Above all I was charmed in Auden by what to me, when I first read him, seemed the ultimate sophistication, which was not disillusion but instead minimal expectations. More exactly, it was the combination of unillusioned insight, antiromantic and scientifically objective, with the ability to believe in and feel, however mutedly, the traditional positives…. Such poems as "Lay your sleeping head, my love," seemed a fascinating poetry of deflated affirmation, in which the lover expects little of himself or of human nature and sees through romantic love, and yet also sees that it has a kind of reality and value.
In the 1930s an eddy of criticism rose over the political commitment that was thought to run through his writing. In retrospect his attitudes seem much more complex, divided, and ambiguous. He had a horror of dictators, yet voiced the hope for a strong leader or saviour. He suspected that wars are fought so gunmakers may profit and was antimilitarist, but ready to make exceptions for the just or necessary war ("Spain, 1937"). He was against any crude nationalism, but tenderly loved "our little reef" of England. He explored the industrial decay in images of "silted harbor" and "derelict works"; he dwelt powerfully on the contrast of the jobless and brutalized poor with the pleasure-seeking rich "constellated at reserved tables" and subject to "immeasurable neurotic dread" and death wishes; he conveyed the gathering international threat in images of secret agents and secret police; and he proclaimed the need of renovation, occasionally promising a better "tomorrow." Yet the utopian note was rarely sounded with much conviction, and his state of mind was much too changing and uncertain to be partisan. Feelings of guilt, battle, and doom were constant in his poetry, but who was guilty and doomed was a question…. Nevertheless, there was the anxious thought that one ought to be joining the fight….
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