In Memory of W. B. Yeats

“In Memory of W. B. Yeats” is an elegy by W. H. Auden, one of the 20th century’s leading poets, on the death of the Irish poet W. B. Yeats in January 1939. 

Yeats was widely considered to have been the finest English-language poet of his time. Auden wrote the poem in February 1939, within a few weeks of Yeats’s death. As Auden had just emigrated from England and was living in New York, the elegy was published in the New Republic on March 8, 1939, and was reprinted in Auden’s collection Another Time in 1940. In later editions of his poetry, including Selected Poetry of W. H. Auden (1959) and Collected Shorter Poems, 1927-1957 (1966), Auden excised three stanzas from Section 3 of the poem. Today, editions of Auden, anthologies, and online versions sometimes reproduce the original version and sometimes the later, amended version. 

This elegy differs from the traditional elegy form in that the speaker does not express personal grief about the death of Yeats, and offers a qualified rather than celebratory evaluation of his life and work. The speaker honors Yeats’s achievements, criticizes some of his ideas and beliefs, and offers a broader view of poetry in the modern world and how it may alleviate the human condition. 

This guide uses the original version of the poem, as printed in The English Auden: Poems, Essays, and Dramatic Writings, 1927-1939, edited by Edward Mendelson (Random House, 1977, pp. 241-43). 

Poet Biography

Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, England, on February 21, 1907. He was the third son of George and Constance Auden. His father was a doctor. From 1915 to 1920, Auden attended St. Edmund’s, a boarding school in Hindhead, Surrey. He then entered Gresham’s School, in Holt, Norfolk, where he was an outstanding student, publishing his first poem in the school magazine. In 1925, Auden entered Christ Church, Oxford, where he obtained a degree in English. After graduation he worked as a private tutor and schoolmaster until the mid-1930s. As was fashionable among the young intellectuals of the time, Auden espoused left-wing political views in his poetry, supported the leftist Republican cause against the Fascists of General Franco during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), and visited Spain in 1937. 

In 1930, Auden’s Poems, published by Faber & Faber, immediately established him as one of the most promising young poets in England. The Orators, a collection of verse and prose, followed in 1932. Look! Stranger!, which came out in 1936 and was published in the United States as On This Island (1937), and Another Time (1940), which contains “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” further elevated his reputation. 

In 1939, the year that World War II began, Auden left England to live in the United States; he became a naturalized American citizen in 1946. In 1940, he rejected his former socialist beliefs and became a Protestant Christian. His later poetry collections include The Double Man (1941), For the Time Being (1944), Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden (1945), The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (1947), which won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and The Shield of Achilles (1955), which won the 1956 National Book Award for Poetry. In the 1960s he published Homage to Clio (1960) and About the House (1965). 

Auden’s essay collections include The Enchafèd Flood (1950), The Dyer’s Hand (1962) and Secondary Worlds (1968). He also cowrote with Christopher Isherwood—Auden’s romantic and sexual partner—a number of plays, including The Dance of Death (1933), The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935), and On the Frontier (1938). Auden entered into several musical collaborations, including writing the text for Our Hunting Fathers (1936), a song cycle composed by Benjamin Britten. With Chester Kallman, his longtime romantic partner in the US, Auden wrote a number of film scripts and opera libretti, including The Rake’s Progress, an opera by Igor Stravinsky (1951). 

Over the years, Auden taught at many American colleges and universities, including Michigan University, Swarthmore College, Bryn Mawr College, Bennington College, Barnard College, and the New School for Social Research. In 1956, he was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford, which required him to give three public lectures per year. In 1958, he and Kallman bought a farmhouse in Kirchstetten, Austria, where they lived during each spring and summer for the rest of Auden’s life. 

In 1972, Auden returned to England and lived at Christ Church College. He died of heart failure in Vienna on September 29, 1973. Auden was buried in Kirchstetten; a couplet from “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” was inscribed on his tombstone (“In the prison of his days / Teach the free man how to praise” [Lines 64-65]). The poetry collection Thank You Fog (1974) was published posthumously. 

Poem Text

Auden, W. H. “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.” 1940. Poets.org.

Summary

Section 1 describes the day that the poet Yeats died. It was a cold winter’s day. The landscape was bleak, with frozen streams and falling snow, and few people were traveling. While his passing was mourned, his poems remained intact and unaffected. Yeats now lives on through his poetry, which thousands of people across the world will continue to read and absorb, interpreting it according to their own lights. However, tomorrow, everyone will get on with their own lives and activities, but a few thousand will remember the previous day—not with grief, but as a day on which they did something a little out of the ordinary. 

In Section 2, the speaker addresses Yeats directly, describing him as a man who had faults, but claiming that his talent for poetry rose above them. Nevertheless, his poetry made no difference to the causes he espoused, although poetry does have subtle effects, making itself felt within the deeper recesses of the mind. 

Section 3 lauds all those who are dedicated to working with language; they will be forgiven their faults and failings. However, at this dangerous time in European history, people have failed in their intellectual duties, and compassion is nowhere to be found. To counteract this, the poet must continue to do his work, which is to teach people to praise life and experience it with joy and freedom.