"Who Am I Now?"

CITY WITHOUT WALLS AND OTHER POEMS by W. H. Auden. 124 pages. Random House. $4.50.

With his ageless, cigar-store Indian's face, his schoolboyish cleverness and his endless role playing--political poet, lyric poet, religious poet--W. H. Auden was doomed to be regarded as the most promising poet in the English language. Right up to the threshold of old age. In fact, from the moment his first book of poems appeared when he was 23 and just down from Oxford, Auden was permanently assigned the prospect of becoming T. S. Eliot's successor. That has turned out to be practically a lifetime career.

The years passed. The books dutifully appeared, the promise was brilliantly maintained, an assured expectation. But like all crown princes kept waiting too long, Auden suddenly went from being considered promising to being considered a little passe.

Prizewinning Graffiti.

Now at 62, beyond promise, beyond middle-age slump, beyond fashion, the clever schoolboy deserves to be read for what he is: an endlessly experimenting, self-revising poet whose true voice is to try all voices, an honestly fluctuating responder to a fluctuating age. City Without Walls, containing poems of the past five years, includes nothing to rank with Auden's best. He appears to be long past the writing of wry love poems like "Lullaby." Perhaps more important, nowhere in this collection does he achieve the delicately blended wit and civilized humanity of "In Praise of Limestone," which may be his most beautiful and enduring shorter poem. Yet almost every other level and facet of Auden is present.

City Without Walls includes occasional verse in which Auden delights. The poet honors Fellow Poet Marianne Moore's 80th birthday, the wedding of a relative, the death of a housekeeper (". . . in a permissive age/ so rife with envy,/ a housekeeper is harder/ to replace than a lover").

Auden's early collaborator, Christopher Isherwood, recalls: "You could say to him: 'Please write me a double ballade on the virtues of a certain brand of toothpaste, which also contains at least ten anagrams on the names of well-known politicians, and of which the refrain is as follows . . .' Within 24 hours, your ballade would be ready--and it would be good."

As apparently effortless are the aphoristic fragments--like prizewinning graffiti--that Auden loves:

Justice: permission to peck a wee bit harder than we have been pecked.

As always, there is Auden modestly on the stump, or in the pulpit, but steadily aware of the dangers of pontificating. In the title poem, he invokes his Age of Anxiety themes, then introduces a second voice to cut himself down: "What fun and games you find it to play/ Jere-miah-cum-Juvenal . . ." Suddenly yet a third voice yawns: "Go to sleep now for God's sake!/ You both will feel better by breakfast time."

From Sixty to Sixteen-Plus. "In poetry," Auden has written, "all facts and all beliefs cease to be true or false and become interesting possibilities." It is his refusal to give up possibilities that makes singleminded, typecasting critics suspect him of essential frivolity. The fellow is forever tinkering with meter. He is forever arguing that poetry is play. He has the nerve to say: " The unacknowledged legislators of the world' describes the secret police, not the poets." Can high art be as amusing as Auden makes it? Eliot once said that the purpose of art was to entertain--and got away with the manifesto. Auden practiced that belief poetically--and for a long time paid the critical price.

Times and critical tenets are changing, though. Aesop's ant is no longer quite so honored, his grasshopper no longer quite so despised. Play has ceased to be such a dirty word. The wise and serious artist is more and more free of the burden of having to sound like a high priest. Today's readers should be more inclined to accept Auden's virtuosity without imputing shallowness. He is serious, if not deadly--and who, save Lowell perhaps, can match him for compassion and complexity?

These qualities of mind and art are never better summed up than in the book's final poem, "Prologue at Sixty." Now beginning to listen to thoughts of his own death "like the distant roll/ of thunder at a picnic," the poet remains stubbornly tentative to the end. Part prayer, part history lesson, "Sixty" links Auden in his Austrian retreat to the Northern barbarian races--with whom Auden has always been conscious of kinship--and the long sweep of European history. "Turks have been here, Boney's legions,/ Germans, Russians, and no joy they brought." The medium through which such awareness flows is the aging poet full of misgivings and reminiscences: "My numinous map/ of the Solihull gasworks/ gazed at in awe/ by a bronchial boy." "Who am I now?" he asks, and answers:

An American? No, a New Yorker, who opens his Times at the obit page, whose dream images date him already, awake among lasers, electric brains, do-it-yourself sex manuals . . .

Can Sixty make sense to Sixteen-Plus? What has my camp in common with theirs, with buttons and beards and Be-lns? Much I hope . . .

To speak is human because human to listen, beyond hope, for an Eighth Day, when the creatured Image shall become the Likeness: Giver-of-Life, translate for me till I accomplish my corpse at last.

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