The various characteristics that [Randall Jarrell in his essay "Changes of Attitude and Rhetoric in Auden's Poetry," see CLC, Vol. 2] lists in order to describe the style of 1930—so many of them involving ellipsis: the omission of articles, demonstrative adjectives, subjects, conjunctions, relative pronouns, auxiliary verbs—form a language of extremity and urgency. Like telegraphese, with which it has sometimes been compared, it has time and patience only for the most important words in the most kinetic, if not the best, order…. Behind this linguistic urgency lies Auden's sense of the immense peril in which the whole human enterprise stands as the hour comes round for a decaying civilization either to renew itself or die. Man, the evolutionary adventurer in Auden's biological-political- economic-psychological-social, Darwinian-Marxist-Freudian universe, must either move forward, or destroy himself, or both. The stripped, laconic language of those early poems is nicely calculated to convey this extremity and imperative without limiting the scope, the universality of reference. Auden deals easily in this stark style with men in general, where a more fully articulated syntax might involve him in the shades and modulations of the particular and the peripheral.
Auden's shift to the "rhetorical" mode a decade later is, among other things, a humanization of his style—an attempt to bring the modulated, civilized life of urban man more closely to bear on the language and feeling of his poems, a readiness to place all things as closely and vividly in relation to particularized human experience as possible…. Again and again the adjectives, far from being [in Jarrell's words] "abstract," "critical," "technical," and "nonpoetic," assign or withhold human capacities, dispositions, or valuations to or from non-human nouns, so that in effect we have a traditional anthropocentric poetic device wielded by a far-reaching, audacious, but fastidious imagination—a kind of Pathetic Fallacy by Incongruity or Denial: "the shining neutral summer"; "a new imprudent year"; "the small uncritical islands"; "the rare ambiguous monster"; "weep the non-attached angels"; "the hot incurious sun"; and "the undiscriminating sea." The measure, in each case, is man, and the dominant effect is not so much abstraction as animation. (p. 446)
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