IN "CONSIDER," one of the best of his early poems, W.H. Auden offered his generation two destinies: "To disintegrate on an instant in the explosion of mania/Or lapse for even in to a classic fatique." It may be unfair to judge Auden's recent poetry until we can read his as yet unpublished work, particularly his love poetry, but it seems as if our verdict in his case must be one of fatigue. There are seventeen poems in Thank You, Fog--few of them are bad and they are all characteristic, but they are enervated, written on a lower energy level. Perhaps the softening for Auden thanks numbed his perceptions and dulled his creative powers. Although Auden was only 66 when he died last September, he was clearly not a man who expected to live much longer. Many of his last poems construct a "neutral" position indifferent to life and death.

"We never step twice into the same Auden," his first really good critic, Randall Jarrell observed, and went on to identify "Four Stages of Auden's Ideology." On the other hand, Auden's development can be neatly split into only two periods. At first he felt uncomfortable in his world, and rejected its economic organization, social structure, and sexual practices; even nature, things like landscape and weather, seemed sick and threatening. Auden himself, in a poem in this book called "Thanksgivings," takes a stab at explaining why he abandoned this radical alienation:

Finally, hair-raising things

That Hitler and Stalin were doing

Forced me to think about God.

Auden returned to Christianity and a certain complacence about politics, even though he maintained to his death that "human time is a city/where each inhabitant has/a political duty/nobody else can perform." But in his later work Auden is no longer interested in defining that duty, or even in dramatically exhorting anyone to perform it. He is content to inhabit the realm of "common-sense" and its unrevolutionary complement, "tall stories."

Auden finds himself at home here. He feels himself in a world where "trees are proud of their posture,/stones are delighted to lie/just where they are." His disgust for man himself, and he is willing to settle for mediocrity so long as it is not troublesome. Beasts can be admired in preference to men:

If you cannot engender

A genius like Mozart

Neither can you

Plague the earth

With brilliant sillies like Hegel

Or Clever nasties like Hobbes.

Not only does Auden seem to be arguing for the kind of standardization he once accused totalitarianism of creating, but he seems to have forfeited--and it sounds at least partly intentional--one of his best poetic voices. Auden was the greatest writer of English light verse since Byron. He could make ideas sound "truer than true" without criminal oversimplification, and in long poems like New Year Letter and Letter to Lord Byron he had proved himself as effective at satirizing the condition of modern man as at prescribing for it. In the process, he came up with such sparkling intellectual characterizations as

Self-educated William Blake