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James Fenton on Auden:

"Ursula Niebuhr, the theologican wife of the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who was critical of pacifism, gives an account of Auden's commencement address at Smith College in 1940... Auden called his address a sermon, but he put the text at the end. It is from Rilke's Words to a Young Poet:

The only courage that is demanded of us: [is] to have courage for the most extraordinary, the most singular, and the most inexplicable that we may encounter....Only he or she who is ready for everything...will live the relation to another as something alive....We must always hold to what is difficult, then that which still seems to us the most hostile will become what we most trust and find most faithful...Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

And Ursula Niebuhr goes on to recall how Auden

wrote sympathetically about Rilke's negative reaction to the First World War. 'Not to understand: yes, that was my entire occupation in those years'; and commented on these words of Rilke, 'To be conscious but to refuse to understand, is a positive act that calls for courage of the highest order.' But he admitted that, 'It may be difficult for the outsider...to distinguish it from selfish or cowardly indifference.' For him, Rilke was the writer to whom to turn, 'for strength to resist the treacherous temptations that approach us disguised as righteous duties.'

I think of Blake's question:

Thou has a lap full of seed
And this is a fine country.
Why dost thou not cast thy seed
And live in it merrily.

To which the answer must be: if only it were as easy as that. If only what the question supposes were true. Auden had the greatest gifts of any of our poets in the twentieth century, the greatest lap full of seed. And it was given to him to know that, and to doubt it, to know and to doubt it. The sense of being primus inter pares, the sense of always being the youngest person in the room, the spirit that could say to posterity, 'You did not live in our time - be sorry' - all this was given him. And then, to be conscious but to refuse to understand, to live not in a fine but in a lean country, to hold to what was most difficult, to face that which was most hostile - this too was given him. To make mistakes, to know humiliation - this too was given him. To find himself wronged or in the wrong, to find his courage taken for cowardice, to find himself human in short - all this was given him. 'Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us,' and perhaps that forward impulse of renunciation implied a gesture towards the terrible. This was where his Gift had brought him, to this lean country and to these caves of accusation.' "

- James Fenton, "Auden in the End", from The Strength of Poetry.