W. H. Auden: 'Can Sixty Make Sense to Sixteen-Plus?'

( The author interviewed Mr. Auden when he was at Harvard last week to give a poetry reading. )

W. H. Auden looks very, very old. His hair is flecked with white, and, head erect, shoulders hunched, he lurches forward, an amiable panda in dark glasses and checkered bedroom slippers. His age is etched on his face, in the wrinkles that twist and turn, crossing over and flowing together, streaking across in thin, deep lines. At 63, he has worn out his face, and, when he leans back, eyes closed, the creases of his eyes and mouth branch out into the spreading wrinkles. W. H. Auden-in the thirties, that name labeled a new generation of pocts; by the sixties, it had settled down comfortably and securely in the anthologies of English literature. And in the seventies, Auden goes on writing, his new book, City Without Walls, re-affirming his position as a major twentieth-century poet.

A frequently reprinted picture taken of Auden about thirty years ago shows a young man with a sharp face, his blond hair flopping in his eyes, a hand raised to light the cigarette pressed between his lips. Thirty years ago, Auden was the leader of the "Auden generation" -a group of young poets that included Stephen Spender, Christopher Isherwood, and C. Day Lewis. He was young then, as he followed the revolutions in Spain and China, and his reputation and influence grew rapidly. Today, as he shuttles annually from homosexual domesticity in the Austrian village of Kirschteten to an East Village apartment on New York's St. Marks place, he is older, and his views of history and his opinions of his earlier poems have changed.