Auden and the Future

How great is Auden? If this passage from The Age of Anxiety doesn't describe academic life, I don't know what does.

To be young means
To be all on edge, to be held waiting in
A packed lounged for a Personal Call
From Long Distance, for the low voice that
Defines one's future. The fears we know
Are of not knowing. Will nightfall bring us
Some awful order--Keep a hardware store
in a small town...Teach science for life to
Progressive girls--? It is getting late.
Shall we ever be asked for? Are we simply
Not wanted at all?

This poem is part of Auden's book-length "baroque ecologue" from 1947. It won the Pulitzer Prize the next year, and the year after that, Bernstein used it as the (loose) inspiration for his second symphony. And then, two years later, Jerome Robbins choreographed a ballet to it. And then, sixty years later, all these versions became the subject of a chapter in my dissertation.

Speaking of Auden, YouTube comes through once again, to give us the classic Night Mail collaboration between Auden and Benjamin Britten in 1936. Man, I could listen to his voice all day long. One of my formative moments as a musicologist was my junior year in college, when Philip Brett came to my school to give a talk about Auden and Britten. I had just read "Musicality, Essentialism, and the Closet" earlier that year, and it seemed like there was nothing more awesome than being a musicologist. Ah, youth.