Poetry as a Change in the Language

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The twenty-first sonnet in W.H. Auden’s 1938 sequence, ‘In Time of War’, includes the phrase ‘Anxiety / Receives them like a grand hotel’. Terry Eagleton cites it approvingly in a 2010 review of Craig Raine’s poetic-prose novel, Heartbreak. For Eagleton, Auden’s phrase is ‘genuinely metaphysical, yoking together concrete and abstract so that each interferes interestingly with each other. Raine’s images, by contrast, are too fastidiously self-regarding, too enraptured by their own show-off contrivance, to light up actual bits of the world.’ Eagleton’s praise of the Auden comes, that is to say, via a critical attack on a form of diction that falls short of it.

Ignoring the reference to Raine for the moment, we see that Eagleton attributes two, related, virtues to ‘Anxiety / Receives them like a grand hotel’. Firstly, the phrase brings together the abstract concept of anxiety and the concrete figure of a grand hotel, in such a way that ‘each interferes interestingly’ with the other. That mutual interference acts, a second virtue, ‘to light up actual bits of the world’.

To sketch what Eagleton is getting at, we might envisage a reader’s response to Auden’s words as follows. ‘Anxiety / Receives them like a grand hotel’ is certainly unusual and at first blush confounding. We can imagine a person, or even a type of accommodation, receiving others like a grand hotel, but surely not an abstract emotion – and certainly not anxiety. There are formulas for the use of such expressions, and Auden is going about this one the wrong way. But even as the reader ponders the poet’s ...