Looking back at the 1920s and ’30s, it is alarming to note how many of literary modernism’s greatest talents were either sympathetic to fascism or out-and-out Nazi collaborationists. Gertrude Stein, despite being Jewish herself, admired Marshal Pétain’s Vichy government so much that she translated the Nazi collaborator’s speeches into English, complete with glowing foreword. T. S. Eliot, arguably the most important and widely read English-language poet of the twentieth century, held Adolph Hitler in cautious esteem. Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s antisemitism was so widely divulged, and exterminationist in tenor, that it landed him a conviction for treason in the French courts following World War II. And Ezra Pound — the great discoverer of literary talent in the early part of the last century — became a full-fledged radio propagandist for Benito Mussolini’s Italy, operating out of the country from 1941 to 1945 while the continent burned.

It is out of this combustible mix of artistic genius and moral iniquity that W. H. Auden emerged. Alone among his contemporaries, Auden exemplified an unwavering radical humanism throughout what he would later call a “low, dishonest decade” (the 1930s), placing himself on the front line in the existential fight against fascism in Francisco Franco’s Spain, and writing some of the greatest antiwar poetry ever set down. Perhaps more important than this, Auden could see the Nazi regime for what it was: Fervently nationalist, yes. Violently militaristic, absolutely. But at its core, it was a regime driven by pseudoscientific racism and genocide. This seems nakedly obvious in retrospect, but in the 1930s, there were few non-Jewish observers who suspected something as abominable as the Shoah was about to stain the horizon. Seemingly in defiance of the literary movement that had fostered him, Auden spent the best part of the late 1930s and 1940s writing about European Jews: about their dispossession, about their tragedy, and about the plight of refugees more generally — in words that reverberate through our own “low, dishonest” times.