Poetry

ANOTHER TIME--W. H. Auden--Random House ($2).

AUTUMN JOURNAL -- Louis MacNeice --Random House ($1.50).

English poets have seldom left England --the Christian world's poetical home base--except on scholarly vacations or for their health or reputation's sake. Yet two able-bodied English poets are now more or less permanently quartered as wage earners in the U. S. Louis MacNeice is teaching at Cornell, Wystan Hugh Auden at Manhattan's New School for Social Research. And Auden, probably the most spectacular English poet alive--and one who in 1937 received, at his King's hands, the King's Gold Medal for distinguished literary services--is now on his way to becoming a U. S. citizen.

However unlike the conventional ways of English poets this migration may be, it is no more unconventional than the poems that Auden writes--and to a lesser degree, MacNeice. Traditionally, poems are composed as soliloquies in some one quarter of a poet's mind: Auden's most characteristic poems are composed as colloquies between various quarters of his mind. And Oxonian Auden's up-to-the-minute mind has, roughly speaking, as many, and as sketchily correlated, quarters as a university has classrooms or a newspaper has columns. Psychoanalysis, sociology, literary history, bawdry, biology, whatnot, all chip in to make Auden's poems:

Rummaging into his living, the poet fetches

The images out that hurt and connect.

By listening in on all the areas of his mind, and by encouraging them to deliver their own particular stuff--much as a swing band leader encourages his instrumentalists to sound off on their own--Auden writes poems so briskly variegated that they seem, to some readers, quintessentially modern, to others cold-bloodedly synthetic.

Another Time, Auden's latest book, is full of images that "hurt and connect." Its contents range from shabbily profane ballads to professions of mystical faith, with a middle register at:

It's farewell to the drawing-room's civilised cry,

The professor's sensible whereto and why,

The frock-coated diplomat's social aplomb,

Now matters are settled with gas and with bomb.

The works for two pianos, the brilliant stories

Of reasonable giants and remarkable fairies,

The pictures, the ointments, the fragible wares

And the branches of olive are stored upstairs.

Above this level come serious poems about people and places, in which Auden states his admirations and aversions, hopes and fears. The potpourri is tied together more by constant verbal virtuosity than by any underlying single-mindedness. Auden admires a hand-picked selection of the Great--his criticisms of them are acute, his praise of them generally mystagogic; he admires Love--but writes no loving poem; socially, he is a run-of-the-parlor pink--but he is a nearly bloody hater of the upper-class English "old gang." By birth Auden belongs with them; and he sees a worm at their root that he would like to get his hands on.

Hell is neither here nor there

Hell is not anywhere

Hell is hard to bear.

It is so hard to dream posterity

Or haunt a ruined century

And so much easier to be.

Only the challenge to our will,

Our pride in learning any skill,

Sustains our effort to be ill.

To talk the dictionary through

Without a chance word coming true

Is more than Darwin's apes could do. . . .

If we were really wretched and asleep

It would be easy then to weep,

It would be natural to lie,

There'd be no living left to die.

Auden's poems gravitate--or levitate--around a central concern for self-respect, Louis MacNeice's around a central concern for personal comfort. But MacNeice's idea of comfort is of the self-respecting kind:

All that I would like to be is human, having a share

In a civilised, articulate and well-adjusted

Community where the mind is given its due

But the body is not distrusted.

So writes MacNeice, halfway through Autumn Journal, a long poem covering five months' effort on the author's part to make himself comfortable in England in the autumn of 1938. As it turned out, the time and place were badly chosen.

In this rhymed journal MacNeice's chief aim, as he states in a foreword, was to be honest about what he felt and saw; and in this he succeeds as far as his engaging garrulity will allow. The poem starts at summer vacation's end (All quiet on the Family Front), follows MacNeice up to London for his job:

. . . lecturing, coaching,

As impresario of the Ancient Greeks

Who wore the chiton and lived on fish and olives

And talked philosophy or smut in cliques. . . .

Soon comes the Munich crisis (We are safe though others have crashed the railings), bad times in London, hard times for Poet MacNeice (No wife, no ivory tower, no funk hole). Recurrent ruminations on the meaning of it all down MacNeice often, never knock him out. He visits Barcelona soon before its fall, takes in Paris on the way:

Where alcohol, anchovies and shimmying street-lamps

Knock the stolid almanac cock-a-hoop,

winds up his testament of beliefs and dubieties with a resolution to remain alive -- only more so:

For to have been born is in itself a triumph

Among all that waste of sperm. . . .

Wasteful of words as it is, Autumn Journal is a cheerful record of squalid times, occasionally conveys intimations that the fun of living can outweigh its guilt.

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