Thank you, fog: W. H. Auden as presiding genius

6) Focusing his remarks on Book II of Spenser's Faerie Queene, A. Bartlett Giamatti has delineated the bower experience as a place in which magic, art, and the unnatural are aligned; a place which leads the poet through a series of gates and porters; illusory beauty, a false imitation of Eden, which makes nature seem more and more unnatural; a place which tests the poet's resistance, his will to master himself and sharpen his reason. It is a place, finally, which encloses the poet in hell-not paradise-if he succumbs to its illusory charms (see 232-94, and especially 246-79).

7) Keats describes his desire for such in a way that perfectly describes the Genius A as one characterized by vision: Whereon there grew

A power within me of enormous ken To see as a God sees, and take the depth Of things as nimbly as the outward eye Can size and shape pervade.... that I might see And seeing ne'er forget. (Keats 443)

Auden thus achieves Keats' desire, specifically in his assertion, "Now native knowledge returns": in other words, the Genius A perspective does not, in this sense, forget.

8) In his turn to hermeneutics, for example, Gerald Bruns argues this premise without questioning it, that in moving away from epistemology and linguistics, the appropriate question to ask now is what it is to read Wallace Stevens when we no longer believe in the imagination (24-40, quotation, 25).

Works Cited

Auden, W. H. Collected Poems. Ed. Edward Mendelson. New York: Random House, 1976. Cited in the text as CP.

_. The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays. 1950. New York: Vintage, 1989. Cited in the text as DH.

_. The Enchafed Flood or The Romantic Iconography of the Sea. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1950.

1968 Address at the Salzberg festival. Quoted in James A. Winn. Unsuspected Eloquence: A History of the Relationship between Poetry and Music. New Haven: Yale UP, 1981.

_. "Psychology and Art Today." The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings 1927-1939. Ed. Edward Mendelson. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1977. 332-42 ___."The World of the Sagas" in Secondary Worlds. New York: Random House, 1968. 47-84.

Boly, John. Reading Auden: The Returns of Caliban. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991. Bruns, Gerald. "Stevens without Epistemology." Wallace Stevens: The Poetics of

Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985. 24-40. Clark, Thekla. Wystan and Chester: A Personal Memoir of W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman. New York: Columbia UP, 1995.

Culler, Jonathan. "Apostrophe." The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981.

DeMan, Paul. "Lyric and Modernity." Forms of Lyric: Selected Papers from the English Institute. New York: Columbia UP, 1970.151-76.

Giamatti, A. Bartlett. The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1966.

Hartman, Geoffrey. "Romantic Poetry and the Genius loci." Beyond Formalism. New Haven: Yale UP, 1970. 311-36.

Jackson, Richard. The Dismantling of Time in Contemporary Poetry. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1988.