When Edward Mendelson flew to Kirchstetten, Austria, in October 1973 to attend the funeral of W.H. Auden, the poet’s niece, Rita Auden, greeted him with friendly puzzlement. Then she asked Mr. Mendelson whether his father had come too. “I said, ‘I think I am the person you think is my father,’” recalls Mr. Mendelson, who in April 1972, at age 26, had been named by Auden as his literary executor.

In his 1939 elegy to Yeats, Auden declared that “poetry makes nothing happen.” His own verse vaulted him to a precocious celebrity. Born in York, England, into an upper-middle-class family, Wystan Hugh Auden became identified with a circle of Oxford-educated poets that included Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, and Cecil Day-Lewis. His early poetry, published by T.S. Eliot in 1930, was often obscure—deliberately so, according to Mr. Mendelson. But his lyrics, with such memorable lines as “Lay your sleeping head, my love/Human on my faithless arm,” and his left-leaning political anthems of the 1930s secured his position as a leading poet of the 20th century.

For all his devotion to Auden, Mr. Mendelson sometimes seems a bit bemused at Auden’s popularity. He remembers his surprise, for example, at the avalanche of phone calls he received about the poem “Funeral Blues,” used in “Four Weddings and a Funeral.” He has since added it, as well as some of Auden’s lighter verse, to “Selected Poems.” “Funeral Blues,” says Mr. Mendelson, “takes a cliché, and it moves it a little bit farther and turns it into a work of art. For years, people thought Auden was chilly emotionally, when it was exactly the opposite. Auden was the most obviously emotional poet you could think of.”

Auden’s generosity, Mr. Mendelson says, extended to people he had never met. “He always answered letters. He got into a big correspondence with a Canadian burglar who discovered his poetry in jail,” says Mr. Mendelson. “One of his friends told me this wonderful story of Auden coming in and waving a letter from the Canadian burglar, and saying, ‘I’ve got him reading Kafka!’”

In the U.S., Auden was very much a public figure, a fixture on television and radio. In 1963, Time magazine researched a cover story about him, but it never ran. According to Mr. Mendelson’s account, “The managing editor said, ‘The last writer we had on the cover’—whom I think was Tennessee Williams—‘was a homosexual, and we’re not going to have two in a row.’”

More: A reading by W. H. Auden, at the 92nd Street Y’s Poetry Center, March 27, 1972.