The sucking backwash of his reputation was still gurgling down the beach as I grew up. He wasn’t quite dead then, though so drunk that he might as well have been; but he was the poet who had been inescapably important during the adolescence of people thirty or forty years older, so he was quite inaccessible to me. The short, famous and wonderful poems seemed like folk songs. They had always been there; they could never once have been original.<\/p>\n\n
\nThis evening I pulled down a copy of his selected shorter poems to read to Rosie. It was wonderful. The words came out new-minted, full of solid worth, as if I’d found some treasure from which the earth had removed all decay and corruption.<\/p>\n\n
then I looked around the room, when I came up here towrite,and on the wall was a fragment of Auden’s about journalism, or at least about critics, that I stuck up years ago to keep me a little honest, and haven’t read for years:<\/p>\n\n
I’m sorry I ever took seriously Robert Graves’ poisonous remarks about Auden in his lectures as Oxford professor of poetry.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The sucking backwash of his reputation was still gurgling down the beach as I grew up. He wasn’t quite dead then, though so drunk that he might as well have been; but he was the poet who had been inescapably … Continue reading