Welcome back to the Daily Poem. I'm David Kern, and today's Monday, February 22nd, 2021. Today's poem is by

W.H. Auden. He was born February 21st, 1907, and he died on September 29th of 1973. So yesterday was

his birthday. He would have been, what, 114 years old. You've heard him a time

or two on this podcast, but he is one of the most gifted, one of the most interesting poets

of the 20th century. I've heard from a few writers, a few scholars, a few poets who claim that

he was the greatest poet of the 21st century. And I think that there is, that that claim is not without reason.

You probably have heard poems that he wrote like Funeral Blues, September 1st, 1939, and the Shield of Achilles.

Also, the age of anxiety, which is one of his longer poems.

And for the time being, he wrote many very famous poems.

He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947 for the Age of Anxiety.

And the poem that I'm going to read today is one of his late poems.

It was published in Poetry Magazine in November of 1971, just a couple years before he died.

It's called Ode to the Medieval Poets. Not one of his most

famous poems, but one that I think gets at some of the things that are most odd and like,

and one of the ones that I most enjoy. It goes like this. Chaucer, Langland, Douglas Dunbar, with all your brother Anans,

how on earth did you ever manage without anesthetics or plumbing

in daily peril from witches, warlocks, lepers, the holy office,

foreign mercenaries burning as they came to write so cheerfully

with no grimaces of self-pathos.

Long-winded you could be, but not vulgar, body, but not grubby, your raucous flightings, sheer,

high-spirited fun, whereas our makers, beset by every creature comfort, immune they believe

to all superstitions, even at their best, are so often morose or kinky, petrified by their

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