Peter Ackroyd’s new biography of W.H. Auden has a thesis most Auden admirers won’t like: the early poetry that T.S. Eliot hailed as genius was “fresh and striking, but not particularly coherent or good.” Christopher Caldwell’s review in the Washington Free Beacon takes that skepticism seriously, and it makes for a more interesting portrait than hagiography ever could.
Auden’s career in phases:
- Early 1930s — praised by Eliot at 22, but full of “deliberate obscurity,” hectoring politics, and pompous self-importance
- Mid-1930s turning point — “Letter to Lord Byron” (1936), written in rhyme royal on an Iceland trip, freed him from the need to be political
- Peak (1936–1955) — from Look, Stranger to The Shield of Achilles, Auden in full command of formal technique
- Later years — increasingly self-critical, revising early poems into ruin, chasing sincerity
The biographical details are as vivid as the literary ones. Auden was the grandson of two clergymen who embraced Anglo-Catholicism in his 30s, a leftist who never joined the Communist Party, a British poet who moved to the East Village and Ann Arbor. He lived openly as a homosexual across a range of environments — bourgeois institutions and the tawdry edges of society alike.
Stravinsky called him “the dirtiest man I have ever liked.” His friends said “the speed at which he could wreck a room was barely credible.” He had dentures by 45. And yet the poems endure — “Epitaph on a Tyrant,” the sonnet sequence “In Time of War,” the ballads — because Auden, alone among the modernists, was at home in the 20th century. Pound and Eliot mocked it. Auden wrote in it, from fascism to airplanes to the Apollo landing.
Ackroyd’s biography may not replace Carpenter or Mendelson as the definitive account, but Caldwell’s review makes a strong case that its skepticism is exactly what Auden studies needed.