Auden's Syllabic Verse

Much of the poetry written by W. H. Auden between 1939 and the time of his death consists of syllabic verse, or lines arranged in accordance with a predetermined syllable-count but no fixed number or distribution of stresses. This book presents a comprehensive, in-depth analysis of his many and widely varied syllabics, grouping them primarily by the formal sub-categories to which they belong (as measured by line-length, stanza-type, or some other aspect of their overall design). With this approach the book clarifies the dynamic range and technical inventiveness of Auden’s syllabics. It also shows how his work of compares with that of Robert Bridges and Marianne Moore, two pioneers in the writing of English syllabic whose verse he was familiar with.

W. H. Auden once wrote: Every poet has his dream reader: mine keeps a look-out for curious prosodic fauna like bacchics and choriambs. In Richard Hillyer, Auden has at last found his dream reader, one who also understands the intellectual and literary point of Auden's prosodic and metrical subtleties. This is a uniquely illuminating book, one that every reader of modern poetry will want to explore.--Edward Mendelson, Columbia University, Auden first encountered Marianne Moore's syllabic verse in 1935. As a poet who had experimented in all the prosodic modes opened up by modernism - sprung rhythm, free verse, Anglo-Saxon accentual poetry, and the half, dissonant, and para-rhymes of the Great War poets - he was instantly alert to the opportunities for semantic and metrical innovation afforded by Moore's syllabic model. After chapters on Moore's predecessors, in particular Robert Bridges and the quantitative verse of Greek and Latin Classical authors, Richard Hillyer provides a comprehensive and meticulous account of the diverse syllabic forms Auden deployed in his later poetry, with a fine ear for the significance of, for example, the tensioned interplay of syllabic and iambic rhythms, the opportunities to extend poetry's vocabulary of polysyllabic words, and the implications for sentence and stanza forms and the possibilities for a wider discursive matter and manner once lines were freed from the tyranny of the accentual. Although this is a thorough scholarly account of Auden's syllabic verse, it does not confine itself to a purely technical analysis, but ranges widely and with a lightness of touch over the later poetry, to reveal how much of its meaning and resonance depends upon the poet's skill in opening up this new prosody - in particular underpinning the demotic, conversational register which Auden made his signal style in such later works as The Age of Anxiety and About the House. Hillyer handles this poetry with verve and on occasion a dry wit worthy of Auden's own. He is particularly illuminating about the 'minor' poetry of Auden's later years, the limericks, clerihews, and occasional poems that rarely receive critical attention, and he writes informatively and originally about Auden's writing in tanka and haiku forms, where, often, an extended narrative is constructed out of a sequence of stanzas in this form. For anyone interested in the variety and richness of Auden's syllabic poetry, this study is essential reading.--Stan Smith, Professor Emeritus in English, Nottingham Trent University, UK

Richard Hillyer is professor of English at the University of South Alabama.