THE DOUBLE MAN.(Brief Article)

When W. H. Auden died, in 1973, no one would have imagined that thirty years later he would come back as the poet of another age, our own. He seemed miserable and seedy then, having made a failed return to Oxford after two decades on St. Marks Place in the East Village and become the model of a modern poet who had lost his way and got stranded on an island of his own pet phrases. The obituaries, though large, mostly quoted his lyrics from the thirties: "As I Walked Out One Evening" or "Lullaby" ("Lay your sleeping head, my love, / Human on my faithless arm . . .") or, more brazenly, the line from "September 1, 1939"--"We must love one another or die"--which he had ...