At odds with himself …

… The Love Feast, by Alan Jacobs. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I have been reading and teaching and writing about Auden’s poetry for many years, but I have taken the opportunity offered by these two volumes to try, as best I can, to encounter it all anew. And as I set the books down, I find myself wondering whether—even if that hinge of 1939 remains always visible, even if the campaign against the earlier poetry is constant—we may eventually be able to perceive the essential continuities in Auden’s thought. It seems to me now that the early conjuror’s verse, studded with those unforgettable “magical lyric phrases”—that playful, dynamic, innovative, almost hedonistic poetry—regularly undermines itself, is accompanied by a kind of second voice, an ethically questioning voice, that becomes dominant after 1939. It is, after all, years before his return to Christianity that his clocks prophesied to the young lover, and to us, that we shall, at most and at best, love our crooked neighbor with our crooked heart. And if you listen very, very carefully, you can hear even in the verse of Auden’s old age some of the tones of his youthful exuberance.