Janet,
The crown of sonnets is still being done effectively. One of the best works of Marilyn Nelson is her sequence called "Thus Far By Faith," and she's got one or two more crowns that I've yet to see in print. I actually think the longer poems will work best if they do have some formal buttress. For example, while most of Ludlow is blank verse, I deliberately used a sort of Shakespearean method of ending scenes with rhymes to create subtle resonance. Walcott is in a sense a model here for the admixture of formal patterns and freshly heard aural culture.
Auden's longer poems are all over the map. Unlike Walcott, he didn't really have the dramatist's ability to make characters and is more likely to make allegories, but what astonishing things he did despite that weakness. I think he's the most intellectually rewarding of all the modern poets. Here are a few quick sketches of each of his longer poems:
Paid on Both Sides: his early charade, is a fabulous allegorical drama about the divided self, the way private conflict creates public conflict. His use of Anglo-Saxon patterns to create a "primitive" energy in the poem is remarkable.
"Letter to Lord Byron": a delightful defense of "light verse" but also an early stab at the verse essay, circling through autobiography as well as a set of ideas about society. This in a sense morphs into his hudibrastic verse essay, "New Year Letter," which pulls in an extraordinary range of intellectual history as it tries to dissect the dilemma of a world at war (1940-41). Contemporary poetry is so thorougly imagistic in its character that the verse essay is incomprehensible to many modern readers. Auden makes it a lot of fun.
One longer poem I'm leaving out for now, because I haven't come to grips with it, is "The Orators," but for me the two masterpieces of the long poem in Auden are really "For the Time Being" and "The Sea and the Mirror." These both take dramatic or mock-dramatic form (characters, scenes, etc), but since I've never seen them performed I can only judge them as literary performances. Britten thought the former too wordy to be set to music, which was Auden's original hope. In any case, as a non-Christian I'm intrigued by how deeply I love Auden's skeptical Christianity in "For the Time Being." I think it has to do, really , with the way he catches so much modern feeling and modern experience in his ironic retelling of the Incarnation story. The Narrator's speeches are among my favorite passages in Auden, and his Herod is weirdly hilarious.
"The Sea and The Mirror" takes up that skeptical sense of self that goes all the way back to "Paid on Both Sides" and has wonderful things to say about the limitations of art in our lives when we face the ultimate things: death, etc. These two longer poems are veritable encyclopedias of poetic forms, by the way, and could be used in a class teaching poetic form very profitably.
Finally, there is his wonderfully weird long poem called "The Age of Anxiety," which frequently uses a more strict approximation of Anglo-Saxon measure as it relates a story both Joycean and allegorical about four people. The complexity of this piece is daunting, and I think it's rather marvelous while at the same time feeling that it's just not my favorite of the longer works. To call it a failure is going too far. It's just an acquired taste.
One might argue that some of Auden's longer poems, like Eliot's Quartets, are really sequences rather than sustained long poems, and that narrative, per se, is not his bag. Yes, I agree. But if anyone can be said to have made a sort of narrative of ideas, it's Auden, and if anyone can give emotional color to intellectual life, it's Auden.
The fact that I'm more interested myself in grounded drama about people does not prevent me from loving Auden's longer poems.
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