Auden After Dark

In the middle of the 1930s, a young English schoolmaster, Wystan Hugh Auden, began writing a torrent of tremendous poems. Some are rollicking ballads, others tender love sonnets, others philosophic observations about the ominous movement of world history. But they tended to be rhymed and metered and they did something most people had thought impossible. They took the "unpoetic" things about the 20th century—from fascism to airplanes to oncology—and bundled them into something about which lovers…