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One might think that Christians, at least, would champion his work, but they have rarely done so, in part because of his lifelong homosexuality (and for other reasons which I have explored in this essay). But here at the centenary I think the most important thing to note is this: in the early 1940s Auden began writing poems that scarcely anyone knew how to read—that scarcely anyone even today knows how to read.

After that agitation in 2006, readers and poets and critics roused themselves and did proper honor to Auden on his birthday, February 21st, 2007. There were festivities here and in England: the BBC even did its part, with a series of programs, including radio essays by poets on Auden and, best of all, a Good Friday reading of Auden's great poetic sequence Horae Canonicae, introduced by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. But reading through the many reflections and tributes that turned up in the English–language press, I couldn't help noticing how many writers seemed to be groping, uncertain what to say about a man who clearly was for them an enigmatic figure.

Take, for example, the extended conversation about Auden at Slate.com. Meghan O'Rourke led off the discussion by reflecting on the famously corrugated appearance of Auden's face in his final years:

According to a biographer, Richard Davenport–Hines, Auden seemed worn down at the time of his death, and the poet's friends have said that the years of drinking, heavy smoking, and barbiturate use had taken their toll. But it is tempting to imagine that it wasn't the drugs and liquor that prematurely aged him, but his literary aesthetic itself: the mantle of moral and political responsibility he believed came with the job of being a poet. If he was a formidably craggy slab of a man by the time he turned 60, it wasn't just the Chesterfields, it was the crushing responsibility.

But this gets Auden precisely wrong: when he became a Christian, when he began to cultivate a more civic and ethical mode of poetry, he unburdened himself, divesting himself of responsibilities that others wanted him to meet but that he knew himself to be incapable of sustaining. What had been "crushing" to him was his status as the spokesman for his generation; what freed him was finding, in America, a refuge from his admirers.

Naïve though it may sound, for Auden this country really was a place to start over. And he came to believe that in shrugging off the expectations others had for him, he also had to shrug off his own self–understanding, his own formation as a person and a poet. Auden had always been a critic of Romanticism and an aficionado of earlier and less fashionable poetic movements: from the beginning he had drawn on medieval literature—which he had come to love after hearing some lectures at Oxford by an Anglo–Saxonist named Tolkien—and had celebrated Alexander Pope and Lord Byron—the one Romantic poet Auden admired, in part because everyone else treated him as a minor poet who had been over–celebrated in his lifetime. Auden despised Shelley especially, often singling out for scorn the notion that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." It was a model of poetic power that, he saw, many of the great modernists had accepted as well, for all their vocal anti–Romanticism.

But as he settled into life in America, and into Christian belief, he came to think that he had absorbed more of the Romantic model of the poet as isolated genius than he'd realized. Superficially his verse had not looked Romantic, but deep down, he had accepted distinctively Romantic ideas about the singular power and unique insight of the poet.

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