Nice work David and most elegantly put. I think here in England it is generally accepted that he is the greatest of our poets since the War, or since Auden, if you like. And how many poets in the whole history or our art have written fifty poems we couldn't do without.
He was unfortunate in his biographer. We need another biography now, partly because we know more. And, though he was certainly a Tory, like Eliot, Yeats, Betjeman and the later Auden, it is difficult to argue he was a snob, if by that you mean he liked to cultivate upper class people.
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