And no critic needs a poet whispering in his ear that most poetry is scribbled with blind means toward unconscious ends, that luck and happenstance play a horrifyingly large role in writing verse. In 1946, Auden came to the New School in New York City to begin a course of lectures on Shakespeare. He had moved to the United States seven years before, the most important young poet in England, and during the war had been widely reviled at home for leaving. He became a gypsy scholar, teaching at Michigan, Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr and Bennington. His Shakespeare lectures were only the latest in a series of accommodations to the lecture-based courses that organized American college education, very unlike the tutorials of British universities.
Great critics are sometimes wary of great authors.
Eliot and Pound usually sidled past Shakespeare. The New York Times W. H. Auden in 1970. When confronted with ''The Merry Wives of Windsor'' he pronounced it hopelessly dull and played a recording of Verdi's ''Falstaff'' instead, much to the discomfort of his students. Auden approached Shakespeare as a fellow craftsman, a man who had a certain job and a limited time to do it. This approach, though speculative, has the advantage of reminding us that the poems and plays were written by a man with ink on his fingers and horse manure on his boots.