ABSTRACT
In Memory of W.B. Yeats W.H. Auden's "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" (first published in New Republic [8 March 1939]) is a Modernist elegy on the occasion of the death of William Butler Yeats in the south of France, 28 January 1939. Two days earlier Auden had arrived from England in New York harbor during a snowstorm, making this his first American poem. Auden portrayed Yeats' death as a tragedy for the world of letters, a tragedy that also reflects the general disorder on the eve of World War II. Yeats was both a private and a public figure, a lyric autobiographer and a prophetic poet on a grand historical scale, but his weaknesses for rich women, the occult, and reactionary politics qualified Auden's admiration. Like"A Pact," in which Ezra Pound comes to terms with his differences with Walt Whitman, "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" is Auden's vehicle for coming to terms with Yeats as a great poet whose antidemocratic ideals Auden, a radical socialist, found abhorrent.
