“ … I cannot throw away The Orators as worthless bosh,” wrote Alan Pryce-Jones. “It appears to be the work of a sane imagination without a mind—a far more complicated state than the paranoiac's working on fragments of knowledge and experience.” Such exasperation typifies the reaction of the vast majority of critics to the appearance of Auden's second book. Even the sympathetic G. W. Stonier had to confess that “With so much in this book that is fine and original, one hesitates to ask the author for more explanation. Yet that is what is needed. He works so intimately, but at such a distance. One hopes that time will bridge the gap, and that we will get nearer to him or he to us.” Unfortunately, however, since 1932 the gap between The Orators and the critic has more often widened than narrowed, critics preferring to speak vaguely about the work's significance rather than to grapple with its complex details. Richard Hoggart in 1951 and J. W. Beach in 1957 shed light on some of these details, but not until the last few years, in the writings of Justin Replogle and Monroe K. Spears, have serious attempts been made to deal with The Orators as a meaningful whole. Yet, of his own interpretation, Spears has to confess: “We can be sure that enough dark corners will remain, even if we succeed in casting light on a considerable part of its territory.”By probing some of these remaining “dark corners,” I hope to cast yet further light on Auden's most puzzling work.