Auden's Poetry Reading Packs Sanders

W. H. Auden, the man who christened the Age of Anxiety, read his poetry to more than 1000 people in Sanders Theater yesterday afternoon under the auspices of the Morris Gray Poetry Fund, which was established to bring well-known poets to Harvard.

Auden read poems which spanned his entire career and reflected his favorite themes-desire and loss, growing old, the banality of modern life, and a longing for things past.

Auden once called himself a slave to time. "I shouldn't know what to do unless it told me," he said. He still seemed to be a slave yesterday, allowing himself precisely 60 seconds respite between poems.

Wystan Hugh Auden-poet, critic,playwright, and librettist-was born in England but now divides his time between Manhattan and Kirchstetten, Austria.

He has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, the Guinness Poetry Award, and the National Medal for Literature.

The audience gave Auden a standing ovation at the end of the reading. "His poems go wumpety-wumpety," said one enthusiastic listener. "But this is the best reading I've ever heard."