The Hidden Law: The Poetry of W. H. Auden

The Hidden Law: The Poetry of W. H. Auden by Hecht, Anthony. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780674390065.

In this study - the fruit of a lifelong critical and imaginative engagement with W H. Audens works - Anthony Hecht identifies and traces consistent habits of thought and belief within the poets extensive and varied writings and through his celebrated conversions and repudiations, literary and otherwise. Hecht acknowledges that Audens poems "both invite the intrusive scrutiny of the cryptographer and deny him access." Yet the readings he offers of poems from every phase of Audens career, along with dramatic works and critical essays, manage to explicate and illuminate Audens rich (and often cryptic) allusiveness without murdering to dissect. Among the themes that connect Audens works are his deep interest in the workings of language; his notion of the ultimate frivolity of art; his interest in the nature of heroism; his understanding of the relation of public to private life; the development of his religious thought; and what Auden called the "hidden law" that governs human existence - a strict and retaliatory force, something like poetic justice, that gives form to our best literature and shapes our personal fates. Hecht identifies these preoccupations in Audens work - and shows how they cut across the many genres in which he wrote - without losing sight of each poems individual history and context. As one of Audens most distinguished poetic heirs, Anthony Hecht is uniquely qualified to illuminate both the reading and the writing of these essential works of twentieth-century literature.