How Oppenheimer Obliterated W.H. Auden’s Association with National Review

More than a decade after he exploded an atomic bomb at Los Alamos, J. Robert Oppenheimer became death, the destroyer of National Review’s budding relationship with one of the 20th century’s most acclaimed poets. Oppenheimer, more precisely, acted as the trigger mechanism and not the uranium or plutonium.

National Review’s two resident Anglophiles — editor William F. Buckley Jr. and literary editor Frank Meyer — aggressively recruited Englishmen to bolster the quality of this fledgling American journal of opinion. J. R. R. Tolkien begged off. It went better with W. H. Auden. Then it didn’t.

About the Author

Daniel J. Flynn

Daniel J. Flynn, the author of The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer, is an American Spectator senior editor, visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, and YouTuber @RightWingWilderness.

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More than a decade after he exploded an atomic bomb at Los Alamos, J. Robert Oppenheimer became death, the destroyer of National Review’s budding relationship with one of the 20th century’s most acclaimed poets. Oppenheimer, more precisely, acted as the trigger mechanism and not the uranium or plutonium.

National Review’s two resident Anglophiles — editor William F. Buckley Jr. and literary editor Frank Meyer — aggressively recruited Englishmen to bolster the quality of this fledgling American journal of opinion. J. R. R. Tolkien begged off. It went better with W. H. Auden. Then it didn’t.