When W. H. Auden suggested editing a collection of light verse for Oxford University Press in 1937, he thought first of calling it The Oxford Book of Light and Popular Verse. “Light verse,” he noted in his introduction to the resulting volume, “can be serious. It has only come to mean vers de société, triolets, smoke-room limericks, because, under the social conditions which produced the Romantic Revival, . . . it has been only in trivial matters that poets have felt in sufficient intimacy with their audience to be able to forget themselves and their singing robes.” In its deepest sense, Auden thought, light verse included not only ephemeral ditties but also what Homer wrote—or performed. This is a slightly Pickwickian sense of “light,” perhaps. But Auden was certainly right that light verse thrives only when poets enjoy a large, general audience with whom they share a common language and a common way of looking at the world. In such cases, the poet “will not be conscious of himself as an unusual person, and his language will be straightforward and close to ordinary speech.”

What Auden called the “Romantic Revival”—which put such a premium on individual genius and valued alienation over conformity—was a natural enemy of light verse and the culture that nurtured it. Modernism, the wary offspring of Romanticism, continued and deepened the enmity. And although he was himself the product of Modernism, Auden always yearned for the kind of community in which light verse could prosper; such yearning may in fact be the distinguishing mark of Auden’s own anti-Romantic Romanticism. Bristling with easy technical mastery, his mature work consciously—even, at times, ostentatiously—hankers after the rhythmic and what we might call the metaphysical confidence of such masters as Pope and Dryden. The problem, of course, is that such aspiration—for simplicity, community, oneness—typically betokens not the possession but the distance of such desiderata.

In any event, the extent of Auden’s success can be fairly judged from this new collection of his light and popular verse put together by Edward Mendelson, Auden’s literary executor and author of Early Auden. Poems such as “Musée des Beaux Arts,” whose rhetoric is as stately as their substance, are are not of course represented; nevertheless, this volume does include, as Mr. Mendelson notes in his introduction, some of Auden’s best work. Readers familiar with Auden’s oeuvre will find such well-known poems as “Letter to Lord Byron” (1936), “Lullaby” (1937) (“Lay your sleeping head, my love,/ Human on my faithless arm”), and “O Tell Me the Truth About Love” (1938). There are also numerous lesser-known works and a handful of previously uncollected poems and songs. Some of the poems are “light” in Auden’s expanded sense of the term; many of the most agreeable works, however, are more lite than light. Here, for example, is one of the “Shorts” Auden wrote between 1929 and 1931:

I am beginning to lose patience
With my personal relations.
They are not deep
And they are not cheap.

Auden excelled at a certain species of whimsical bawdy, snippets of which are included in this volume. Two of his more innocent limericks, from 1950, can be quoted here:

A friend, who is not an ascetic,
Writes: “Ireland, my dear, is magnetic.
    No snakes. Lots of elves
    Who just OFFER themselves—
Rather small but MOST sympathetic.”


                        * * *


T. S. Eliot is quite at a loss
When clubwomen bustle across
    At literary teas,
    Crying: “What, if you please,
Did you mean by The Mill on the Floss?

Among the more serious works included in this volume are a number of love poems and songs from Auden’s dramatic works. The chorus of “Death’s Echo” (1936), in which Auden alludes through Nietzsche to Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, summarizes a dour philosophy of life that, though probably anathema to Auden himself, crystalizes one important strand of Modernist aestheticism: “Not to be born is the best for man/ The second best is a formal order.” Emily Dickinson was not quite as extreme when she wrote that “After great pain, a formal feeling comes.” But the impulse was similar and, in its celebration of the redemptive promise of achieved form, stands behind the creation of most things that deserve the name “poetry,” light or otherwise.

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 14 Number 1, on page 75
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