W.H. Auden, from Atlantis to the New Jerusalem

To some extent, W.H. Auden's poetry rests on the nostalgia for a lost plenitude. This concern is the starting point of a quest for the reconstitution of a Utopia, which hie compares with a deceptively ideal New Jerusalem. However, Auden's "good place" is neither political nor religious; it is a purely verbal society based on his conception of Whitsunday/Pentecost, the only possible Utopia being to him poetic.