Abstract:
This article questions and complicates the argument previously made by critics of W.H. Auden’s work—including myself—that Auden’s early poetry participates in the discourse of espionage through encryption, concealment, or masquerade, and that it is therefore peculiarly difficult in a way that Auden’s later work is not. In this piece I pinpoint Auden’s 1936 collection Look, Stranger! as the publication in which the trope of espionage is first turned to a new and different purpose, and then virtually abandoned for the rest of Auden’s life, and argue that there is greater thematic and political continuity between Auden’s pre-war and post-war poetry than I and others have previously suggested.
