Early Auden: Farewell to the Signified

Abstract

Although the basic images in Auden’s early poems seem fairly easy to comprehend, the texts prove remarkably evasive when it comes to questions of meaning. The beginning of Justin Replogle’s Auden’s Poetry is a typical example of the confusion they tend to create:

The pattern of Auden’s ideas, though often talked about, has never been very clear. His earliest poetry was vigorous, energetic, and on the surface at least original, untraditional, and obscure. Readers could sense vast energies pouring forth without quite knowing what the commotion was about. Yet at first the energy itself seemed meaningful. To a young generation at odds with society, energy suggests rebellion.¹

The passage displays a puzzling array of terms for ‘meaning’: there are underlying structures, there are ideas, and there is a pattern created out of them. Replogle also mentions a discrepancy in lucidity between the different layers. The basic features of Auden’s poems seem easily perceptible. His ideas, however, remain obscure, and a pattern or meaning can hardly be constructed out of them. Rather, the texts create an ‘energy’, which, however, remains unspecific and hardly signals permanence.