In one of his very last poems, 'A Thanksgiving', Auden directed a wry backward glance over his life, for each stage of which, so he claimed, he chose to be directed by different masters. At first, when moor and woodland were sacred, Hardy, Edward Thomas and Frost were to hand. Once love struck in, Yeats and Graves proved a help. Then, without warning, 'the whole / Economy suddenly crumbled: / there, to instruct me, was Brecht'. And when Hitler and Stalin did 'hair-raising things', Kierkegaard, Charles Williams and C. S. Lewis 'guided me back to belief'. This necessarily concertinas a wide stretch of years. More interestingly, it avoids mention of the name that, during the period of the crumbling economy, meant at least as much to Auden as Brecht did - Karl Marx. This is not to say that Auden was ever a wholly committed Marxist. Though in 1932 he wrote a poem called, on first publication, 'A Communist to Others', he never joined the Communist Party of Great Britain, nor did he waste time on flat, ephemeral pamphlets or boring meetings. Nevertheless, during the 1930s he made much use of Marx's ideas, as he admits in New Year Letter, where at one point he notes that 'We hoped; we waited for the day / The State would wither clean away, / Expecting the Millennium / That theory promised us would come. / It didn't.' Stan Smith has noted that the 'abrupt reversal on the enjambment enacts the dialectical process, setting up an antithesis of theory and event' (Smith, p. 135). This is not therefore so much a dismissal of Marx as a recognition that his theory is itself part of the dialectical process in which 'we' believe.