SOURCE: "Goodbye, 1939," in New Yorker, April 1, 1996, pp. 88, 90-4, 96-7.

In the following essay, Jenkins provides an overview of Auden's literary career and the significance of his expatriation in the United States.

No episode in the century's English-speaking literary world came as more of a surprise than the poet W. H. Auden's abrupt departure, in January of 1939, from Britain for the United States. Auden was the first major English-language poet to be born in the twentieth century (in 1907); now, as the century drains away, it seems likely that he will turn out to be the only poet of world stature born in England in the last hundred years. He is more widely read than he has been for many years, both here and in England, and Auden scholarship is flourishing. (A multivolume Complete Works is under way and, along with several memoirs, two major biographies have been written: the...