In Memory of W. B. Yeats

When he started out on his career, Auden greatly admired Yeats and was indebted to his work. However, during the 1930s, Auden became critical of the older poet. His stance on Yeats was therefore contradictory for most of his career; he both admired him and censured him. In a 1948 essay in Kenyon Review titled “Yeats as an Example,” Auden wrote that Yeats produced “some of the most beautiful poetry” of modern times. However, Auden did not care for Yeats’s esoteric beliefs, his romanticism, his tendency to embrace antidemocratic views, or his hobnobbing with the aristocracy. In 1964, Auden wrote to the poet Stephen Spender (in a letter quoted by James Fenton in a 2007 article in the Guardian) that Yeats “has become for me a symbol […] of everything I must try to eliminate from my own poetry, false emotion, inflated rhetoric, empty sonorities,” although Auden added that none of that was Yeats’s fault (Fenton, James. “A Voice of His Own.” The Guardian, 2007).

Auden’s elegy for Yeats reveals this double perspective. In the spring of 1939, just a few weeks after he wrote the elegy, Auden published “