Josef Weinheber from 1936. Part of his house there, located on Josef Weinheber-Strasse, has been preserved as a museum in his honour. The English poet W. H. Auden, who spent summers in Kirchstetten from 1958 until 1973, wrote a moving poem about Weinheber called "Josef Weinheber." Auden acknowledges Weinheber's support of Nazism but also records his reply to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels' offer to enrich Austrian culture: "in Ruah lossen" (leave us alone). Auden's poem appears in his "Collected Poems." Josef Weinheber "Translated from German Wikipedia" Josef Weinheber (9 March 1892 in Vienna – 8 April 1945 in Kirchstetten, Lower Austria)
W. H. Auden ironic style was "self-defensive, self-indulgent or merely irresponsible", and Harold Bloom who wrote "Close thy Auden, open thy [Wallace] Stevens," to the obituarist in "The Times" (London), who wrote: "W. H. Auden, for long the "enfant terrible" of English poetry . . . emerges as its undisputed master." Critical estimates were divided from the start. Reviewing Auden's first book, "Poems" (1930), Naomi Mitchison wrote "If this is really only the beginning, we have perhaps a master to look forward to." But John Sparrow, recalling Mitchison's comment in 1934, dismissed Auden's early work as "a monument to the misguided aims that