Auden [antikvár]

Introduction by Monroe K. Spears Most good criticism of Auden is recent, for during the greater part of his thirty-five years of fame as poet, Auden has been peculiarly unfortunate in the treatment accorded him by reviewers and critics. At the beginning of his career he was greeted by excesses of praise, on grounds largely irrelevant to the true nature of his poetry: he was hailed as the leader of a "group" with a political program, as a poetic messiah who would lead the way out of the Waste Land. When politically oriented critics saw that he was not what they had wanted him to be, the reaction was bitter, and it became bitterer still when he emigrated to the United States and began writing religious poetry. Resentment of Auden as a Lost Leader was an obvious motive, though rarely an ostensible one, in much criticism of the later Thirties and the Forties, and it still survives. On the other hand, aesthetically oriented critics were generally made suspicious by Auden's popularity and the outcry about his politics, as well as by his facility and occasional unevenness. Though some critics of this type have written well about Auden, he has never been one of their central concerns or enthusiasms. The most influential of all hostile criticism of Auden was that of F. R. Leavis and his followers, whose criteria appeared to be aesthetic but were, it seems clear in retrospect, basically moral and social. Though Leavis allowed Auden promise and published occasional reviews by him in Scrutiny from 1932 to 1935, Auden soon became the whipping boy for the group's profound antipathy to Oxford, Bloomsbury, and the academic and literary Establishments which had, they thought, made Auden fashionable. The recognition of Auden's promise was accompanied by forebodings for the future: as early as 1935 Leavis pronounced that The Orators was an ominous falling off from the Poems of 1930. Soon Auden was "placed" as immature, "arrested at the stage of undergraduate 'brilliance.' " Leavis established this view so early in Auden's career that one wonders at the assurance