Henry James left America for Europe in 1876, and T. S. Eliot left America for England in 1914, both feeling that their talents would flourish better abroad. In 1939, W. H. Auden, along with his sometime collaborator Christopher Isherwood, reversed the process and abandoned England for America. They were criticized for doing so, for the war with Germany had just begun, and they were considered deserters, even cowards. In Auden’s case, the move was a fateful one. It soon made him the best-known poet in the Anglophone world.
How good a poet was Wystan Hugh Auden? Views differ — and radically. Some put him in the upper echelon of modern poets alongside Eliot, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens. For others, his poetry is too scattered, his poems neither memorable nor especially rereadable, and his ideas too thin when not wrong.
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