Edward Callan, "Disenchantment with Yeats: From Singing-Master to Ogre," from Auden:  A Carnival of Intellect (Oxford University Press, 1983).

W. H. Auden's "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," is perhaps his best-known poem, and it marks the great influence which the elder poet had on Auden's development. Edward Callan, however, writes about Auden's attempt to distance himself from Yeats, even as he acknowledged Yeats's importance. He examines Auden's elegy, and particularly the revisions which he made in it over the years, in light of Auden's increasingly emphatic rejection of the romantic tradition which he identified with the nineteenth century, and with Yeats. 

And when, in "Yeats as an Example," Auden sought to identify Yeats's chief poetic legacy, he credited the Irish poet with transforming the occasional poem in English from an official performance of impersonal virtuosity, like Tennyson's "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington," into a serious reflective poem having at once personal and public interest; and he identified Yeats's elegy for Robert Gregory as the first successful instance of this transformation: "A poem such as 'In Memory of Major Robert Gregory' is something new and important in the history of English poetry....

As the thirties wore on, Auden's admiration for Yeats as an occasional poet was tempered by his dislike for Yeats's fondness for the trappings of aristocracy and his flirtation with General O'Duffy's Irish fascist organization, the Blueshirts. But this was mere distaste for Yeats's foibles. In the second half of his life Auden developed an almost obsessive fear of the danger of Yeats's kind of outlook, and much of the story of Auden's development as a poet after 1940 is also the story of his struggle to exorcise the persistent spirit of Yeats. The stages of his growing disenchantment with Yeats mark the hardening of his conviction that the greatest threats to individual freedom in the modern world--the Utopias of both left and right--were a direct legacy of the Romantic outlook on which Yeats prided himself.