The various characteristics that [Randall Jarrell in his essay "Changes of Attitude and Rhetoric in Auden's Poetry," see CLC, Vol. 2] lists in order to describe the style of 1930—so many of them involving ellipsis: the omission of articles, demonstrative adjectives, subjects, conjunctions, relative pronouns, auxiliary verbs—form a language of extremity and urgency. Like telegraphese, with which it has sometimes been compared, it has time and patience only for the most important words in the most kinetic, if not the best, order…. Behind this linguistic urgency lies Auden's sense of the immense peril in which the whole human enterprise stands as the hour comes round for a decaying civilization either to renew itself or die. Man, the evolutionary adventurer in Auden's biological-political- economic-psychological-social, Darwinian-Marxist-Freudian universe, must either move forward, or destroy himself, or both. The stripped, laconic language of those early poems is nicely calculated to convey this...