The weight and concentration of the poems fall upon things (and those great things, animals and people), in their tough, laconic, un-get-pastable plainness: they have kept the stolid and dangerous inertia of the objects of the sagas—the sword that snaps, the man looking at his lopped-off leg and saying, That was a good stroke.

Freud to Paul: The Stages of Auden's Ideology, p. 155 - The Third Book of Criticism (1969)