Chapter 20 - Byron Among Our Contemporaries

Summary

W. H. Auden made it clear in his ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ and various prose writings on Byron that what counted for him was the poet’s ‘voice’: ‘I like your muse because she’s gay and witty / […] / I like her voice that does not make me jump’.¹ ‘Voice’ was no small matter for Auden, since as he famously declared in ‘September 1, 1939’ it was all he had ‘[t]o undo the folded lie’.² Addressing Byron in the form of a verse-letter allowed him to find a new voice for himself. Within the context of Letters from Iceland, the format permitted him to talk on public matters while adopting the tone of a private communication; and, in addition, it allowed him to develop a broader conception of poetry’s scope, by finding in it a place for the non-earnest – something, as he saw it, that had been lost along the way in the development of poetry since Byron’s time. It gave a new direction to his own writing, preparing the way for the longer poems of the second half of his career.