I’m teaching a course on twentieth century British poetry, and we’re whipping through six poets in about fifteen weeks. My students appreciated T. S. Eliot, and enjoyed Robert Graves, but we are halfway through W. H. Auden, and he has enthralled them, hitting them square in their hearts with brutally accurate yearning and empathy. We’ve taken a thematic approach in working through the Selected Poems: quotidian life, war & politics, and most recently: the love poems. (We’ll hit the transcendence of art & religion, and then touch […]