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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 2

A Game of Magic

A Game of Magic

Different poets construct (or re-construct) their poems in different ways. In the case of MacNeice, Auden’s contemporary and early friend, one has the impression, justified by one or two published draft-sheets, that he simply page 357 wrote his poems down as they came to his mind, with little correction, and thus the poem stood or fell on the force or precision of the original impulse. In the case of Auden one has the opposite impression – that he regards his poems somewhat as arrangements of flowers which can be endlessly altered to obtain the best effect. In his witty Foreword Auden has written, ‘On revisions as a matter of principle, I agree with Valery: “A poem is never finished; it is only abandoned”.’

The view is no doubt valid enough. Yet it may emphasise too much the conscious process of construction that goes into the making of a poem. Especially in Auden’s later verse, he seems from time to time to regard writing simply as an elaborate magical game – a welcome change perhaps from the solemn prophetic approach of his youth, yet the pendulum may have swung too far. One is glad to meet the witty man of letters; but one regrets the frequent absence of the great intuitive poet. For Auden is indeed a great poet. The earliest work was eccentric and private perhaps; yet it was a voice, confident and intellectually sure, that no one had ever heard before, that spoke to us in a series of magnificent metaphysical lyrics. In the middle period he seemed too prone to moralise. Yet, for all its faults of heaviness and prolixity, ‘New Year Letter’ seemed at the time a marvellously accurate analysis of the predicaments of modern man. Again, his Christmas oratorio, ‘For the Time Being’, presented the emotional nexus of religious anxiety in a radically new way – I at least found it a seminal and formative work in my own erratic development.

Perhaps anxiety is the word that hides Auden’s real aesthetic and spiritual difficulty. ‘The Age of Anxiety’ showed a descent into a merely linguistic brilliance that left behind the semi-prophetic intuitions that had so astonished us. And at that point it is as if he said to himself, ‘I mustn’t be too solemn. After all, I’m getting older. Better to be a witty clown than a boring old man.’ It is a better solution than the one that Wordsworth found when the sources of inspiration began to run dry; but one regrets that Auden, for all his versatility and sinewy strength, did not find a genuine road of renewal. Many of these shorter poems are excellent. But the earlier ones are still the best.

1967 (440)