The American poet John Hollander wrote in his essay “Auden at Sixty” in the July 1967 issue of the Atlantic Monthly,

It is hard to think of another writer in English the progress of whose lustra—those five-year periods by which the Romans marked out life’s phases or stages—would seem to matter so much. It is not only that he is our foremost poet, but that his career has been full of the ambivalences and paradoxes that have marked the moral history of the past 40 years.