[We should not be tempted] either to believe Auden's own analysis of his creative character, or to divide his output too firmly into the "English" Auden and the "International" one. Of course, his departure for good from England early in 1939 is a very real watershed, but the nature of the change it brought about in Auden's poetry defies simplistic description. I am inclined to follow Edward Lucie-Smith's view, that what Auden learned from America was not how to work but how to be a professional. The 400-odd pages of The English Auden are a rich enough testament to his ability to get down to hard work while he lived in these islands…. Just as stuffed with aphorisms, brilliant paradoxes and sheer good sense as the later pieces in The Dyer's Hand or Forewords and Afterwords, [the prose articles and criticism included in this book] are none the less poorly organised, randomly assembled and sorely in need of an editorial pencil. The American Auden was sheerly professional in all his reviews and essays: the English Auden was still the notebook-keeper and amateur healer, tossing off brilliant aperçus for readers of The Daily Herald on "How to Be Masters of the Machine" or assembling a do-it-yourself-kit for understanding "Psychology and Art Today." (p. 64)

[Included in The English Auden is] an unpublished and unfinished work entitled The Prolific and the Devourer which is touching in its rawness. Here are the main ideas which dominated Auden's life right up to his death, but there seems to be no control of their presentation. Had he been able to work them into a properly planned book, the world might well have lost much of the mature poetry he wrote thereafter. These fragments remain like thematic sketches in a composer's notebook: we see the dominating shapes of his imagination, but as yet there is no proper indication of how richly he is going to expand them and counterpoint them in his work. At first sight, these perceptions seem confined to political issues, but the working-out of their consequences can be found in For the Time Being, The Sea and the Mirror, The Age of Anxiety and well into the poems of the Fifties and Sixties. Auden always saw politics as an expression of the health of the imagination, and there is a sense in which the later Horatian poetry is quite as politically directed (or as unpolitical if you want to put it that way) as the work of the Thirties…. It makes general sense to state that Auden not only wrote well and ill at all stages of his career, but that his abiding interests and characteristics did not change very much over forty years' devotion to poetry. He is an artist who resists the famous three periods of production: his work is like a well-cut gem, it reveals different facets of itself at certain times. It does not get more mature or develop particularly, except in the one sense of literary professionalism. After settling in America, Auden's concern for the technical finish of his poems became more fastidious. (pp. 64-5)

But The English Auden leaves the strong impression that this growth of professionalism was not all gain. Mixed up with the rough and ready finish of much of his poetry of the Thirties, there is also a marvellous authority and originality which the later poetry does not possess…. Poems 1930 must be one of the most unexpected books ever to have made its author's reputation. Where, except perhaps in Laura Riding's verbal defoliation and Wilfred Owen's pararhymes, are there any precedents for the first poems of this twenty-three-year-old genius? The material of the poems is not without ancestry—chiefly the sagas, the public school fantasies of himself, Isherwood and friends, and the gnomic marginalia of Blake—but the tone is completely new. And like Byron's tone, which enabled him to wake one morning and find himself famous, Auden's won instant recognition. It is only when we scrutinise these early poems closely that we perceive how far they depart from the canons of poetical propriety which the later Auden set up for himself. For a start, they are sui generis, and not fashioned by imitation of some admired model…. There are shadows of past structures in them …, but they come very close to being unclassifiable formally—uncomfortably so, for the taste of the mature Auden, perhaps, though he always remained fond of the bulk of them and included them, under however many changes of title, in his various collections from the Forties onwards. (p. 65)

After 1930, rhymes, metrical devices, stanza structures, in fact all the traditional armoury of poetry, are applied in full knowledge of their effectiveness and the formal demands they make upon the poet's skill and imagination. But the early poetry is different. It is packed with close rhymes, pararhymes, and cadences out of the nursery, but these are held dissolved in verse of a sleepwalking authority. This is just the way an oracle would speak, we think, as we read such poems as "From the very first coming down", "Taller today", "Love by ambition", "Watch any day his nonchalant pauses", "Will you turn a deaf ear", and "Consider this and in our time." Those first readers in the Thirties who thought they were hearkening to the voice of a new leader, and who interpreted Auden's poems as messages from the battlefront, soon identified with Communism, were not wrong in their impulses, though wholly mistaken in their interpretations. As Edward Mendelson [editor of The English Auden] points out, the early poems speak of defeat, of separation, of stories which are not simply incomplete but of which there were probably never any definitive versions. We may wonder how anybody could take Poems 1930 or even The Orators as a call to the collective life…. But Auden himself must have been persuaded to think that his talent was amenable to the cause of Communism: for all his brilliance of mind, he was not gifted with total self-knowledge.

His was a most unusual case—a very young poet whose first work was recognised by his contemporaries as new and authoritative. Combined with his didactic bent, this discovery of his authority pushed him towards an explicitness which was sometimes at variance with his talent during the Thirties. After 1930, it seems to me, Auden's work is a sort of development section reworking themes to which the first book of poems gave the exposition. Ideas out of the hauntingly complete early poetry are now subjected to overt elaboration. Except for his remarkable lyrics and songs, many of which were gathered into Look, Stranger!, the rest of the Thirties poetry is not as fine as his first published work. Only after he went to America and realigned himself with Christianity did he experience another surge of power of the kind with which he began….

[The] revolutionary art seemingly promised by his earliest work was something he was either unaware of or something he had no intention of providing. The anti-modernist counter-reformation which he led in later years is prefigured as early as The Orators. And if in the Thirties he was content to take up forms and influences with an almost games-playing enthusiasm, he quickly turned himself into a virtuoso, whose maturity was accelerated by the more professional air of the United States…. The United States is, of course, the home of the academic avant-garde but Auden did not interest himself in this. It was American professionalism which concerned him, and he was more likely to discern it on Broadway than on Black Mountain.

It is hard to read The English Auden without wondering equally at the memorable language and the wilful extravagance. The two occur together most frequently in The Orators and The Dog Beneath the Skin…. These live side by side with details of the fifth column of wireless-controlled crows and card packs, and the stink bombs and sanitary-paper sabotage forecast in Journal of an Airman. But the extravagance has a point, the amateur versifying has a no-holds-barred exuberance which Auden risked less and less as he got older…. (p. 66)

But having praised the exuberance, I can't say I am surprised that Auden quickly outgrew and came to regret the crudity of many of the ideas in the poems of his time of poetical loosening-up…. Auden's personality being so strongly didactic, his creative gift had to stand in for the Old Adam in him. He was drawn to the wilder shores of the healers (Homer Lane, Lawrence and "loony Layard"), but also to Freudian orthodoxy and to his mother's Anglicanism. Without the urge to portray the sickness of our species in poetry as exuberant and memorable as anything he wrote in praise of health, he would have been an insufferable prig as an artist. (p. 67)

Not the least of the attractions of The English Auden is its reminder that this knowing artist once exhibited character faults like ours, and didn't merely anatomise them. He had not yet put his guard right up. Poems 1930 is all Old Adam—a wonderful assortment of warnings and battle scenes, not just from ruined industrial landscapes and the haunted pastures of old feuds, but as much concerned with the High Streets and mass culture of an England bleeding to death in the Depression. The one really severe loss suffered by Auden in America was his sense of place. He recaptured it in a touristy sort of way in his poems about the Mezzogiorno and lower Austria, but the real (as distinct from the mythic) America seems never to have entered his imagination at all forcefully. Not even New York is fleshed out in his later poetry. From New Year Letter onwards, the landscape of his poems comes from books, and emblematic ones at that. And when he does record more concretely, the scene is usually England again…. [He] sets these islands before us like a map. It is much more than a geographical poetry; the vision is of the field of folk itself…. "Get there if you can and see the land you once were proud to own" begins one of the poems in Auden's first book. So much of what Auden saw at that time is undated and disturbingly true today. In America Auden moved on to other concerns, but the country he left behind remains very much as he diagnosed it.

The English Auden should enable all those commentators who have been saying for years that he left his gift behind him when he went to America to check on their memories of his work in the Thirties. (pp. 67-8)

It is interesting to note Auden's habit of dropping set-pieces into his plays as with the "Epithalamium" and "The Witnesses"; he had not yet begun to dismember his longer works to provide individual poems for later books—that was to come with his various versions of Collected Poems. Therefore, starting with Paid on Both Sides, the book is a steady progression forward out of the Twenties up to Auden's departure for the States in January 1939. (p. 68)

There are dozens of masterpieces in [The English Auden], some of them the most familiar and loved poems of our century. Has there been a writer of lyrics in English since Rochester who was Auden's equal? That claim can be substantiated on his first decade's production alone—the greater part of it present in this cornucopia of a book. (p. 70)