"America may break one completely, but the best of which one is capable is more likely to be drawn out of one here than anywhere else," W. H. Auden wrote a friend soon after immigrating to the United States, Richard Johnson related in Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography. Despite seeing America as a "terrifying place," Auden decided the only worthwhile goal was "to attempt the more difficult" and "to live deliberately without roots." He had uprooted himself from both the British literary scene and his family and underwent a self-imposed alienation, as Johnson concluded; in his writing and in his life, Auden assumed the exile's role.

Auden died in 1973 in Austria, far from his adopted country, but no less an American. In a special Auden issue of Shenandoah, Robert Lowell agreed with fellow poet John Crowe Ransom's remark that America "had made an even exchange, when we...