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- for poetry makes nothing happen; it survives / In the valley of its making . . . / flows on south / From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, / Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, / A way of happening, a mouth.
"In Memory of W. B. Yeats," W.H. Auden
-When a writer is dead, one ought to be able to see that his various works, taken together, make one consistent oeuvre.
"Writing," W. FI. Auden
After W. H. Auden's death in 1973, David Bromwich's deconstructionist assessment of Auden's Collected Poems finds an Auden who changes at mid-career from an "oracle" to an anti-Romantic "jester" whose poetry makes nothing happen (91 ).' Since deconstruction has a primary interest in seeing the evolution of Romantic poetry into Modern poetry as a secularization process in which poets discard any belief in transcendence, it might be surmised that this view of Auden as jester is positive. Perhaps Bromwich finds Auden's nothing-making a sign of Auden's cooperation with this process and applauds the poet's intellect for maturing: for realizing that any belief in the imagination or the transcendence to which it is (foolishly) drawn is nothing.2
As Bromwich's review makes clear, however, the way in which Auden's poetry makes nothing happen is disappointing. Auden does not do what a good jester should do; he does not become a secular hero, offering poetry that jests about transcendence while insisting on the irremediable, determinate nature of being human. Bromwich sees Auden as a failed secular hero in this regard, and Bromwich ends his review by declaring that he prefers the early Auden-when he was like the "rest of us," when his "all-too-human" nature made him a "victim" of his own "survival" (100).
To a degree, Bromwich's disappointment with Auden is nothing new: from the start of his career, Auden disappoints. He is never quite what anyone expects or wants him to be. Critics have difficulty discerning his intent.1 Reviewing the play Paid on Both Sides, F. R. Leavis, for example, complains in 1931 that Auden's peculiar sense of "seriousness and flippancy" destroys any meaning (221 ).
This disappointment in Auden continues through the second half of his career. As Donald Hall complains in 1962,...