W. H. Auden (1907–73) was quite explicit about the origin of his poetic vocation. In “Making, Knowing and Judging,” a lecture he delivered at Oxford in 1956, Auden recalls that he decided to become a poet “one Sunday afternoon in March 1922” because “a friend suggested that I should.” At that time Auden was fifteen years old. For the next six years he served a studious apprenticeship, reading, absorbing, and, especially, imitating poems by other writers.

To be sure, the apprenticeship had its caesurae. When Auden was at the Gresham’s School, he once threw his poems into the school pond, declaring that he was done with poetry and that “the human race would be saved by science.” It was a dramatic, school-boy gesture, quickly repented. That same evening he somehow managed to recover the poems and, forgetting about the salvific properties of science, went on writing new ones.

To be sure, the apprenticeship had its caesurae.

Technically, Auden’s first book of poems was published in 1928. It was dedicated to his friend Christopher Isherwood and was hand-printed by Stephen Spender (in collaboration with a local Oxford printer) in an edition of about thirty copies. These were duly distributed to friends. But Auden’s real debut came in 1930. That year saw the publication in The Criterion of Paid on Both Sides, a ferociously difficult poetic drama that Auden subtitled “A Charade,” and, a bit later, a slim volume of poems (including Paid on Both Sides) by Faber & Faber.

Today we think of Auden as one of the great prosodists of the twentieth century. How often he insisted—to the disgust of those who have wanted to see poetry as a quasi-religious struggle for authenticity— that technical matters formed one of his chief interests in poetry. He was quite blunt about this: “Here is a verbal contraption. How does it work?” Among the questions he would have liked to put to critics:

1. Long lists of proper names such as the Old Testament genealogies or the Catalogue of ships in the Iliad?
2. Riddles and all other ways of not calling a spade a spade?
3. Complicated verse forms of great technical difficulty, such as Englyns, Drott-Kvaetts, Sestinas, even if their content is trivial?”

The technical side of Auden’s poetical character was present from the beginning. Above all, the young Auden was a prodigious literary magpie. As Katherine Bucknell notes in her informative introduction to the first complete edition of Auden’s Juvenilia,[1] “He looked for examples everywhere and imitated everything he liked.” There were the astringent simplicities of Frost, Hardy, and Edward Thomas; the richnesses of Shakespeare; the sonorities of Keats and Hopkins. Eliot in 1926 and the later Yeats the next year came as world-shattering revelations. (Auden enthusiastically rated Yeats’s poems from The Tower an “a+.”) Even Edith Sitwell, alas, left her mark.

Auden digested them all, toyed with their poetical personae, discarded much as he struggled toward artistic maturity. The approximately two hundred surviving poems written between 1922 and October 1928, when Auden left England for Berlin, are an inventory of tried-on styles and mimicked voices. “In imitating his Master,” Auden wrote (identifying his own early “Master” as Thomas Hardy),

Many of the poems collected in Juvenilia betray false or incomplete starts, uncertain development, and various failures of taste and tone. There are repetitions, as an image or phrase is amplified, enhanced, transmogrified, stored away for later use. (Readers will note that the comparison of eyes with “unwashed jewels”—an image that Auden adapted from King Lear—occurs in two of the poems printed below.) There are also some remarkable successes, and near-successes. Edward Mendelson, Auden’s literary executor and one of the poet’s most devoted commentators, identifies “The Watershed” (1927) as the first poem that Auden wrote entirely in his own voice. Many of the poems collected in Juvenilia introduce us to aspects or elements of that emergent voice.

The four poems printed here, written circa 1926 and 1927 (the exact dates of composition are somewhat conjectural), come from what we might call the mature period of Auden’s poetical immaturity. Only one—“Aware,” a metrical hommage to Gerard Manley Hopkins—has been previously published (albeit in a shorter version). Written when he was a student at Christ Church, Oxford, these poems display Auden’s intense if short-lived obsession with the high modernism of Eliot and the later Yeats. They are dense poems: haunting but difficult, elusive, sometimes downright obscure, though memorably so. Writing about this phase of Auden’s career, Mr. Mendelson has usefully noted that “the poems suggest that they are fragments of a larger whole but do not provide enough data to identify that whole. The reader is made to feel that some vital clue is lacking which, if one had it, could make sense of everything. But Auden hid nothing.” The central clue is simply that the difficulties and tensions these poems embody are an integral part of what they are all about.

Notes
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1. • The poems that appear here will be published in Juvenilia: Poems, 1922–1928, by W. H. Auden, edited by Katherine Bucknell, forthcoming from Princeton University Press. ~cpr The Estate of W. H. Auden Go back to the text.