While his poetry has generally become clearer and more direct, Auden's language has become more esoteric. He has two copies of the 13-volume Oxford English Dictionary -one in New York and one in Austria-and he loves to look through them, finding such words as "bransles" and "whelking." As he said- "The words are all right there in the OED.; I don't make up any of them" -and he chooses words for their sound and meaning, not for their familiarity. "One special duty of the poet is protecting the language constantly against corruption and vagueness," he said. "Most students, by the time they leave college, have read Homer and Virgil. But if you spend your early youth ????? more about the meanings of words, words in your own language as well as words in foreign languages. People today use language for other purposes. Scientists, politicians... and when the mass media come in..." He looked very sad.

He enjoys writing poetry. "Why else would anyone write poetry?" he asked. True, some poets do say they find writing painful: "While climbing a mountain, you can it's painful, but afterwards, in the long run, you say it's fun." When writing a poem he does not distinguish between form and content. "At any given moment, I have a certain subject in my mind which is preoccupying me," he said. "The subject looks for a form to incorporate it, and it looks for a type of form that it can incorporate. When the two meet-you have a poem." He works a long time on individual poems; quoting Paul Valery, he said, "A poem is never finished-it is only abandoned." Vain about his knowledge of meter, he complained peevishly that critics "can't even recognize a choriamb-and if they're critics, they should be able to."

Reluctant to talk about contemporary poets ("I don't talk about living people," he smiled. "People are always secretly hoping that you say something malicious about them."), he did reflect briefly on poets, now dead, that he knew. "I liked Eliot very much," he said, adding that he doesn't think his own work was influenced by Eliot. "Eliot's was a very idiosyncratic position," he said, "It is rare that you can see that someone's been reading Eliot, while you can see that someone's been influenced by Yeats or Rilke." About Yeats he does not talk. "I can't really speak objectively about Yeats, because I think he had a bad influence on me," he said. "Too loud a rhetoric." Although both Eliot and Yeats took the "other side" in the Spanish Civil War-Eliot being somewhat uninterested, Yeats leaning toward the reactionary position-the political deviance of the two great poets of the time was over-looked by the young activists. "We knew they were wrong," Auden recalled, "but we didn't hate them for it."

A "passionate formist." Auden objects to "the lack of intrinsic form in modern poetry." His poems all carefully adhere to intricate metrical patterns. "Everyone who plays a game knows that he has to go by the rules." he said. "I have never written freeverse, and I don't think it would be any fun." Remarkably versatile-he has written sonnets, eclogues, plays, sermons, librettos, love poems, war poems, comic poems-he believes that "if one thinks one has learned how to do one sort of thing one has to change to something else." As for different genres of writing? "You can be serious when you're frivolous," he said. "On the whole, I think of myself as a comic poet."

In his life as well as in his poetry, Auden "goes by the rules." rules which he creates for himself. "I am time-obsessed; I must always know what the time is," he said. During his poetry reading last week at Sanders Theatre, he carefully timed his rest periods, allotting himself exactly one minute of rest between poems.

So obsessive a ritualist

a pleasant surprise

makes him cross