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“Letters to Lord Byron” is
the most famous long poem in the early stage of Auden’s poetic career. It
was interluded in On This Island. It exhibited his great skill in
verse and his subtle blending of humor and irony. The themes touched on in
the poem are as diverse as those in Byron’s Don Juan or Childe
Harold’s Pilgrimage. It begins with the author’s apology to Byron for
the liberty of writing this “letter”, and plunged into wild satirical hits
on the popular figures of the modern world. In Part Ⅱ, Auden pretends to
introduce to Byron the twentieth century England and imagines Byron’s Don
Juan in the twentieth century Britain:
Don Juan was a mixer and no doubt
Would find this century as good as any
For getting hostesses to ask him out,
And mistresses that need not cost a penny.
Indeed our ways to waste time are so many,
Thanks to technology, a list of these
Would make a longer book than ‘Ulysses’.
Then, Auden even steals a line from one of Wordsworth’s
sonnets and deplores the present state of decline in Britannia:
Byron, thou should’st be living at this hour!
What would you do, I wonder if you were?
Britannia’s lost prestige and cash and power,
Her middle classes show some wear and tear,
We’ve learned to bomb each other from the air,
I can’t imagine what the Duke of Wellington
Would say about the music of Duke Ellington.
This abrupt transition from the highly humorous to the subtly
satirical, this effective blending of the highly ludicrous with the slightly
pathetic, and this combination of brisk haphazard phrasing and dubious
double rhyming, all provide us with the reminiscences of the Byronic verse
in “Don Juan”. The typical Byronic style is here imitated to perfection.
Part Ⅲ deals with more extensively with literary criticism.
Part Ⅳ gives a rambling account of the poet own life and career. Auden ends
the “Letter” in Part Ⅴ with his returns to England from Iceland.
The representative work of Auden after the departure from England
for America was another famous long poem, New Year Letter. The long
verse epistle was addressed to his friend Elizabeth and marked a new
beginning in Auden’s poetry as well as in his life. The poem ends on the
Christian forgiveness and helpfulness to each other and love, which has come
to be the new faith for Auden since the 1940s:
We fall down in the dance, we make
The old ridiculous mistake,
But always there are such as you
Forgiving, helping what we do.
O every day in sleep and labor
Our life and death are with our neighbor,
And love illuminates again
The city and the lion’s den,
The world’s great rage, the travel of young men.
His other long poems include “For the Time Being”
(1944), “The Sea and the Mirror” (1946) and “The Age of Anxiety”(1947).
Auden’s poetry touched every aspect of modern life,
war, science, literature, human existence and emotions. It contributed a lot
to enlarge the content of English poetry. Although a poet of 1930s, Auden’s
poems showed an optimistic tone. Later, his worldview changed, but his mild
satire, seriocomical style and unconventional phrasing could be found here
and there in his poems throughout his poetic career. He liked to mix the
popular conversational language of common people with high artistic skills
and he was really good at this conversational style. Sometimes, Auden is
accused of imitation. Indeed, the influence on him were various— his
critical position was strongly influenced by both Freud and Marx, his poetic
technique by Eliot, Hopkins and Owen. He was also sometimes Browningesque.
In the later years, he was even adapted to many Americanism and absorbed
expression from the Blues singers. But none of these influences could
prevent him from being one of the greatest of the poets in the twentieth
century.
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