ABSTRACT
In a public lecture he delivered at Oxford in 1955, the poet W.H. Auden proposed a rubric for evaluating poems:
Speaking for myself, the questions which interest me most when reading a poem are two. The first is technical: Here is a verbal contraption. How does it work? The second is, in the broadest sense, moral: What kind of a guy inhabits this poem? What is his notion of the good life or the good place? His notion of the Evil One? What does he conceal from the reader? What does he conceal even from himself? (Auden 1968: 50–51)
