In a poem from the early 1960s, ëOn the Circuití, W.H. Auden describes himself as ëa sulky fifty-sixí, who finds ëA change of meal-time utter hellí, and has ëGrown far too crotchety to like/A luxury hotelí. There is plenty of self-parody in this picture ñ a little later in the poem he identifies his worry about where the next drink is coming from as ëgrahamgreeneishí ñ but this was a time when Auden was rearranging his sense of himself and of his world. Comedy was one sort of arrangement, and an important feature of his view of life; but he was seriously ëunsettledí, as Edward Mendelson says, and had acquired ëa profound new sense of menace and dreadí.

LRB 2 June 2011 | PDF Download