Another Time

The test is subtractive, and the book answers it in two voices. The great poems resist it: nothing can come out of “Musée des Beaux Arts” without loss, and the Yeats elegy requires every stage of its turn, from the report of a death through the argument of its second part to the incantation of its third. But the book is a gathering, not a composed sequence, and several of the place poems and lighter pieces are occasions taken because they were there. It also carries what its maker later cut or disowned: the stanzas on Kipling and Claudel, “the necessary murder” of “Spain 1937”. Being questioned is not proof of idleness, but the slack is there. High necessity in the best third, a miscellany’s looseness around it.

Score: 7.9 / 10

The disclosures can be stated, and they hold. “About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters”: catastrophe occurs inside the ordinary, and the ordinary does not turn to look; the ship “had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on”. The Yeats elegy states the limit of art against history, “poetry makes nothing happen”, and the duty left to it, to teach “the free man how to praise”. “September 1, 1939” names the psychology of the coming war: “Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return”. “The Unknown Citizen” lays bare the statistical man, and “Refugee Blues” discloses statelessness through a form built for private sorrow. These are meanings, not moods. Held below the top because several are stated as maxims more than discovered by the poems.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Height and frequency together. The heights are real and several: the lullaby, “Lay your sleeping head, my love, / Human on my faithless arm”, where tenderness is lifted by its own knowledge of transience; the close of the Yeats elegy, “In the deserts of the heart / Let the healing fountain start”; the lovers’ clocks in “As I walked out one evening” turning to dread, “The glacier knocks in the cupboard”, and the ending’s “crooked neighbour / With your crooked heart”; “Funeral Blues”, whose hyperbole is grief’s own. But the register is chiefly diagnostic and urbane, and the elevation intermittent: the portrait sonnets, the ballads and the light verse are clever before they are transporting, and “Miss Gee” works by a deliberate coldness. A book that rises repeatedly, not steadily.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The myth is more evoked than built. “Musée” builds the most: Icarus is reread from the margin, and the fall that myth placed at the centre becomes a splash nobody hears; the pattern carries the poem. The Yeats elegy makes a poet’s death a seasonal myth of a body entering earth and a work passing to “the guts of the living”, and its last part takes on something of a ritual charm. “As I walked out one evening” sets the ballad lover’s vow against Time as a speaking power. Much of the rest is figure and allusion: the Freud elegy names Eros rather than constructing him, and the portrait sonnets make writers into types, the novelist “Encased in talent like a uniform”, by wit more than by archetype. That holds the axis below the gate.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The inheritance was Auden’s own as much as Yeats’s and Eliot’s: the political, clinical, allusive poetry of the early thirties that had made him the leader of a generation. The turn here is away from that role while still writing public verse: toward the civic elegy, the portrait of the artist, and the ballad, blues and cabaret song set in the same book as the elegies, and toward a voice that doubts its own power. The stake was real. The book appeared after Auden had left England for America in January 1939, it was read in England as the work of a man who had gone, and it undoes the posture of “Spain” in its own pages. What holds it below the gate: the means were largely inherited forms, used with mastery, and the larger formal swerves of the following years lie outside this book.

Score: 8.4 / 10

In the best poems form is the knowledge. The Yeats elegy says three things in three metres: the report of a death in loose long lines, the argument about poetry in paragraphs close to blank verse, and the charm of its third part in trochaic quatrains whose ritual return is the healing fountain it asks for. “Musée” is shaped like the painting it reads, the eye moving from the foreground to the corner where the legs vanish. “Refugee Blues” makes statelessness sound like a lover’s complaint the world will not hear. “Miss Gee” uses the jaunty ballad as cruelty’s instrument, and the cruelty is part of what the poem knows about how a society looks at a dying spinster. But the book’s own form, three parts sorted by kind, is a filing arrangement, and many lesser poems would say the same in another stanza.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Evidence, not promise: eighty-six years of return. The central poems have been argued over without exhaustion. “Poetry makes nothing happen” is still quoted in debates on art and politics, in both directions. “September 1, 1939”, disowned by its author, returned to wide reading after September 2001, and its “or die”, with Auden’s change to “and die”, remains a crux. “Musée” is one of the most discussed ekphrastic poems in English. The Yeats elegy keeps opening on its contradiction, a poem that says art is powerless and practises a power. The book as a book has had less return than its poems: the lesser poems of the first part are rarely read, and the yield is concentrated in perhaps a dozen poems, though those have been mined for generations.

Score: 8.7 / 10

The field is poetry in English in the twentieth century. The intrinsic force: the book established a modern idiom for the public elegy and the civic poem, conversational and unconsoling, and showed that a major poet could set the cabaret song and the comic ballad beside the ode without loss of seriousness, a reorganisation of what a serious book of poems could hold. Held below the top because that reorganisation is of tone and stance more than of form, and Eliot and Yeats remain the field’s larger movers. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Brodsky’s “Verses on the Death of T. S. Eliot” takes its form and stance from the Yeats elegy, which Brodsky named as decisive for him; William Carlos Williams’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” answers the Brueghel that “Musée” made a subject; and the ekphrastic poem of the later century runs through “Musée”.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Survival of eighty-six years. The poems’ presence is among the widest of any English poetry of the century: anthologised, taught, recited at funerals and in public crisis; “Funeral Blues” reached general use through its recital in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994). The text itself survives whole; nothing is lost. Two charges hold the figure where it is. The book as a book is less present than its poems: it is read almost entirely through Auden’s later collected and selected editions, in which several of its poems are revised, cut or absent, so the 1940 text survives in print but is not the text most readers meet. And some of its surface is fixed to its year: the occasional poems are bound to Spain, Munich and the outbreak of war.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Judged on Auden’s English. The command of verse is at the top of the century’s range and is shown in more forms than almost any one book of the period holds: the ballad’s narrative economy in “Miss Gee” and “Victor”, the blues refrain, the sonnet’s turn in “The Novelist” and “A. E. Housman”, the short-lined stanza of “September 1, 1939” carrying argument at speed (“I sit in one of the dives / On Fifty-second Street / Uncertain and afraid”), the tetrameter of the lullaby, the trochaic quatrain of “Earth, receive an honoured guest”. The diction moves from the clinical to the colloquial without a seam, and in “Musée” the casual syntax enacts the indifference it describes. Charged with facility: the light verse sometimes runs on its own ease, and abstractions like “the clever hopes expire / Of a low dishonest decade” can tip into formula.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: “Calypso” or “O Tell Me the Truth About Love”, and “In Memory of Sigmund Freud”. One law can be named: private feeling and public history are read by the same diagnostic intelligence, which finds love, neurosis and politics continuous, and the lullaby and “September 1, 1939” obey it. But the book gathers poems from a period in which Auden’s beliefs were changing, and it contradicts itself in ways it does not govern: “Spain 1937” accepts “the necessary murder” and ends on a history that “cannot help nor pardon”, while “September 1, 1939” and the Freud elegy turn to love and to a forgiving reason. The tension is fertile, but it is a record of transit, not a law the book holds. The range is wide, and that counts for it.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Judged as a book of lyric and occasional poems. It holds much: consciousness and the unconscious, in the Freud elegy; love and its faithlessness, in the lullaby and the cabaret songs; the state and the citizen, in “The Unknown Citizen” and “Epitaph on a Tyrant”; history and war, in “Spain 1937” and “September 1, 1939”; the refugee; the city, Brussels, New York and Oxford; art and the artist, from Brueghel and Yeats to Housman, Lear, Rimbaud and Arnold; law, in “Law Like Love”; and the sacred at the edges. The best poems hold several orders at once: “September 1, 1939” holds a bar, Europe’s history, the psychology of nations and a personal faith in one argument. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: a gathering of short poems lists more than it integrates, and the family, labour and the natural order are thin.

Score: 7.8 / 10