Tom and Wystan

Now, I do not know whether Auden is to be considered as an English or as an American poet: his career has been useful to me in providing me with an answer to the same question when asked about myself, for I can say: “whichever Auden is, I suppose I must be the other.”

— T. S. Eliot in 1953

One was born in St. Louis but became a British subject; the other was born in York and became an American citizen. One was straight, the other was gay. One was born into a Unitarian family but later became an Anglican; the other was born into an Anglican family, was for many years an unbeliever, and eventually returned to a very different kind of Anglicanism. One was famously precise and fastidious, and lived in monastically spare accommodations; the other was (equally famously) slovenly and lived in utter squalor. One lived most of his adult life in London, a city that he loved; the other despised London and visited only when he had to. One came to fame by writing free verse; the other made a fetish of poetic form.

Both were unquestionably great poets. Both wrote pornographic poems not for publication but for the entertainment of friends. Both loved cats. Both adored detective stories. Both could be very funny, though in different ways. Both were editors and critics as well as poets, and shaped the thought of many.

Tom and Wystan. At first one was the mentor, the guide — a Virgil to the other’s Dante. Then they were friends. Then the friendship was broken, and never returned to what it had been. But they came to be at peace with each other; each knew and appreciated the other’s stature. The character of poetry in English even today owes a great deal to the two of them.

My next book — to be published by my old friends at Princeton University Press — will be the story of their long and complex relationship, a story that has not yet been told in book form. When it’s done, I think you’ll all enjoy it.