Alexander McCall Smith's story about Collected Shorter Poems

The single book that changed my view of the world more than any other book is W.H. Auden’s Collected Shorter Poems. It may be unusual for a book of poetry to have this effect, but such is the power and range of Auden’s genius this collection of poems written between 1927 and 1957 quite simply opened my eyes. I remember the precise moment I first encountered it. I was a young man and I picked it off a library shelf on impulse. I took the book out and began to read it. Somehow it seemed that Auden was talking directly to me, that I was in the presence of a most marvellous, humane intelligence.

Auden was a poet who used almost every metre available. His was one of the most complex and accomplished literary minds of the twentieth century and his feel for the English language and its lyrical possibilities was unrivalled in the poets of his generation.
His work reads effortlessly, but has great technical skill behind it. And his choice of subjects is extraordinary wide: love, science, geology, opera, history, politics – in fact, there is little in our human experience that Auden does not cover. In this collection we see him change – from the poet who believed in the perfectibility of man through social change to the poet who had to come to terms with inherent and incorrigible evil.

This book contains some of his very greatest work. Limestone Landscape, one of his best-known poems, tells of his love-affair with a particular sort of countryside; In Memory of Sigmund Freud dwells on the liberating power of psychoanalytical insights; and then there is the simple gravity of Lullaby, perhaps the most powerful hymn to carnal love ever written: Lay your sleeping head my love …

Auden’s words are a constant source of inspiration to me. In one of my books, ‘The Comfort of Saturdays’, I wrote about a lecture being delivered by W H Auden’s literary executor, the distinguished critic Professor Edward Mendelson. I then invited Professor Mendelson to Edinburgh to deliver the lecture which he gives in this book, thereby making fiction a reality.

He wrote the poem Musee des Beaux-Arts – about how extraordinary things happen while people are simply getting on with their business. The poem in question deals with Brugel’s depiction of the fall of Icarus; the boy falls from the sky while a farmer ploughs his fields, a horse scratches its rump against a tree, and a ship gets on with its voyage. He was right. People carry on with their lives even if something important is going on under their noses.

I carry this book around with me on my travels. I never tire of dipping into it and finding something new. It never fades. It is in no sense diminished by the passage of time. A constant companion.