The book's stylistic mobility is remarkable: aridly dialectical passages modulate into blackly humorous burlesque, parodies of platitudinous rhetoric fade into stretches of gnomic pronouncement, and lyrically descriptive elements are juxtaposed with the Airman's telegraphese as Mendelson has stated, The Orators ‘has a pungency and extravagance that he never equalled’. The ascendancy of European fascism strongly informs the political urgency embodied in the doomed figure of the Airman other important elements in the complex conceptual fabric of the work are provided by Auden's reading in psychology and anthropology. The ‘radical uncertainty of tone’ which Edward Mendelson notes partially accounts for Auden's later view of the work as ‘a fair notion fatally injured’ this characteristic is, however, a function of the multiplicity of personae and contexts employed, as well as being intrinsic to the sustained thematic concern with uncertainties of identity and intention. Its disjunctive development, experimental formal strategies, and pervasive sense of combined personal and cultural crises identify it as Auden's most typically Modernist ( see Modernism) work. Sub-titled ‘An English Study’, the work is in three parts, ‘The Initiates’, ‘The Journal of Airman’, and ‘Six Odes’, the first two of which are predominantly written in prose. Auden's books, published in 1932, with revised editions in 19.
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