Anthony Hecht, from The Hidden Law: The Poetry of W. H. Auden (Harvard University Press, 1993).

Like Edward Callan, Anthony Hecht regards Audenís elegy for Yeats as a reflection on Audenís own difficulty in coming to terms with the Irish poet. But unlike Callan, who views the poem as Audenís repudiation of Yeatsian romanticism, Callan’s reading of the poem emphasizes the “puzzles” posed by Yeats’s verse.

This is an elegy for a great poet. There are precedents for such compositions; the one, that most immediately leaps to the mind is Milton's. But Edward King, though a poet, was not a great poet, so Auden may be said to have tackled a larger task than Milton. He must, however, have had his predecessor in mind, and "Lycidas" is so singular a poem, so celebrated for its manner, its artificiality, its ancient conventions, and above all its use of the pathetic fallacy, that, I suggest, Auden wished to allude to it by ironic variation. Whereas in "Lycidas" all of nature, and all manifestations of pagan divinity (Nature's personifications), mourn the death of the shepherd, this opening of the poem presents a nature both indifferent to Yeat's death and imitative of it. The day itself becomes a dying patient; coldness and illness and deformity pervade a scene which may be English but is certainly not the south of France, where Yeats actually died. The poem begins in remoteness, but a remoteness different from, though analogous to, Milton's. The wolves pursuing their own ends are not unlike the anonymous persons in "Musée des Beaux Arts" who are unconcerned about the deaths and martyrdoms that take place virtually in their midst. "The peasant river" and "the fashionable quays" are a kind of economic lansdscape, a tiny paysage moralisé with no pathetic fallacy about them but merely the plausible suggestion that certain classes of people congregate in certain locations. The poet's death is then contrasted to the "life" of his poems, which are still alive and necessarily ignorant of his death.