The Lexical Exercises of W. H. Auden

This chapter takes its title from ‘A Bad Night (A Lexical Exercise)’, which establishes an ambiguity between the poem as a communicative and a philological entity. With reference to formalist theories and their critiques, an investigation is made of Auden’s understanding of philology as ‘the most poetical of all scholastic disciplines’ in relation to his use of obscure diction, particularly in his later poetry. This diction resists all attempts to read it as a method of obstructing or facilitating communication; rather, its historicity makes communication possible (with the help of the OED) without guaranteeing its efficacy.