To the Editor:

Christopher Caldwell’s reading of the career of W.H. Auden [“Countercultural Auden,” May] seemed to me entirely admirable and convincing, and I could hardly think otherwise, because I make a very similar argument in the manuscript of a book I have just finished on Auden’s later years.

Strictly as a point of personal honor, therefore, may I say that I certainly hope I never called “Spain” the “greatest poem of the 1930’s,” as Mr. Caldwell says I did. I think he may have misread the passage in Richard Davenport-Hines’s book where he quotes me as saying that about the sonnet sequence, “In Time of War,” whose rhetorical technique and historical vision are entirely different from those of “Spain,” and which, as I argued in my book on Auden’s early work, was written partly as a refutation and rejection of “Spain.”

I am writing this letter because I believe (as evidently Mr. Caldwell does, too) that literary judgments are both moral and aesthetic. I do not mind being accused of mistakes of aesthetic judgment, but if I had in fact ever regarded “Spain” as the greatest poem of the 1930’s, I would have made a very bad moral judgment, and it was unsettling to find such a bad judgment attributed to me when I believe I never thought anything of die kind.

Again, that point aside, Mr. Caldwell’s reading of Auden’s greatness as emerging from “ruthless self-appraisal” corresponds exactly to my own, and I was very glad to see it expressed so eloquently and persuasively.

Edward Mendelson
New York City

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Christopher Caldwell writes:

My apologies to Edward Mendelson for the misreading, which occurred exactly as he supposed, and my thanks for his kind words, which are particularly gracious under the circumstances.