AUDEN

Auden assumed a significant public presence in the United States: in the war years and after he wrote for a remarkable range of periodicals, including The New York Times, The New Republic, Commonweal, and The Nation. But American intellectuals were nearly as befuddled by Auden's religion as his British ex-admirers. Randall Jarrell, the country's most brilliant and influential critic of poetry and a fine poet himself, treated the Christian Auden with something approaching contempt, and convinced more than a few others to do the same. Auden was never forgotten, and occasionally his brilliance was recognized—even at times by Jarrell, who was so awestruck by a poem called "Under Sirius" that he could only respond, "Well, back to my greeting cards"—but his reputation underwent a long, slow decline which lasted through the rest of his life.
Where does that reputation stand now? It's hard to say. Probably the most common view is that Auden was a major poet in his twenties but, after his move to America and subsequent religious conversion, drifted off the path. Many poets and critics read Auden's story as one of a prodigious talent mostly frittered away. The greatness of those early poems is rarely disputed; the question is whether that one decade of greatness is sufficient to make a major career.