James Fenton started out looking like the W.H. Auden of his generation; now, with the publication of his “Selected Poems” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 196 pages, $14), it seems clear that he is really its Stephen Spender. Auden and Spender, of course, were two of the young poets who helped to revolutionize English literature in the 1930s. Along with Cecil Day-Lewis and Louis Macneice (collectively, the four poets were whimsically but enduringly dubbed “MacSpaunday”), they helped to bring the properties of life in the 20th century into poetry for the first time. Spender’s poem “The Pylons,” with its ominous image of power lines “like whips of anger,” gave them their other collective name, the Pylon school. For a few years in the early 1930s, Spender and Auden seemed equally momentous for the future of poetry.

In time, however, the enormous difference in talent between them became unignorable. Auden grew to be a major poet, even as he changed his early style and moved from England to America. Spender, who never stopped writing poetry, nonetheless ceased to matter as a poet, and took on the more amiable and transient eminence of the man of letters. He lectured, taught, wrote his memoirs, and attended conferences. But when he died in 1995, it was only his poems of 60 years before that people still remembered.

The same destiny seems to lie in wait for James Fenton, who was born in 1949 and who also made his literary debut as part of a talented and gossiped-about coterie. Along with Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, and Christopher Hitchens, Mr. Fenton worked at the New Statesman magazine in the 1970s, where he became known as a foreign correspondent even as his poetic reputation grew. This combination of roles — the man of sensibility who was also a man of action, the reporter who could cover the civil war in Cambodia and then write poems about it — was a potent one, and Mr. Fenton profited from its glamour. In particular, his early poems, collected in “The Memory of War” (1982) and “Children in Exile” (1984), evoke the Auden who, 30 years before, had traveled to Spain and China to take the pulse of the age:

One man shall smile one day and say goodbye.
Two shall be left, two shall be left to die.
One man shall give his best advice.
Three men shall pay the price.

These lines, from “Cambodia,” have something of the ominous indefiniteness of Auden’s “‘O where are you going,’ said reader to rider.” It is one of Mr. Fenton’s most effective tones, and he used it to excellent purpose in the early sequence “A German Requiem,” a poem about the World War II that does not contain the name of a single battle:

It is not what they built. It is what they knocked down.
It is not the houses. It is the spaces between the houses.
It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets that no longer exist.

The plain, repetitious syntax is crucial to the poem’s ghostly power. When speech is unequal to a subject — in this case, the destruction of German cities by Allied bombing — a speaker has two choices: He can raise his voice into bombast, or he can mute it into simplicity. In a handful of poems from the 1970s and early 1980s — “A German Requiem,” “Lines for Translation Into Any Language” — Mr. Fenton endowed that simplicity with such ethical and emotional force that they still help to define the sound of serious poetry in our time. (Given how few of these significant poems he wrote, it seems inexplicable that Mr. Fenton would exclude from this “Selected Poems”some of the best and most famous, including “A Staffordshire Murderer.”)

Mr. Fenton’s unsolemn seriousness, his plain language, and his poetic engagement with current events all seemed revelatory in the early 1980s, when poetry was cloistered in academic postmodernism. The blurbs on the back of the “Selected Poems,” which date from that distant period, give a sense of what Mr. Fenton’s readers were responding to. He is praised for “having a great deal to write about,” for being “direct, artless and entertaining.”

This is where Mr. Fenton’s other identity, as a foreign correspondent, was especially valuable. He could give readers a you-are-there frisson, as in “Dead Soldiers,” a poem about the Cambodian civil war:

On my left sat the Prince;
On my right, his drunken aide.
The frogs’ thighs leapt into the sad purple face
Like fish to the sound of a Chinese flute.

In this vein, Mr. Fenton sometimes sounds like a Kipling for the post-imperial age, a vendor of the exotic whose politics are reassuringly unimpeachable. This is the style of middle-period poems like “The Ballad of the Imam and the Shah,” which turns the Iranian Revolution of 1979 into an Eastern adventure tale:

It started with a stabbing at a well
Below the minarets of Isfahan.
The widow took her son to see them kill
The officer who’d murdered her old man.

Yet once the novelty of such balladeering wears off, it becomes clear that Mr. Fenton has little real political insight to offer. Worse, the language of his journalistic poems is lacking in density and metaphorical surprise. Even poems whose titles are like datelines — “Jerusalem,” “Tiananmen” — are jinglingly unspecific: “Tiananmen/Is broad and clean/And you can’t tell/Where the dead have been.” They are what Byron called his own Eastern tales — poems to quaff, not to savor. And Mr. Fenton lacks the one quality a quaffing poet most needs, abundance.The whole of his “Selected Poems” is not much longer than other poets’ single collections.

Short as it is, however, the “Selected Poems” still feels misleadingly padded. For after the early 1980s, it appears, Mr. Fenton stopped writing actual poems almost completely. Instead, most of his verse productions were song lyrics, written to be set to music; almost a third of the book consists of the libretto for an unproduced opera, “The Love Bomb.” And while Mr. Fenton has chosen to include these pieces in his “Selected Poems,” they are not poems that make use of the conventions or forms of song lyrics. They are real lyrics, meant to be sung, which means that on the page they are completely dead. After the genuine poetry of the book’s first quarter, the reader is dismayed to find himself in a wilderness of banality and sentiment:

Don’t talk to me of love. Let’s talk of Paris.
I’m in Paris with the slightest thing you do.
I’m in Paris with your eyes, your mouth,
I’m in Paris with…all points south.
Am I embarrassing you?
I’m in Paris with you.

This kind of sub-Cole Porter wordsmithing does not seem to come from James Fenton the young poet, but from James Fenton the steadily productive man of letters. His songs and libretti, like his art reviews for the New York Review of Books, or his guide to gardening, or his history of the Royal Academy, are worthy enough, but they do little to explain or justify Mr. Fenton’s once formidable poetic reputation.This “Selected Poems” may be the rare volume that does not consolidate its author’s fame, but actually injures it.

akirsch@nysun.com