W.H. Auden’s affiliation with the 92nd Street Y Poetry Center began in our very first season (1939) and continued for more than thirty years. His last appearance was in 1972, and today’s featured recording is an excerpt of that reading. Here is how Richard Howard introduced him that night:

We are fortunate to have with us this evening not merely the citizen, the school-master, the church-warden and the other members of the best repertory company in poetry today. We have the poet himself, who at 65 is so familiar and yet so unrivaled. Unique in our time in that he believes in knowledge, knowledge in the poetry, and extending the scope and range of inquiry and response beyond the condescension of mere public appearance. If you have been keeping up with him, which means keeping up with what glory can be given to the English language in our generation as well as his, you know that, these days, under the sign of a consented-to mortality, he is concerned with boundaries, limitations, definitions, the precarious identifications which make our life possible—the naming, which was Adam’s first task and Auden’s to the last, or to the latest. Hence the famous and extraordinary vocabulary and the wonderful meter—you will notice in a minute that he does not read his poems off the page, but out of his ear—and all those alliterative bells and charms. That is a magic neither black nor white. That is full color.

Howard ended his introduction with this casual couplet:

For decades, Wystan Hugh Auden has devised new ways to broaden the mind of the age.
Often, as right now, from this very stage.

Auden began with several late poems—“Natural Linguistics,” “Epistle to a Godson,” “Lines to Dr. Walter Birk,” among others—but today’s excerpt comes from the second half of his performance, when he read a group of early lyrics. The excerpt culminates, as the reading did, with his recitation of “Metalogue to The Magic Flute,” which was composed for Mozart’s bicentenary in 1956 and includes the following passage:

How seemly, then, to celebrate the birth
Of one who did no harm to our poor earth,
Created masterpieces by the dozen,
Indulged in toilet-humor with his cousin,
And had a pauper’s funeral in the rain,
The like of whom we shall not see again.

In an ongoing effort to share with our readers some of the great literary moments which the Poetry Center has presented across the decades, this blog has begun to feature regular postings of archival recordings. For access to other recordings, please click here.

Unterberg Poetry Center webcasts and access to our archive are made possible in part by the generous support of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation.

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