud or egoistic routes to salvation. Instead, there is an air of hard-won shrewdness and a recourse to God, whose mysterious being is suggested with what might seem Audenesque skepticism if it were not so typically an Auden commitment. For Poet Auden, who frankly admits to his friends that he feels obliged to be amusing, sounds vaguely flip even when he discusses his God. And to prove God's existence, he ironically cites the unease of those who deny it:

What reverence is rightly paid

To a Divinity so odd

He lets the Adam whom He made

Perform the acts of God?

All proofs or disproofs that we tender

Of His existence are returned

Unopened to the sender.

Now, did He really break the seal

And rise again? We dare not say;

But conscious unbelievers feel

Quite sure of Judgment Day.

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