Poems (Auden)

Written in a gnomic, seemingly obscure style, the poems and the play Paid on Both Sides included with them, were extraordinarily influential.

The compression of their style, their presentation of a personality "frustrate and vexed" that could be seen as a metaphor for the zeitgeist of a country—plainly England, struck a wholly new, modernist note.

Not allusive like Eliot's The Waste Land (1922), the numbered poems in the volume, as well as the play, were as difficult and rich as that work but, unlike it, seemed to come from a person speaking in a private but significant code.

The impression derives from the density of rhetorical device, but some of it also comes from the author's stoic, detached attitude toward his own intense emotional life.

For this reason critics dubbed these contemporary writers, who also saw England in parlous condition, as "the Auden generation."