Mendelson reproduces some of Auden’s explanatory diagrams to Isherwood—for example, about his ars poetica, The Sea and the Mirror—though he doesn’t include the extraordinary “comprehensive chart” of antitheses Auden constructed while teaching at Swarthmore and writing The Sea and the Mirror, which can be found in Later Auden. ↩ Still, whatever Mendelson thought then, he has now given us everything, or almost everything. (A final volume, Personal Writings: Selected Letters, Journals, and Poems Written for Friends, is forthcoming.) It’s been an astonishing act of literary scholarship and personal dedication on Mendelson’s part, and readers the world over should be thankful for it. He thought that “to grow up does not mean to outgrow either childhood or adolescence but to make use of them in an adult way. But for the child in us, we should be incapable of intellectual curiosity.” The “intricate play of the mind” allowed Auden to entertain, as it were, notions, and he was intellectually promiscuous, always open to new modes, new thoughts. Eliot’s well-known observation of Henry James, that he had a mind so fine no idea could violate it, might be reversed in Auden’s situation. He was interested in everything—in psychology, Christianity, opera, Thucydides, Diaghilev, Tolstoy, Shakespeare; or, to take some examples from his poem “Spain 1937,”“the enlarging of consciousness by diet and breathing,”“the diffusion/Of the counting-frame and the cromlech,”“the photographing of ravens,”“the divination of water,”“the origin of Mankind,”“the absolute value of Greek,”“the installation of dynamos and turbines,”“theological feuds in the taverns”…

While at school Laird won national poetry competitions but was set to study law at Cambridge before changing to English. "As is fairly usual for any small town, if you were regarded as having half a brain it was assumed you should become a doctor or a lawyer. So while changing was obviously the right decision for me, it was a big thing to give up a vocational course for something more abstract." Poets including Helen Mort, Mohammed El-Kurd and Clare Pollard have been shortlisted for the 2022 Forward Prizes for Poetry. Publisher Ithys Press is unrepentant, saying, “The book was conceived not as a commercial venture but as a carefully crafted tribute to a rather different Joyce, the family man and grandfather.”While adults rave over Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 Women’s Prize winner Hamnet, children have been enthralled by her new picture book Where Snow Angels Go, illustrated with quiet beauty by Daniela Jaglenka Terrazzini. Sylvie wakes in the night with a fever to discover that she has a snow angel guardian keeping her safe.

Up Late is Laird’s fifth collection of poetry and his eighth book-length publication; he is the Seamus Heaney Professor of Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast: these facts make the significant lazinesses of the work difficult to skate over; the tonelessness of the collection prevents wholesale recommendation. It is obvious Laird has ability as a poet, and it is easy to imagine him having written better. Auden’s move to America prompted some rancor in the literary world. He was recruited to the Morale Division of the US Strategic Bombing Survey in Germany, 5 where he interviewed German citizens about the war and “got no answers that we didn’t expect.” He returned briefly to London in 1945, and Robert Graves’s attitude seems not untypical: “Ha ha about Auden: the rats return to the unsunk ship.”

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Auden is, I think, 31. I am 23. I don’t know Auden, but I think he sounds bad: the heavy, jocular prefect, the boy bushranger, the school wag, the 6th form debater, the homosexual clique-joker. I think he sometimes writes with great power: “O Love, the interest itself in thoughtless heaven, Make simpler daily the beating of man’s heart.” I can’t agree he’s as bad as [Archibald] MacLeish. He’s overpraised of course. I’ve added my own little dollop of praise in a number of New Verse devoted entirely, with albino portrait and manuscript, to gush and pomp about him. He’s exactly what the English literary public think a modern English poet should be. He’s perfectly educated (& expensively) but still delightfully eccentric…. He’s just what he should be: let him rant his old communism, it’s only a young man’s natural rebelliousness, (& besides, it doesn’t convert anybody: the awarding of conservative prizes to anti-conservatives who are found to be socially harmless is a fine, soothing palliative, & a shrewd gesture. And, incidentally too, the rich minority can always calm down a crier of “Equality for All” by giving him individual equality with themselves). Take the fifteenth poem (they are numbered rather than titled) of the thirty in his first collection: Astonishingly fluent, Auden could write poems of immense power that take their subject matter head-on. When it came to love poems, more circumspection was needed, but using the second-person pronoun licensed a direct approach of sorts: “Lay your sleeping head, my love.” Though he later became famous for lines that have the feel of diagnostic epigrams (“We must love one another or die”) or generalizing maxims (“About suffering they were never wrong,/The Old Masters”), the early poems are necessarily oblique, and this vital hedging and coding gives rise to a new style. “Audenesque” came to mean minatory, knowing, allusive, densely enigmatic. Behind that approach lies also a very English irony, a refusal to stand entirely foursquare behind the thing being said, a tone that allows some play within it. And play, for Auden, created a space where he could exist in his complexities.

The geographical freedom entails an epistemological one. She is anonymous, she starts again—the new life. Even the family poems of The Seven Ages have fresh perspectives, and see things from, say, the sister’s point of view: Her greatness—and she is one of the finest poets writing today—is due, in no small part, to her intransigence. Many of her poems are great in the same way. The child’s anger and resentment at his parents in, say, Firstborn and Ararat becomes Telemachus’ anger and resentment against Penelope and Odysseus in Meadowlands. The poems are franked with the distinct impress of a personality. Mónica Parle, co-executive director of the Forward Arts Foundation, the charity which runs the Forward Prizes, added: “We are incredibly proud of this year’s shortlist: it represents such a strong mix of known names and new talent, and perfectly embodies our aims at Forward, to champion the diverse scope of contemporary poetry published in the UK and Ireland.

Up Late

Fatima Bhutto, chair of the judges, said: “To spend the better part of a year thinking about poetry has been an incredible gift. The collections we pored over reminded me of care and the power strangers exert over each other in so many delicate and fragile ways. We have assembled here a collection of debut writers, masters, believers and doubters, all of them innate observers of our intimate lives. Some of them you may already know, others will be a revelation.” By Him is dispelled the darkness wherein the fallen will cannot distinguish between temptation and sin, for in Him we become fully conscious of Necessity as our freedom to be tempted, and of Freedom as our Necessity to have faith…

He had been rejected by the US Army in August 1942 on medical grounds, because of his homosexuality. ↩ He says he had been sensible enough with his lawyer's income to buy a four-bedroom house in Dalston, London, specifically so he could let out three bedrooms, which allowed him to live and write in the fourth. He was then offered a visiting fellowship at Harvard, where Smith was already teaching, and where he prepared his first poetry collection, To a Fault (Faber, 2005), and debut novel, Utterly Monkey (Fourth Estate, 2005). In his review of Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog and the Fox, Auden quotes Berlin’s famous thesis: hedgehogs “relate everything to a single central vision,” while the foxes “pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory.” Dante, Plato, Hegel, Proust, Nietzsche, and Ibsen are hedgehogs, while Herodotus, Aristotle, Molière, Montaigne, Goethe, and Joyce are foxes. Auden goes on:There is conflation and conflagration, rage and fire, neither of which are seen as necessarily destructive. The received idea about Auden is that in the later work the complicated ambiguous truths elicited by play, by the parabolic, are overtaken by a more public, more life-involved tone, and the received idea is mostly true. It’s also thought that Auden’s American years produced less memorable and influential poems, although this is a more arguable proposal. The later books contain more than a few works of genius: Nones (1951) has “In Praise of Limestone,” and The Shield of Achilles (1955) contains “Bucolics” and the title poem, which strike me as being among the most accomplished things Auden—or anyone—ever wrote. Hardy, Edward Thomas, the Anglo-Saxon poems were important early influences. (Fittingly, perhaps, considering the extensive criticism and poetry he wrote looking to Shakespeare, his first poem was published in the school magazine under the typo “W.H. Arden.”) He went up to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1925, where he studied natural science, then PPE (politics, philosophy, economics), and finally English, under the medieval scholar Nevill Coghill, graduating with a third-class degree but a university-wide reputation for his brilliance and for his poetry. As an undergraduate he read and imitated Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Edith Sitwell, and Laura Riding.