One of a continuing series of authors and the famous whom I’ve encountered in night dreams. Auden was younger than this pic, in his forties, but his face was still very recognizable, even without the deep lines of his later self.
I only had time to ask him one question which, strangely enough, was about Tom Eliot: “Was he anti-Semitic?” “Oh God, yes.”
There were other questions at the back of my mind, notably about his Time poems and how he used and referred to Time in his poems, but by then my reverie-consciousness had moved on….
(Above pic: the British Library via BBC has published many interesting CDs with twentieth century British and American authors reading and interviewed. It is terrific to hear what some of these writers sounded like; so much depends on a writer’s speaking voice–you get closer to their public personas and gain many clues into how they felt and thought when expressing themselves.)