On this occasion (and no doubt on others, for the elderly Auden often repeated his bons mots) Auden, when asked for his opinion of Yeats, said: "Yeats spent the first part of his life as a minor poet, and the second part writing major poems about what it had been like to be a minor poet." On another occasion Auden said that he had only once encountered pure evil in a person, and that was when he met Yeats.
If this comes as a surprise, considering that the most famous tribute to Yeats on his death is Auden's elegy, you have to remember that for Auden there was always a case pro and con, as far as Yeats was concerned. At the time I first met him, he had recently written to Stephen Spender (in a letter quoted by Richard Davenport-Hines in his biography of Auden): "[Yeats] has become for me a symbol of my own devil of inauthenticity, of everything I must try to eliminate from my own poetry, false emotion, inflated rhetoric, empty sonorities."
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