Humphrey Carpenter and friends such as Brian Howard and Lincoln Kirstein have suggested that Auden had no visual sense and little interest in the visual arts. His topographical and pictorial iconography has, possibly in consequence, been largely overlooked. But the depiction of landscape, both real and symbolic, is a recurrent feature of his poetry. His approach to the physical landscape and to painters such as Daumier, Picasso, Cézanne, Dürer, Titian, Brueghel, Salvator Rosa, Poussin and Piero di Cosimo, consistently transforms the perceived world into symbolic, allegorical and metonymic modes, as vehicles for intellectual and moral ratiocination. Not for nothing is one of his early poems called 'Paysage Moralisé' (1933).

Auden consistently projected his bipolar vision, working through a complex series of opposites, on to his landscapes. His early approach to topographical imagery, shaped by a Romantic sense of the contradiction between reason and feeling, was gradually transformed into a postmodern acceptance of duality as a ‘unity-in-tension’ (DH, p. 65) of different modes of being. His poetic landscapes are haunted by the opposition of the wilderness and the city, reflecting a divided human nature, engaged in a historic quest in which the ideal is repeatedly threatened with relapse into barbarism. Landscape forms the backdrop for such journeying along an unending road, with a great city behind and unexplored regions ahead.