"Then toward the end of my teens I really started to admire Auden a great deal. Early Auden. Anne Ridler said that reading Auden made her want to write poetry in the first place. He had an idiom that seemed to be adapted to anything he did and to be able to link the ancient craft of poetry with modern experience. You must remember that I was young and ignorant and I didn't know about the modernists, and I didn't know much about Eliot then and I hadn't read Baudelaire, or I would have known that other people had written about modern experience. But Auden seemed so available. He made writing seem easy. I am very grateful to him for having, in one sense, started me off. I did feel a great need to disown him, as one does with one's earliest influences, as soon as I started to write a little more seriously. You know, it's called castrating one's father." Thom Gunn PN Review (1989)

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