W.H. AUDEN AT 100. Today is the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of W.H. Auden. He was living in New York City when we lived there, and he was listed in the phone book with his address on East Tenth Street. He said that he had always in his youth been the youngest child in any group so that even as he got into his fifties, he still thought of himself as the youngest person in the room. I have now had the same experience.
Other sayings of Auden that are worth recalling: “Work first; wash later,†and the observation that a person who has finished writing a poem is no longer a poet, but simply a person who once wrote a poem