LXXIV

From the outset of his self-transcending bardic dialectic,

His own distinct, self-influenced ‘Audenic’ discipline,

The brilliant boy from Solihull, near Birmingham, third

Of three sons born in York to physician Charles Augustus

And missionary nurse Constance Rosalie Bicknell, young

Wystan –with the chafed face of a scholarly twelfth-

Century friar, carved eyes bevelled with the belfry-dark

Of meticulous cloistered craft on parchment and illuminated

Manuscript, skin freckled with bookish foxing– sent out mixed

Signals, sparring shadows always latticing his path: first

He was for defining an authentic political poetry –

Then, for obfuscating such lofty tolls for the subtler peals

Of ‘parable-Art’ (but surely all art is parable?)… In his

Introduction to The Poet’s Tongue (1935), Auden

Coined this grail again as ‘the parabolic approach’,

The quintessence of which was Poetry; and this Parabolic

Poetry would teach us ‘love’ but not ‘ideology’, it would

Bear us messages in paradigms, the sides, ours to decide –

Rather than being didactic, it would lead us out from dingy

Schoolroom glooms of ethical tutelage, out to ecchoing

Greens of chainless heart-intelligence, or up to flights of self-

Enfranchisement through Hermeneutic Choice, personal

Responsibility for interpreting the parable with whichever

Messages seemed to strike us first in the figurative tapestry –

And this was where anxiety entered, gingerly, with its weighted

Gingery grin: neurosis, sourced from a species’ rinsing sin,

The ‘dizziness of freedom’, chagrin of Choice, the choking

Chain of impossible office, or whichever Kierkegaardian

Coinage one picked, anxiety was the defining temperament

Of the time, not only for the Audenites, but also for

Their harbingers: flame-haired D.H. Lawrence, and T.S.

Eliot who had once admitted to himself “Anxiety is

The hand maiden of creativity” –trembling epiphany;

The thunderstruck lightning-charge of Damascene anticipation…