The first impression, Barbara Everett said in her fine, early book on Auden, is ‘abundance and variety’: his task as a poet never lay in struggling with the medium but rather – as Clive James suggested – in managing his immense facility. The challenge of fulfilling the demands made by so many diverse poetic forms was a perpetual stimulus, but he remained savingly aware of the risks (to art and to morals) that might come from placing the wrong sort of emphasis on ‘form’. And like most of Auden’s most telling warinesses, this one was especially keen, because it arose from risks he knew that he had run himself. The idea of poetry as a highly specialized kind of game, a display of immense proficiency with its own formal demands and absorbing ‘aesthetic-technical problems’, recurs ostentatiously in many of Auden’s best-known critical utterances. One lasting gratitude he owed to his first master Hardy was his ‘metrical variety, his fondness for complicated stanza forms’, which represented ‘an invaluable training in the craft of making’; and the honour due to W. P. Ker, whose essays Auden had come across by a happy chance in Blackwell’s, lay in the ‘fascination with prosody’ that he managed to instil (DH, pp. 38, 42): ‘Hardy taught me stanza forms’, Auden told Alan Ansen, ‘but Ker really made me aware of the perpetual availability of metrical forms’ (Ansen, pp. 42–43). Ker was an approximation to that ideal critic fondly imagined by Auden, among whose qualifying credentials was counted a liking for ‘[c]omplicated verse forms of great technical difficulty, such as Englyns, Drott-Kvaetts, Sestinas, even if their content is trivial’ (DH, p. 47): such an unusual critic would be a professional version of the ‘dream reader’ Auden elsewhere invented, who ‘keeps a look-out for curious prosodic fauna like bacchics and choriambs’. ‘Auden liked to boast that he had now written a poem in every known metre’, says Carpenter, writing of the later years when Saintsbury’s History of English Prosody was firmly established as a sacred text (Carpenter, p. 419): ‘he would explain verse forms to me’, Stravinsky remembered, ‘and almost as quickly as he could write, compose examples… he was even eloquent on such matters’.
