“... editor of Harper’s Bazaar, and for a while housed such diverse inhabitants as McCullers, W.H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Gypsy Rose Lee, Paul and Jane Bowles and Richard Wright. (Auden seems to have been an especially terrible housemate, complaining about excessive use of toilet paper and telling people their colds ...”

“... two terms as an undistinguished student at University College, Oxford, before he finally met W.H. Auden. It was not for want of trying. Michael, Spender’s elder brother, an insufferable turbo-brain at Balliol, had known Auden at school and kept in touch, but refused to arrange an introduction for Stephen, fearing, as ...”

“... been allowed to be one. Mellers says that ‘very sophisticated poets like T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden, sometimes listed among his sources’, seem to have little affinity with Dylan, yet 11 pages later attributes to Dylan the claim that ‘in my end is my beginning.’ This kind of sliding around matters, partly because Dylan has talked about first and last ...”

“... Tolkien is not remembered by the world at large, although this is the aspect of his work that W.H. Auden chose to commemorate in a genial poem. What interests the reading public is the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Practitioners of Tolkien’s academic subject often deplore this fact, but posterity’s judgment does him no great ...”

“... aspirations. Sacks’s standing with literary people is not just due to the regard in which W.H. Auden is known to have held him. Like Verne before him, Oliver Sacks has produced a metaphorical vision, indeed, in some readings, a neurological version, of fiction. The interest of A Leg to Stand On is that it is a story about something which happened to Sacks ...”

“... Penelope Gilliatt, Lillian Hellman, Isaiah Berlin, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Harry Levin, W.H. Auden, Malraux, James Baldwin, Stravinsky, Robert Lowell etc. None of these people, however, furnishes Wilson with anything like a satisfying number of thoughtful passages in the journals. This is partly a result of misleading editing by Lewis Dabney, who divides ...”

“... over an overdone partridge. ‘Stephen laughed. Pauline de Rothschild ate only one pear. W.H. Auden was silent.’ Plante and his partner were smart, pretty, adulatory and new – a shoo-in to the company of elderly gays and needy widows – but the vacancy at the centre of Plante’s ambition is much in evidence. He’s one of those who seems to have ...”

“... from Berryman’s witty Englishing of his name to Aldous Huxley, from William Bradford to W.H. Auden, have discovered in America an unformulated open space hospitably ready to accommodate their private myths of self-realisation. To less determined or less visionary immigrants it offers a wide variety of ready-made life-styles, and it’s in this humbler ...”

“... to dislike Eliot with some intensity’; refers to ‘greasy Epstein’, and to his admirer W.H. Auden as belonging (mysteriously) with ‘the corduroy panzers’; dismisses the Poet Laureate as ‘poor old John Masefield’. Nor do the members of his own coterie fare much better. He is ‘wholly unsympathetic’ to Charles Williams’s mind, and although he ...”

“... And on the occasion of his death, Kingsley Amis declared that Day Lewis, ‘less clever than Auden, less ebullient than MacNeice ... may well turn out to be more durably satisfying than either’. This was, perhaps, just coffin-smoothing on Amis’s part, an expression of hope rather than expectation: Gelpi, however, attempts to make it so. He discerns ...”

“... forgiving friend, Tennessee Williams, a fellow Southerner, ‘lonely hunter’ and drinker; W.H. Auden; Edith Sitwell; Henry Miller; Janet Flanner; Richard Wright, who praised McCullers for her complex, realistic portraits of Negroes; the American composer David Diamond, who had a triangular love affair with McCullers and Reeves that ended unhappily for ...”

“... varieties are beaten flat/Under one leaden word; in which, to nick a line from well-married W.H. Auden,/Thousands have lived without love. Not one without partners.Riley would probably agree with Pound’s view that ‘poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.’ In addition to her digressive, often argumentative, long-lined verse there are ...”

“... What​ became of his face? In his memorial address Stephen Spender, who had known Auden since they were undergraduates, contrasted the young man, Nordic and brilliant, with a ‘second image of Wystan … of course one with which you are all familiar: the famous poet with the face like a map of physical geography, criss-crossed and river-run and creased with lines ...”

“... game Fuller’s work shows more affinity. Fuller, who has published a useful critical work on W.H. Auden, is an inheritor of the poet’s later attitude to the art. When, in his English phase, Auden wrote from the conviction that poetry, arising out of crises in his own and his country’s identity, could alter both, he may ...”

“... was more to politics, and to love, than doing your own thing.So, in a very different way, did W.H. Auden who, a few days after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, wrote a short poem entitled ‘August 1968’:The Ogre does what ogres canDeeds quite impossible for Man,But one prize is beyond his reach,The Ogre cannot master Speech:About a subjugated ...”