W.H. Auden: Juvenilia
Edited by Katherine Bucknell
Princeton, 336 pages, $29.95
They were the most brilliant bunch of boys English literature has ever seen, those writers who came to fame in the ’30s. And as this volume of the poems he wrote at school and university brings home, the most brilliantly precocious of them all was Wystan Hugh Auden.
Katherine Bucknell’s collection, “W.H. Auden: Juvenilia”-as loving and meticulous and informing an edition as any writer, young or old, could wish for-leaves off as Auden, just down from Oxford, armed with a poor third-class degree in English, departs for Berlin in the early autumn of 1928. “Poems” (1928), his first, tiny volume was about to appear.
It was the tip of an immense iceberg. In the mere six or so years since he decided as a schoolboy of 15 to become a poet, he had produced more than 200 poems. Most of them are here, an extraordinary ransacking of modes, a trying on and swift discarding of voices, a confident striding towards a poetic mind and voice of his own.
What’s going on in Bucknell’s collection (drafts, notes, cross-checked allusions and all) is Auden’s quest for a way of combining in verse his various loves. He’s nothing if not a lover.
“This world is full of lovely things.”
He meant the scarred, bird-haunted landscape of northern England, with its derelict traces of the early industrial revolution.
“Doth it not welcome thee? This land? With all its splendid men, its loveliness?”
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And not just the engineers, farmers and shepherds, but boys, sexual partners his own age.
Much of this writing is about the roping in of alternative, surrogate fathers. Thomas Hardy, he who “used to notice such things,” is acquired as a great model of regard for an earth “lovely beyond belief.” T.S. Eliot quite staggers the Christ Church undergraduate with a blend of worldliness and an austere investment in the tropes and modes of the highest Western culture.
At every stage of his development, this amazing young pasticheur becomes what he is currently admiring.
Watching Auden invent the Audenesque is one of the many great joys of this volume. But it is still dismaying to note the persistence of sadness and guilt, and to watch the poet settling for a life in the furtive sexual underground that parents, school and the law impose as his dismal future lot.