Yeats, Auden, Eliot: 1939, 1940, 1941
Colm Tóibín, 22 January 2026
“... named the gift as the liberating source of identity and power.’ Auden thought that D.H. Lawrence owed ‘his influence for good and evil to his gift’, but that Matthew Arnold had ‘thrust his gift in prison till it died’. According to Mendelson, ‘almost everything [Auden] wrote in 1939 was an attempt to clarify his mixed feelings about the ... ”