Auden’s Secrets

When I spot an essay entitled “The Secret Auden,” I get nervous. When it’s in the New York Review of Books, I get nervouser.Edward Mendelson’s recent piece on Auden does refer to Auden’s homosexuality, but the focus of the piece is elsewhere: Auden’s dirty . . . . Continue Reading »

Auden and the Limits of Poetry

By the mid-1930s, W. H. Auden was the most famous and most widely imitated young poet in England. His verse was brilliant, ironic, often funny, wide-ranging in its reference—equally at home in the worlds of Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry and the technology of mining—and sometimes impenetrably . . . . Continue Reading »