SOURCE: "John Skelton," in Prose and Travel Books in Prose and Verse, Volume 1: 1926-1938, edited by Edward Mendelson, Princeton University Press, 1996, pp. 82-93.

In the following influential essay, originally published in 1935, Auden provides a reassessment of Skelton 's poetic accomplishments.

To write an essay on a poet who has no biography, no message, philosophical or moral, who has neither created characters, nor expressed critical ideas about the literary art, who was comparatively uninfluenced by his predecessors, and who exerted no influence upon his successors, is not easy. Skelton's work offers no convenient critical pegs. Until Mr Robert Graves drew attention to his work some years ago, he was virtually unknown outside Universityhonour students, and even now, though there have been two editions, in the last ten years, those of Mr Hughes and Mr Henderson, it is doubtful whether the number of his readers has very substantially increased. One...