Publications -- books and samples of work by prize-winning poet and writer Pat Boran

Later Auden by Edward Mendelson. Faber and Faber. £25 Stg. HB.

PAT BORAN

(Sunday Tribune)

'For a poet like myself, an autobiography is redundant,' wrote W H Auden in a letter in 1968, 'since anything of importance... is immediately incorporated, however obscurely, in a poem.' Despite the fact that, five years before his death, Auden was already thinking about autobiography, or that the word 'incorporated' neatly hints at his later fascination with the body and his refusal to mask it in, what Mendelson calls, 'idealizing language', the importance of this sentence is that it encapsulates Auden's belief that what matters in the life of the poet is to be found in the poems themselves.

So it is that Edward Mendelson resumes his masterful 'history and interpretation' of Auden's work, this second volume commencing with the first poems written after the poet's move to the US (with Christopher Isherwood) in 1939, at the age of 32, and ending with the last, written before his death in Vienna in 1973. On the way Mendelson helps us to better see the writer whom Orwell called 'the high watermark... of Socialist literature' but who gradually came to question the certainties of his own earlier political work.

Already hugely popular at home when he arrived in the US, Auden found in the New World things unavailable to him in interbellum England: enduring love, in the person of his homosexual partner Chester Kellman and, crucially, an opportunity to see if his poetry had a life beyond his politics. (Mendelson, intriguingly, contrasts Auden's journey away from politics with the journey to Africa of Arthur Rimbaud, the French poet who abandoned poetry for a life of action.)

That one of Auden's first poems in the US should have been to mourn the death of W B Yeats, just days earlier, must have emphasised his sense of endings and new beginnings. Though the Socialist in Auden found it 'deplorable that Yeats's last poem calls for war', the poet in him, already emerged as a distinct individual, mourned the loss.

'In Memory of W. B. Yeats', in time, was followed by poems on a range of historical figures, including Freud (a huge influence, just as Jung would later become), and these poems may be said to constitute Auden's arguments over the nature and purpose of philosophy and art, arguments which, on the one hand, led him to the famous 'discovery' that 'Poetry makes nothing happen' and, on the other, revealed William Blake as the poet who 'Broke off relations in a curse / With the Newtonian Universe' - a happening, by anyone's standards, and one with an origin in words.

If Auden's poems are sometimes, as Philip Larkin noted, 'too verbose to be memorable and too intellectual to be moving', his borrowing of poetic forms from a variety of languages and cultures (as a student at Oxford he was already experimenting with Old English alliterative metres), and his efforts to reinvest them with life and, often unexpected, subject matter is little short of dazzling. In Mendelson's words, 'Traditional forms and regular metres were among the means by which he evoked an order that existed prior to any personal intervention,' which suggests that form for Auden was not just a challenge but also a way of maintaining connection with what had come before him - and would come after. His adoption of syllabics, for instance, did a great deal to popularise that non-metrical writing on this side of the Atlantic, and his fascination with the language of science (dating back to a boyhood love of machines) has undoubtedly helped to expand the range and reference of poetry in the second half of this century. There is no doubt but that he was, as J B Priestly claimed, 'a real and powerful poet', though it cannot be denied that he did tend to 'keep his cleverness showing'.

Poetry was for Auden 'the clear expression of mixed feelings', and those mixed feelings were both his torment and his driving energy. If the early Auden could accept the notion that poems might be 'magical lyrical phrases which seem to rise involuntarily to the consciousness', the later Auden , as Mendelson puts it here, 'began to think about poetry as a dialogue with its readers, as a means of breaking the limits of personal isolation'.

Of course poetry can be both of these things at once, the inner and outer quests being mirror images of each other. And yet, even before he leaves for the US, Auden is turning on his own first book - 'Obscurity is a bad fault' - though, despite his efforts to marry the 'scientific enquiries of his father' (a doctor) with the 'ritualised religion of his mother', much of the work that awaits him at the other end of his career (the 1967 book, About the House, probably most of all) feels smug, self-satisfied and almost hermetically sealed. Indeed it is hard to read this as the work of the same poet who claimed that the primary function of poetry is 'to make us more aware of ourselves and the world around us'. Though constantly pushing himself to write not 'escape-art' but 'parable-art', that is teaching art, Auden's elevation of himself to teacher/poet leads him into abstraction and philosophising. He writes of the poem as 'gift', but too often he seems to be giving very little away.

Mendelson, who returns to Auden with a sympathetic ear and an incisive eye draws attention to an early (unpublished) prose piece in which Auden wrote that 'Life is ruled by mysterious forces', and gives us an Auden who, for all his brilliance and ambition, seems never quite convinced that this rarely glimpsed mystery has been caught in his poems.

Later Auden, for all his fascination with the body, with food, with the inner workings of the psyche and the outer quest for religious structure (he returned to the church at 33), sometimes seems like Paul Bunyan in the libretto he wrote for Britten's opera of that name, 'a disembodied bass voice', 'a figure too vast to be portrayed on stage'. For a book that purports to be just about the work, Later Auden positively mesmerises with a portrait of a man and a glimpse of the whole mysterious process of poetry itself.