Auden's technique as well as his sensibility seems to have atrophied by the time he wrote these last poems. In his early work he'd brought a new terseness to English poetry based on occasionally leaving out articles and inverting the usual structure of the sentence:

Order to stewards and the study of time,

Correct in books, was earlier than this

But joined this by the wires I watched from train,

Slackening of wires and posts' sharp reprimand,

In month of August to a cottage coming.

Auden was always more interested in experimenting with syntax than with things like meter and stanza and he was content to pour his unusual grammar into the molds of sonnet, quatrain and blank verse. His chief experiments in Thank You, Fog are with verbs. Poets who write in English, he tells us in one of his "Shorts," "can very easily turn nouns, if we wish, into verbs." He proceeds to do so with gusto, not only to nouns but almost every unit of syntax he can get his hands on. Some examples from a single new poem, "Archeology:" "vacancied long ago," "man...has always graved his dead," "what disastered a city," "though gluttoned on sex/And blanded by flattery," "not that all rites should be equally fonded."

Far from trying to create new relationships between the parts of speech or "wringing the neck of rhetoric," Auden seems simply to be trying to restore some of the freshness of his old voice. Sometimes he succeeds, sometimes he is merely awkward. For example, one of the best things about Auden's early poetry was the way he integrated popular speech into his own poetic voice; but that kind of success is largely a question of touch, of getting the nuance just right, and Auden doesn't seem to have been able to assimilate the characteristic phrases of the sixties as well as those of the twenties:

Out there still the Innocence

That we somehow freaked out of

Where "can" and "ought" are the same.

ANYONE WHO HAS read Auden's earlier poetry must wonder why his genius petered out in this painful, disappointing way. Some have felt Auden's return to Christianity, capitalism and official morality to be the prime betrayal of his talent. But he continues to write great poetry after these ideological changes, during the Second World War and through the early fifties. Perhaps part of the answer lies in emotion instead of ideas--it seems that, after a certain point in his life, Auden became happy. As he explains in "Lullaby," he was "released at last/From lust for other bodies,/Rational and reconciled." Some poets can write under these circumstances; Auden apparently could not. Auden wrote Thank You, Fog after the long exiles of his life--in Weimar Germany, Iceland, and New York--had ended and he was invited back to Oxford. As a long-time expatriate and as a homosexual, Auden could never have been Poet Laureate. Yet, by the end of his life, he would have been as innocuous a choice as Sir John Betjeman.

Sometimes a poet seems to outlive his greatness. Christopher Isherwood once claimed that you could give Auden a subject and a verse form and he'd bring you back a "perfect" poem in twenty-four hours. In his later years, Auden was no longer able to pour out great poetry effortlessly like this, but he could still write some excellent things, like "Epistle To A Godson." A poet of Auden's quality can never be "washed out;" for what it's worth, Auden was the greatest living English poet even in his decline. But it's still unfortunate--for us--that he ever had to decline at all. When a great poet dies at the height of his powers, we must be grief-stricken to think of what the loss of even a single day may have robbed us. But when a great poet dies after lapsing into a "classic fatigue" we can be more temperate. We are only sorry this meant we had to lose a poet before his time.