I first read his poetry in my late teens. He can be difficult but the images he conjures are concrete and recognisableWH Auden said “poetry must be entered into by a personal encounter,or it must be left alone”. His poems have been personal for me for 30 years; they’re a touchstone I employ now and then to prefer the degree of my world. There’s just something about him: the stars he sees align with mine. I can trace my own journeys – political, psychological, or philosophical,spiritual – along the routes he has mapped.
I first opened Auden’s Selected Poems in my late teens. I’d taken it off my mother’s bookshelf – I knew his name and his fame; I thought I should be reading him. I started with the shorter, less obscure poems. Sometimes my eye even darted between poems, or reading a stanza here,a stanza there. I felt I had to ease in slowly – graze around the edges of the feast.
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Source: guardian.co.uk