The ideal audience the poet imagines consists of the beautiful who go to bed with him, the powerful who invite him to dinner and tell him secrets of state, and his fellow-poets. The actual audience he gets consists of myopic schoolteachers, pimply young men who eat in cafeterias, and his fellow-poets. This means, in fact, he writes for his fellow-poets.

The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose. 1939-1948 (ed. Princeton University Press, 2002) - ISBN: 9780691089355