ABSORPTION

‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, the first poem Auden wrote in America, in 1939, contains the most famous lines on poetic inheritance by a modern poet in the English language, lines which have been returned to frequently by other poets and critics. On his death, Auden says, the poet ‘became his admirers’:

‘Scattered’ suggests Orphic dismemberment, and the wood is a Dantean importation; but the poet's subsequent modification is figured here in a peculiar somatic metaphor. John Fuller thinks that it ‘may be intended as a kind of sacramental metaphor of sowing, reaping and digesting bread’, and so it may, with the word ‘sacramental’ implying the doctrine of transubstantiation, when the bread is ‘modified’ into the body of Christ. Even so, in its use of the word ‘guts’, with its intense, almost queasy physicality, it emphasises digestion, and what follows on digestion, in a way that may owe something to Hamlet's morose imagining of how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar.