ABSTRACT
After a temporary disaffection with Auden’s work in the late 1930s (see No. 57 above), Wilson became highly enthusiastic over the poetry Auden produced after his removal to the USA in 1939. Although he criticized Auden in a letter of 9 October 1947 for the following ‘sin’ in particular -
Your regurgitation in ‘The Age of Anxiety’, in the girl’s speech over the sleeping boy, of the last pages of ‘Finnegans Wake’. This is the only misstep in this poem, in which the influence of Joyce, where it elsewhere appears, is pretty completely absorbed by your own style -
