Auden’s In Memory of W.B. Yeats is a poem celebrated with good reason. It’s an emotionally searing, intellectually substantive and formally acute piece of work that has all the trademarks of Auden’s brilliant wit. Above all the poem allows us to experience the transformative journey from the cold, despondent, mourning of the dead with which it opens to its opulent and reaffirming closing statements.

The three parts of In Memory of W.B. Yeats have a musical architecture inherent to them. At t...