Eliot in 1926 and the later Yeats the next year came as world-shattering revelations. As Katherine Bucknell notes in her informative introduction to the first complete edition of Auden’s Juvenilia, “He looked for examples everywhere and imitated everything he liked.” There were the astringent simplicities of Frost, Hardy, and Edward Thomas the richnesses of Shakespeare the sonorities of Keats and Hopkins. Above all, the young Auden was a prodigious literary magpie. The technical side of Auden’s poetical character was present from the beginning.

Complicated verse forms of great technical difficulty, such as Englyns, Drott-Kvaetts, Sestinas, even if their content is trivial?”.Riddles and all other ways of not calling a spade a spade?.Long lists of proper names such as the Old Testament genealogies or the Catalogue of ships in the Iliad?.How does it work?” Among the questions he would have liked to put to critics: “Do you like, and by like I mean really like, not approve of on principle: He was quite blunt about this: “Here is a verbal contraption. How often he insisted-to the disgust of those who have wanted to see poetry as a quasi-religious struggle for authenticity- that technical matters formed one of his chief interests in poetry. Today we think of Auden as one of the great prosodists of the twentieth century. That year saw the publication in The Criterion of Paid on Both Sides, a ferociously difficult poetic drama that Auden subtitled “A Charade,” and, a bit later, a slim volume of poems (including Paid on Both Sides) by Faber & Faber. It was dedicated to his friend Christopher Isherwood and was hand-printed by Stephen Spender (in collaboration with a local Oxford printer) in an edition of about thirty copies. Technically, Auden’s first book of poems was published in 1928. That same evening he somehow managed to recover the poems and, forgetting about the salvific properties of science, went on writing new ones. When Auden was at the Gresham’s School, he once threw his poems into the school pond, declaring that he was done with poetry and that “the human race would be saved by science.” It was a dramatic, school-boy gesture, quickly repented. To be sure, the apprenticeship had its caesurae. For the next six years he served a studious apprenticeship, reading, absorbing, and, especially, imitating poems by other writers. In “Making, Knowing and Judging,” a lecture he delivered at Oxford in 1956, Auden recalls that he decided to become a poet “one Sunday afternoon in March 1922” because “a friend suggested that I should.” At that time Auden was fifteen years old. Auden (1907–1973) was quite explicit about the origin of his poetic vocation.

Collected Poems by W.H. Auden