In 2006, as lovers of poetry became aware that the 100th anniversary of W. H. Auden’s birth was coming up, some of them began to fret that the event wouldn’t receive the attention it deserved. No major celebrations seemed to be forthcoming, in pronounced contrast to the festivals for John Betjeman’s centenary that were going on throughout England in the second half of 2006. The BBC gave Betjeman a whole month of festivities, and wasn’t Auden a much greater poet, worthy of far more honor?<\/p>\n
Yes, but \u201d\u00a6 Betjeman was an enormously popular and beloved poet in England. (Almost the only person who didn’t love him was his tutor at Oxford, a young don named C. S. Lewis\u201d\u201dnot yet a Christian, by the way\u201d\u201dwho told his diary “I wish I could get rid of the idle prig,” and later wrote his pupil a letter which began, “Dear Betjemann [sic], You called the tune of irony from the first time you met me, and I have never heard you speak of a serious subject without a snigger.” Betjeman responded, in a book he published when he was twenty-seven, by offering effusive thanks to Lewis, “whose jolly personality and encouragement to the author in his youth have remained an unfading memory for the author’s declining years.”) And it was not just Betjeman’s poetry but also his deep love of Englishness\u201d\u201dEnglish architecture, English history, the traditional forms of English society, and the Church of England\u201d\u201dthat endeared him to his countrymen. As Richard Jenkyns has recently written, “Betjeman was not always sure that Christ was the Son of God, but he was absolutely sure that the Church of England was the true church”\u201d\u201dan epistemological condition that for many an Englishman indicates well-ordered priorities.<\/p>\n
Auden, by contrast, left England for America in January of 1939 and never returned for anything more than an extended visit. Though only thirty-one at the time, he was one of the most famous writers in England\u201d\u201dhe was twenty-six when the phrase “the Auden generation” entered the language\u201d\u201dand his failure to return to his native land when war broke out later that year was denounced by angry MPs in the House of Commons. And if his wartime detachment cost him the respect of British conservatives, his conversion to Christianity two years later alienated, dramatically and permanently, the political Left, for whom he had been a hero.<\/p>\n