Introduction

W.H. Auden paid little heed to reviews of his work, and evidently felt little respect for his reviewers (with exceptions including Geoffrey Grigson and Edmund Wilson whom he admired). ( ¹ ) While his friend Rex Warner recalls, ‘As a poet he belonged to an “irritabile genus”, but enjoyed praise as much as anyone’, ( ² ) Auden’s unconcern for, and indeed unconsciousness of, his critical reception is confirmed by many of his other close friends – Lincoln Kirstein, William Coldstream, Stephen Spender, Janet Adam Smith, James Stern, Jason Epstein (Editorial Director of Random House, his American publisher), and Dr. John B. Auden, his brother ( ³ ) – none of whom has any recollection of him expressing reactions to published criticisms. ‘You must remember that critics write for the public, not for me,’ he told interviewers late in life. ‘I don’t read them, and often I don’t know what they say about me. You see, most critics write on the basis of reading, not from any experience of writing. I’ve no use for such criticism.’ ( ⁴ ) In their contributions to ‘W.H. Auden: A Tribute’, edited by Stephen Spender (1975), Golo Mann, Ursula Niebuhr, with whom he loved to talk theology (‘theology was his chess’, as Lincoln Kirstein aptly remembers) ( ⁵ ), and Louis Kronenberger have likewise testified to his self-confidence and pride, ( ⁶ ) and to what V.S. Yanovsky has elsewhere described as ‘his genuine distaste for reviews and books about him’: ( ⁷ )

He was truly unhappy when forced to listen to people expressing at length an opinion about his work (‘Usually they praise you for the wrong reasons’). And he did not take kindly to any criticism. What he liked, after having given us a new poem to read, was a simple ‘Good, very good. It’s fun!’ Then he would nod, completely satisfied – or so it seemed. (During the last years, the critics were often hostile to him, donkeys kicking or trying to kick the aging lion.) … He knew his value and did not need much support from the outside.