The Voice of the Poet: W. H. Auden

W.H. Auden describes the experience of poems read aloud:
The formal structure of a poem is not something distinct from its meaning but as intimately bound up with the latter as the body is with the soul. When one reads a poem in a book one grasps the form immediately, but when one listens to a recitation, it is sometimes very difficult to "hear" the structure.

'Yeats was one of the few whose history is the history of their own time, who are a part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them.' - T.S. Eliot 'You were silly like us; your gift survived it all; The parish of rich women, physical decay, yourself; Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.' - W.H Auden, In Memory of W.B. Yeats