'Whoop--He Can See'

In 1946, W.H. Auden edited a selection of Tennyson’s poems for the London publisher Phoenix House Limited. The book is best remembered for its introduction, in which Auden says Tennyson “had the finest ear, perhaps, of any English poet” but “was also undoubtedly the stupidest.” Auden probably never read Harold Pinter’s poetry, so we can forgive his error in judgment. Later in the introduction, Auden proposes something more interesting: the three ways in which poets write bad poetry:

“He may be bored or in a hurry and write work which is technically slipshod or carelessly expressed.”

“Secondly, by overlooking verbal and visual associations he may be unintentionally funny at a serious moment.”

“Thirdly, he may suffer from a corruption of his own consciousness and produce work the badness of which strikes the reader as intentional.”

Of the third sort of awfulness, Auden cites a stanza from a song sung by Margery in Act III, Scene 1 of Tennyson’s Becket:

“Kiss in the bower,

       Tit on the tree!

Bird mustn’t tell,

      Whoop—he can see.”

Of it and two other samples of comically lousy verse, Auden writes: “The faults . . . . could not be cured by literary criticism alone; they involve Tennyson’s personality.” Auden omits what would appear to be the most common reason for poets turning out crap: an absence of talent coupled with incurably bad taste.

[Auden’s “stupidest” crack quoted above comes in the middle of a paragraph in which Auden renders a memorable portrait of Tennyson: “He had a large, loose-limbed body, a swarthy complexion, a high, narrow forehead, and huge, bricklayer’s hands; in youth he looked like a gypsy; in age like a dirty old monk [recall that Auden was no Adonis]; he had the finest ear, perhaps, of any English poet; he was also undoubtedly the stupidest; there was little about melancholia that he didn’t know; there was little else that he did.” As invective-cum-panegyric, this is unequalled in English. Auden’s selection from Tennyson’s vast corpus is excellent.]