Vol. 5 No. 24 · 22 December 1983
Poem

Letter to an Editor

W.H. Auden

Is Robert Lowell
Better than Noel
Coward, Howard?

W.H. Auden’s little poem has passed into the folk memory without, so far as we know, ever having seen print. The editor in question is Howard Moss, who runs the poetry in the New Yorker.

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Letters

Vol. 6 No. 2 · 2 February 1984

SIR: The verses on Robert Lowell attributed to W.H. Auden in Vol. 5, No 24 were in fact written by Chester Kallman around 1971. Your text is defective. Kallman wrote ‘As good as’ not ‘Better than’, and gave each of the two words in your third line a line to itself.

Edward Mendelson
New York

We are grateful for the correction. We did say that the ‘folk memory’ had attributed this little poem to Auden. It seems that the folk memory was not very far wrong.

Editor, ‘London Review’

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