When, on January 19, 1939, W.H. Auden boarded at Southampton a ship bound for New York City, he could not have known that he would never live in England again. But some months earlier, he had told his friend Christopher Isherwood that he wanted to settle permanently in the United States. Almost as soon as he arrived in New York, he began to rethink his calling as a poet, and, moreover, to reconsider the social role and function of poetry. (He also began a spiritual pilgrimage that would lead him to embrace the Christian faith of his childhood.)
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