In Praise of Limestone - Legacy

Legacy

Mendelson, Auden's biographer, summarizes the response to "In Praise of Limestone" in the years following its publication: "Readers found the poem memorable … but even the critics who praised it did not pretend to understand it. Those who, without quite knowing why, felt grateful to it were perhaps responding to its secret, unexplicit defense of a part of themselves that almost everything else written in their century was teaching them to discredit or deny."

The English poet Stephen Spender (1909–1995) called "In Praise of Limestone" one of the century's greatest poems, describing it as "the perfect fusion between Auden's personality and the power of acute moral observation of a more generalized psychological situation, which is his great gift". Literary critic David Daiches found it loose and unfulfilling. The poem became "In Praise of Sandstone" at the hand of Australian poet John Tranter (1943– ), who created a poetic form called the "terminal" in which only the line-ending words of the source poem are kept in the writing of a new work.