Stevens and Auden: Disparities and Affinities

IN HIS RECENT look back at a life in poetry criticism, Harold Bloom includes a two-page anecdote. “I treasure ruefully some memories of W. H. Auden,” he writes, “that go back to the middle 1960s, when he arrived in New Haven to give a reading of his poems at Ezra Stiles College” (133). Bloom recalls how Auden came “in a frayed, buttonless overcoat,” carrying “an attaché case containing a large bottle of gin, a small one of vermouth, a plastic drinking cup, and a sheaf of poems.” After forcing the hosting college to double the agreed-upon speaking fee, Auden delivered the kind of “benign and brilliant” performance for which he was known (133). “The next day,” Bloom reminisces,

I told Auden I had to go off to teach Shelley’s poetry. After saying I was “a dotty don” and that he liked dotty dons, he insisted on attending my class before he entrained back to New York City. I knew he did not care for Shelley and had extended this distaste to Whitman and Wallace Stevens, whom we had discussed at breakfast. . . . It was consistent of Auden to condemn Shelley, Whitman, and Stevens, who were not Christian poets but Epicurean skeptics, metaphysical materialists, and above all High Romantics. Auden’s celebrated In Praise of Limestone explicitly attacks Stevens. When I praised Shelley, Whitman, and Stevens as masters of nuance, Auden flatly said that none of the three had any ear for language. Discussing great poets he disliked was hardly Auden at his best, yet I grimly admired his surprising dogmatism. He was free of the Eliot-Pound virus of anti-Semitism, and immensely kind and considerate in most things, but he seemed rather proud of his critical limitations.

(133–34)

Although we came across Bloom’s bittersweet and perhaps not entirely reliable recollection only later in the course of preparing the current issue of The Wallace Stevens Journal, the anecdote serves as a perfect appetizer, both in the way it sets up a critical polarity between Stevens and Auden and because Bloom’s characteristically polarizing effect returns in the text that did spark the present discussion: a review of Aidan Wasley’s The Age of Auden in the pages of The Times Literary Supplement. When one of our Editorial Board Members, Glen MacLeod, came upon this review, he instantly reported back to us to say that Auden’s influence on postwar American poetry seemed to be trumped up in Wasley’s book at the expense of Stevens. This appeared to us a claim worth reflecting on in the pages of this journal. After all, these were the stark terms in which the TLS reviewer—the Scottish poet and critic Lachlan Mackinnon—set up the antithesis:

Wasley’s argument . . . challeng[es] a received view that the major influence on the younger Merrill was that of Wallace Stevens. Stevens’s centrality to post-war American poetry has been declared by Harold Bloom, and receives strong implicit support from Helen Vendler’s Faber Book of Contemporary American Poetry (1986). It has always been difficult, though, given the meagreness of Stevens’s thought considered in the abstract, to see how he could much influence anyone except in the direction of gorgeousness of diction. Wasley’s is a welcome corrective. . . . John Ashbery is quoted in agreement with Wasley’s anti-Stevensian thesis: “once, when I pointed out to him that he sort of ignored Auden’s effect on me, Harold [Bloom] told me, ‘Nonsense, darling. You only think you were influenced by Auden. But it’s Stevens who made you who you are.’” Not true, as Wasley persuades us through a detailed study of Ashbery’s writing about Auden and the ways in which Ashbery sees literary influence as a matter of conscious choice.

(26)

We hope we may be excused for having thought, initially, that the pitting of Auden against Stevens was a key element in the argument developed by Wasley in his book. Yet when we contacted him to ask whether he would be interested in joining a panel to discuss the Stevens-Auden antithesis, Wasley was...