As an artist and experimentation, Auden showed considerable intellectual curiosity and receptiveness to new ideas and suggestions.
The nature of his affirmation shifted as he gradually moved, in charted stages, from a Marxist alignment to a Christian one. When he removed himself to the United States in 1939 and took out US citizenship in 1946 he regarded both as decisive breaks with his personal, political, and literacy pasts (though he returned to Britain at the end of his life).
Reworking and rethinking of an inherited tradition were especially evident in the verse that emerged in his first American years. In ‘Muse des Beaux Arts’, for example, Auden identifies suffering and ‘its human position’ as a key concern of art (though in the Brueghel painting of the fall of Cirrus to which the poem refers ‘everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster’). The two elegies to W.B. Years and Sigmund Freud (both of 1939 and both written in the tradition of Milton’s Lucida) celebrate continuity as much as they mourn the departed and the condition of the age.