![]() ![]() The poet’s literary executor even agreed to a be a fictional cameo role in one of his novels. Auden now breathes in McCall Smith’s work, figuratively speaking: his character Isabel Dalhousie, an amateur sleuth, solves dilemmas by asking what Auden would do. The poet was his greatest literary discovery, he writes. The title is a self-conscious riff on Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life, though Auden’s benefit to McCall Smith’s own life is clearly profound. It’s a must-read for Auden fans-even more for those who know his work only from a British rom-com. Now the novelist Alexander McCall Smith plumbs the British poet’s modern resonance in this charming, quirky, slim volume, a deft weave of biography, textual analysis and memoir. ![]() In the aftermath of 9/11, Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939” was widely circulated to make sense of the horror the nursery wisdom of “ Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return” provided a sort of logic amid chaos. In Four Weddings and a Funeral, the reading of the heart-gutting “Funeral Blues” summoned cathartic tears. Auden has become a de rigueur accessory to contemporary grief. Over the past decades, the poetry of W.H. ![]()
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