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Alexander McCall Smith on W H Auden

Many of us have in our lives some writer or artist who is special to us, whose work, we feel, speaks to us in a personal way. For me that person is W H Auden, that great and wonderful poet, whose work has the power to touch us as compellingly as ever, whose humanity and insights are undimmed by the passage of time.

I remember the precise moment when I first opened his Collected Shorter Poems. It was the beginning of a love affair that has lasted for the rest of my life. Today I travel with that book in my suitcase. It still surprises and delights no matter how many times I open it.

There is an extraordinary range to Auden's work. He moves from the intensely personal to the very public; at one moment he is talking about the intimate domestic life, at the next he is making philosophical observations of great profundity. He is fascinated by everything – limestone, science, music, love, religion – it is all there. And at times his lines are so moving that they reduce one to the silence of reflection: 'Lullaby' is, in my view, one of the most beautiful love poems ever written – and it celebrates the carnal too, which is astonishing.

Auden was a political poet in his earlier years. He believed, too, in the psychological explanation of evil and in the liberating power of Freudian ideas. Then he returned to the religious fold which he had rejected as an adolescent, and ritual, religious and otherwise, became more important for him. That is not necessarily a journey that all share, but it was the journey of a man who clearly believed that he should try to be as good as the flesh allowed him. His message, ultimately, was that the flesh is very powerful, but we can at least try.

I remember the day of his death very clearly. I was living in Belfast at the time and I had been out to buy a newspaper. Auden dead. I read the report as I walked home; I felt bereft at the loss of that rational voice, that unequalled poet.

© Alexander McCall Smith, 2007

About Alexander McCall Smith

Alexander McCall Smith has won a devoted following of readers for his books, particularly the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. He is a passionate champion of the poems of W H Auden, and presented some of his favourites in discussion with Robyn Marsack at the Scottish Poetry Library, as part of its 'Selected Works' series of events.

Alexander McCall Smith's selection of W H Auden

• A summer night
• As I walked out one evening
• Lullaby (Lay your sleeping head, my love)
• Edward Lear
• In memory of Sigmund Freud
• In praise of limestone
• Streams
• September 1, 1939

First collected in Another Time (Faber, 1940).

All except 'September 1, 1939' are in W H Auden's Collected Shorter Poems, 1927-1957 (Faber, 1966).